Wide Angle

Delivering a preferred customer experience boils down to three easy steps:

• Step One: Clarify what’s unique about your experience and the distinct benefits you provide to customers.  Check.
• Step Two: Understand how customers interact with a variety of touchpoints and emphasize your unique benefits at the touchpoints that matter most.  Got it.
• Step Three: Make sure the dozens (and dozens) of other touchpoints in your customer experience reflect your unique benefits.  Hmmmmm…

We see a lot of breakdowns when it comes to this final piece of the puzzle.  To ensure that customers really understand and appreciate your unique benefits, every touchpoint must be viewed as an opportunity to reinforce or support them.  The problem, as marketers are quick to point out, is that Marketing doesn’t have enough time, money, or control to manage all the different customer touchpoints.  While it’s easy for Marketing to adjust collateral or update the Web site to better reflect benefits, it’s a different story when it comes to modifying packaging or customer service touchpoints.  New set of stakeholders, new set of rules, a whole new ballgame.

Since Marketing doesn’t have the “luxury” of ruling with an iron fist in most organizations (though wouldn’t that be nice?), the unfortunate reality is that it’s pretty easy for different touchpoints to actually pull us away from our unique benefits.  The culprit?  Operational metrics.  Take any five touchpoints and chances are that each one is saddled with a different (and sometimes competing) set of metrics.  For example, the “sales rep” touchpoint is gauged by an increase in the number of visits and sales; “technical support” by decrease in product downtime or reduced cost per call; “customer service” by minimal number of calls to resolution or ability to cross-sell.  Across none of these touchpoints is there a unified look at actually showcasing a unique benefit.  Each touchpoint gets treated as if it exists in isolation of all the others.

If we optimize touchpoints to this slough of metrics, we run the risk of not relating or connecting to our unique benefits in the overall customer experience. The challenge for marketers is to convince the organization to focus less on making each touchpoint perfect, but rather to make each touchpoint echo your unique benefits.  More on this in my next post.