Page 20 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Unit 1: Introduction to Customer Relationship Management

they have made their first transaction. The goal of every company interested in leveraging Notes
customer experience as a competitive advantage is to create a positive and consistent experience
at each touch point.
Your touch points need to include every encounter in the attraction process, such as your website,
blog, email, newsletter, press coverage, articles, industry events, webinars, brochure, product
literature, advertisements, etc to samples, white papers, product demos, initial calls, sales
presentations and meetings, to your contract, product deployment or delivery process to your
customer service, invoice, trouble ticket, to a loyalty card or referral program in your retention
process. As you can see for most companies this is going to fairly long list.

Inventory Your Touch Points

Before you can begin measuring the effectiveness of each touch point we have found that it helps
to take an inventory of all the touch points encountered by your customers. When you inventory
your touch points you will want to know at least the following:

1. Where the touch point is typically encountered in the customer life cycle.
2. The operational purpose of the touch point. On the operational side a touch point may be
designed to identify a prospect, resolve a problem, accelerate conversion or support
executing a transaction.
3. The role of the touch point should in the customer experience such as influencing perception,
building preference, or creating loyalty.
4. Who owns the touch point?

Example: Appointment scheduling may be owned by presales, invoicing by accounting,
and the website by marketing.
5. The touch point’s value. While all touch points matter, they are not equal. A bad experience
on one touch point may be enough to make a customer leave you but a bad experience on
another while irritating and potentially damaging if fixed in time can be overlooked.

Assess Each Touch Point’s Effectiveness

Now that you have a complete inventory of all of your touch points, and you understand the
impact of each touch point in the experience as well as operational purpose and customer
experience role for each touch point, you can assess the effectiveness of each touch point in terms
of achieving its intended purpose against both operational and customer experience objectives.
Although overarching metrics such as customer satisfaction and customer advocacy are quickly
becoming standard metrics today, attempting to measure the customer experience with a single
metric can be overly simplistic and risky. Effectively managing the customer experience requires
4 effective measurement and management of a portfolio of metrics, including touch point
effectiveness, to gain the insights into what is and isn’t working.
We find it is worthwhile to actually plot this analysis on a 2X2 grid, with one axis labelled
operational effectiveness and the other labelled customer experience effectiveness. Our analysis
methodology enables us to map each touch point onto the grid and place it into one of four
quadrants: high/high effectiveness, low/low effectiveness, high operational/low customer role
effectiveness, and low operational/high customer role effectiveness. The mapping will allow us
visualize whether and where there are weak links in the overall experience.

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