Louise McGregor Buzzword

Touchpoint

CM2017_05_touchpoint.png

The Dictionary.com definition of touchpoint is “the point of contact, esp. when products or services come into contact with a customer”

This word feels weirdly modern to me,  so I checked my 1996 Concise Oxford English Dictionary and there it isn’t.

dictionary touchpoing

So I did a quick check using Google ngrams, which looks at the instances of words in published books. I’ve compared it here to the word “touchscreen”. You can see that both terms come into use from about 1980.

compare frequency touchpoint and touchscreen

The word means any point at which a company or organisation interacts with customers, and since the word applies to real world and online it’s useful for companies when they’re considering the customer journey. But too often companies consider the touchpoints in isolation, equating it to channels or (worse!) their organisational chart.

A company might list their touchpoints as billboards, tv ads, banner ads, shops, service offices.

But’s important to consider this from the customer perspective, and a customer might think more about how your receipt is presented rather than that ad you purchased. One of the smart things retailers such as Apple are doing is emailing your receipt to you – which means both parties have the same record of the purchase details. This means more to me than all their TV ads.

In marketing circles there’s a commonly held belief that the more interactions, the more touchpoints you can create with your customers the better. This is illogical and untrue, here’s why:

  • Your customer’s attention is limited, there must be an upper limit of the the number of times you can contact them before you become annoying.
  • Not all touchpoints are happy, your complaints service phone number is also a touchpoint, if I have to call your complaint line five times that doesn’t mean your marketing is working.
  • The more utilitarian your product or service is the less likely it is that your consumer wants to have “interactions”.  The local cinema theatre introduces online ticket purchase but you can’t print tickets – you need to download them at the cinema – why? I can print a bar code at home or have it on my screen for scanning.

The first time I heard this word used I thought it was a nonsense invention, but it turns out to have a useful meaning as a catch-all for all interactions a company has with customers. Just don’t invest in increasing the number of touchpoints without understanding which ones the customer values.

Image:  Touch  |   Sebastian Rieger  |   CC BY-SA 2.0

Louise McGregor Customers

Customer Service Beats Wow

One of my colleagues ordered a taxi last week using his mobile phone, and was pleasantly surprised – wowed even, to get an SMS confirming his taxi booking.

For the rest of us, used to such a simple service, it doesn’t seem so exciting. We were amused at his enthusiasm, teased him a little.

But it makes a lot of sense to get the basics right. It’s easy to be swayed by consultants and marketing gurus talking about delighting or enchanting your customers, but customers often want much less – particularly of commodity products

Harvard Business Review agrees, ” In fact, most customers just want a simple, quick solution to their problem” according to a recent tip. The taxi example prevents callbacks – your order in confirmed, and you feel confident that if a company can do that they’re probably well organised.

Very often the basic simple service is going to do more for your brand long term than elaborate plans to delight a customer.

Image Packaged With Custom Love / CC BY 2.0