rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">3 Within a few minutes of observing service in a CVS Pharmacy at Target, you can observe these touchpoints (and many more):
• Wayfinding signage
• A drop-off area
• A pickup area
• An order conversation
• A status conversation
• A bin with filled prescriptions organized by letter of last name
• Pill bottles with labels
• A digital signature component
• Rewards program marketing signage
INTRODUCING TOUCHPOINTS TO OTHERS
I often make identifying and cataloging touchpoints a group effort. For example, on a service experience strategy engagement with a public library system, I tasked key members of the library staff to catalogue the staff, touchpoints, activities, qualities, and types of customers at different branches. Each staff member was given a template to capture what he or she discovered through observation and experiencing of the libraries’ services personally.
Distributing the inventory had several benefits. One was speed. We could pull together in a few days a great first pass. Just as important, the staff gained immediate experience in understanding what touchpoints were and which ones stood out in the current experience. By capturing them in a common template, my team was able to review and refine the inventory quickly. We then created a game (see Figure 2.12) in which participants determined which touchpoints to take into the future and what new touchpoints would be needed to serve customers better.
COURTESY OF RICHLAND LIBRARY
FIGURE 2.12 Playing with touchpoints and other elements that make up a current experience.
Phone—Voice
Many organizations provide voice channels supported by call centers or other means to sell, support, or deliver products and services. During your inventory, you likely will need to attack this and other communication channels from both the inside and outside to build a complete picture.
Let’s start inside. Hopefully, you can get access to your call center or other locations in which people speak directly with customers. In this channel, your touchpoints will be conversations. For our CVS Pharmacy at Target example, the nature of a call might have been to place an order, update an address, or check status. It could have been all those things. Your objective is to identify what conversations exist to meet these different needs.
Conversations as Touchpoints
Many interactions between people and services occur through conversation. These conversations can be face-to-face, via the phone, or as an audio/video chat. It’s helpful to approach these conversations as touchpoints, and even break them down into multiple touchpoints based on their intent and function.
For example, having your credit card stolen can be inconvenient and emotional. When calling your bank to report the theft, that conversation can be codified as a series of touchpoints:
• Understanding the issue
• Confirming your identity
• Capturing the details
• Explaining the process
• Confirming where to send the new card
• Offering further assistance
This level of granularity is helpful for rethinking the experience, as well as creating consistency and continuity across channels. The “confirming your identity” touchpoint could be moved to an interactive voice response (IVR) system preceding understanding the issue. “Confirming where to send the card” could also be delivered via email. The entire experience could be moved to a voice interface (e.g., Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa).
If your organization has one or more call centers, they are a gold mine for understanding the needs and language of customers. Call centers are also complex environments in which changing the customer’s call experience requires equipping call center agents with the right concepts, tools, and training to deliver the intended experience. To understand the call center experience and the underlying processes, roles, tools, and policies, follow these procedures as much as possible:
• Listen to calls. Most call centers regularly record customer calls for compliance or quality assurance. Work with your call center team to identify calls related to the customer journeys or scenarios under investigation.
• Analyze transcripts. You can also read or search for key words in call transcripts.
• Ask for a report. Some call centers have sophisticated tools to analyze calls for key words and events. Try requesting a report (with audio clips) based on your needs.
• Perform side-by-sides. Call centers are typically set up for observers to plug in and listen to live calls. This is ideal for hearing the conversations and observing the environment and behavior of the agent.
• Process documentation. Process maps could clarify the flow of conversations and how processes trigger specific conversations. Be careful, however. Process maps often don’t reflect what’s happening on the calls.
• One-on-one interviews. Spend time interviewing agents to understand how they structure calls. You will need to keep these sessions to 30 minutes or less, as most call center managers are averse to taking their agents off calls for long periods of time.
• Current-state service blueprinting. This method is covered in Chapter 3, but consider doing service blueprinting sessions with agents to map how they work with tools and other employees to support customer conversations. Also, probe on what touchpoints the agents believe or know that customers interact with before and after their calls. For example, agents may have noticed that many customers call in after a digital touchpoint fails to meet their needs.
Other Channels
The methods we’ve outlined can also help you explore other channels. Target and CVS interact with customers via texts, push messages, physical mail, and email. In many cases, touchpoints are like voice communications—they may give status, prompt action, or connect to the next step. In other cases, they may contain unique touchpoints to that channel, such as a physical coupon.
Cataloging and Communicating Your Touchpoints
As you identify your touchpoints, you will need
