and depth of your product or service, your goals, and the amount of effort you can (or should) commit to the inventory. You have lots of options, but your inventory should give people a complete picture of your touchpoints. Here are two approaches representing the two extremes on a spectrum from lean to finely detailed.
Keep It Lean
When you have little time, or just want to get a first iteration complete, your focus should be on nailing down the basics: stages, channels, and touchpoints. The Rail Europe example (see Figure 2.9) illustrates this level of detail. The stages should have clear labels in customer-centric language. It should reflect your primary channels, while less used channels can be summarized or combined. Touchpoints should then be organized at the intersection of stages and channels.
Figure 2.13 illustrates another approach on the leaner side of the spectrum. This inventory reflects a future-state vision of how to combine new and existing touchpoints into a better end-to-end experience. It includes specifications for each moment—required screens, content, and communications—to support the design process for different channels teams.
If you need to be even leaner and you have the wall space, build your inventory in sticky notes or take a picture of your workshop outputs and put up a large printout of it. Just make sure that your work stays visible to others so they can refer to it to inform strategy and design activities. Keep socializing the framework to unite others on its holistic view of where and when customers will interact with your product or service.
FIGURE 2.13 An example of a touchpoint inventory.
No Detail Left Behind
Beyond the basics, you can go much deeper into cataloging your touchpoints and describing their roles (and how well they play it) in the customer experience. This finely detailed approach is valuable in transformative work that involves reimagining customer journeys or creating sophisticated service experience architectures. While this takes time, the return on investment can be great in terms of better customer experiences and more easily managed operations.
A detailed inventory uses the same methods as outlined in this chapter, but with more information to collect and document. Like a content inventory, a spreadsheet tool provides the right functionality and flexibility to capture and analyze your work. You can then create different visual documentation with varying levels of information as needed. As Chapter 11, “Taking Up the Baton,” advises, your touchpoint inventory should be a living document for planning, creating, changing, and retiring touchpoints.
Below are common attributes helpful to capture and track your touchpoints throughout the design process.
• Channel stage: What stage(s) does the touchpoint support?
• Moment: What moment(s) does the touchpoint support?
• Touchpoint name: Make this clear and unique. If the touchpoint takes on different forms in different channels, keep the name consistent. For example, an Uber “ride confirmation” can be delivered via push notification or text message.
• Needs: What needs does the touchpoint meet? If none, do you need it?
• Roles: What roles—such as featured or repair/recovery—does the touchpoint play?
• Connections: If the touchpoint lives in a sequence or bridges to another touchpoint and channel, list those touchpoints here.
• Quality: Is the touchpoint good? Does it fail to adhere to basic heuristics or specific experience principles?
• Measurement: Do you have any performance metrics associated with the touchpoint?
• Owner: Who owns the touchpoint from the organization’s viewpoint?
• Status: Is there a plan to change or replace the touchpoint in the future?
Nailing down all these details can be a collaborative effort by leveraging shared spreadsheets to have people contribute across the enterprise. Together, you can create a living document of the architecture that makes your customer experiences possible. This foundation will then pay off as you collectively research, imagine, and conceptualize the moments and touchpoints of the future.
Coda
• Touchpoints are critical architectural components of end-to-end experiences. Moment by moment, one or more touchpoints enables interactions between your customers and your product or service.
• While you can design and make them in advance, touchpoints come to life when a customer interacts with them in real time and in a specific context. Some touchpoints occur without any design intervention as customers make their own pathways through and around your organization.
• Create your touchpoints based on meeting specific customer needs and embodying one or more key characteristics. If there is no need or a clear purpose, why do you need it?
• You can use different methods—research, workshops, and discovery—to identify your touchpoints. A simple matrix showing which touchpoints exist at the intersection of journey stages and channels can have eye-opening impact on your colleagues.
• How much detail you capture as you identify touchpoints depends on your goals and time allocated. Start lean to change mindsets; go deep to fuel more advanced techniques in designing and managing your experiences.
CHAPTER 2 WORKSHOP TOUCHPOINT INVENTORY
This workshop is designed to engage your stakeholders in building your initial touchpoint inventory. If you have a draft already, you can easily adapt this workshop to fill in gaps and refine your understanding. The benefits of bringing collaborators together to build or refine a touchpoint inventory are many and include the following:
• Jump-start your discovery: Leveraging the knowledge of others, a first pass at the inventory can usually be completed in 2–4 hours, depending on the complexity of your product or service.
• Teach new concepts: Workshops are a great way to introduce new concepts (e.g., What is a touchpoint?) while focusing most of the time on creating a valuable framework.
• Build relationships: Scheduling the workshop will help you identify and build relationships with key people across functions and groups. It’s also a great opportunity to test the waters on getting more time and partnerships to construct and then use the inventory.
Remember: This is just a start. You will uncover more about your touchpoints when you engage customers in your research (see Chapter 5.
Workshop Objectives
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