damaged merchandise, a series of touchpoints aid you in getting a replacement via your channel of choice. Repair/recovery touchpoints often have sequential characteristics to them.
These are just three of the most common roles that touchpoints may play. You’ll want to review your own moments and their respective touchpoints to determine what roles they play in your product or service experience. This becomes very helpful when you look at key moments through experience maps and service blueprints (see Chapters 5 and 9, “Crafting a Tangible Vision”).
Making Sure That Touchpoints Do Their Job
When you approach touchpoints as a coordinated system of featured and supporting players on the stage of experience, you naturally segue to the thought: “Is everyone playing his or her part, and well?” From a measurement standpoint, some touchpoints—especially digital ones—can be tracked and reported on. Examples include the following: shopping cart abandonment rates, email offer click-throughs, usage rates for mobile versus paper boarding passes, and how many customers upgrade a service following a conversation with a call center agent.
Other touchpoints can be evaluated by asking customers questions in person or via surveys. Was the entertaining airline safety video not so entertaining? How satisfied were you with the call agent’s problem resolution conversation? How would you rate your experience with our new packaging? This feedback can be used to improve specific touchpoints or flow among them.
As you will see in later chapters, great product and service experiences rely on orchestrating these good touchpoints well.
Two Helpful Frameworks
Touchpoints can be slippery. They take the form of the channels that deliver them, but work (or often don’t work) in concert to help create a customer’s experience. The same touchpoint—getting shipping status—can be offered simultaneously in different channels. Or a touchpoint can exist in only one channel. Understanding touchpoints, therefore, can require a couple of different (but helpful) frameworks:
• Touchpoints by moment
• Touchpoints by channel
Touchpoints by Moment
It’s a given that touchpoints play an important role in creating customer moments. They facilitate interactions, deliver information, trigger emotions, and bridge one moment to the next. Figure 2.7 illustrates a simple but powerful framework for placing touchpoints in the context of the overarching customer journeys they support.
• Journeys: Customers experience product and services over time, often in the context of achieving an explicit goal or meeting an implicit need (see Chapter 4). A journey, in this context, is a conceptual frame to refer to the beginning, middle, and end of the customer’s experience. Example journeys include going to the movies, saving for college, adopting a child, and a trip to the emergency room.
• Stages: A journey is not monolithic; it unfolds in a series of moments that tend to cluster around specific needs or goals. When mapping experiences, these clusters are known as stages. Stages are essentially chapters of the customer’s journey, which use a level of granularity for creating strategies that the common customer needs. Table 2.2 provides a few examples of journeys and stages.
• Moments: Whether linear or nonlinear, moments occur throughout a journey as the customers make their way forward in time. Not all moments are created equal, and the most important ones are often referred to as key moments or moments of truth. Regardless, all moments matter.
• Touchpoints: Touchpoints enable interactions within and across moments. As we’ll discuss in later chapters, defining a vision for each customer moment provides the right inputs for ensuring that each touchpoint plays its unique role while harmonizing with others.
FIGURE 2.7 Touchpoints represent fundamental building blocks in the journeys of customers as they interact with a product or service in multiple channels over time.
TABLE 2.2 JOURNEY STAGES
| Journey | Stages |
| Going to the movies | Exploring entertainment options, deciding what to see, going to the theater, buying a ticket, getting concessions, getting settled, watching the film, after the film |
| Buying a home | Searching for a home, getting prequalified, making an offer, applying for a loan, getting ready for closing, closing, moving, settling in |
| A trip to the emergency room | Experiencing a trauma, getting to the hospital, being admitted, waiting for care, getting care, recovering, paying medical bills |
To put this framework to work, you will need to determine the journey and stages you want to dig into down to the touchpoint level. Chapters 4 and 5 will provide guidance as to how to make these decisions with the critical input of customer research. However, starting with an informed hypothesis can yield good results. See the tips on drafting your stages and channels in the next section.
Touchpoints by Channel
Channels enable touchpoints, so it is also helpful to make sense of which channels deliver which touchpoints. However, simply viewing your touchpoints by channel loses the context of how touchpoints align to the customer experience. As illustrated in Figure 2.8, a simple matrix with journey stages on the X-axis and channels in the Y-axis creates a structure that keeps customer context top of mind. This framework—called a touchpoint inventory2 —also effectively provides an at-a-glance view of the density of touchpoints by channel and stage. The touchpoint inventory helps shed light on what touchpoints the organization has created and how they align—or fail to align—to the customer journey.
FIGURE 2.8 This simple framework organizes touchpoints by channel.
As with any framework, you will need to customize your touchpoint for your organization. If you are creating your framework in advance or in the absence of a well-defined customer journey, you will need to create an educated hypothesis of your channels and stages. See Chapter 1, “Understanding Channels,” for guidance on identifying your channels. As for your touchpoints, try one or more of the following:
• Bring together stakeholders that own various
