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Focusing on the Most Basic Business Relationship – You and Your Customer
by: Dr. David Hyatt, President and Partner
In case you haven't noticed, your customers are becoming more savvy and discerning. Their expectations are higher and their willingness to settle for mediocrity has reached a new low. Pressed for time and cash, they are looking for "value." Aside from the fact that "value" will mean different things to different people, you have two challenges. First, you need to get people in the door. Second, once they are in the door, you need to deliver the experience that makes them want to come back and tell their friends. I am not a marketer, so I won't tell you how to do the first part, but I will remind you that if you do a fantastic job on the second part, the word-of-mouth that it generates makes the first part easier. So, how do you address the second challenge and ensure you get positive word-of-mouth advertising? Borrowing from Stephen Covey, we recommend starting with the end in mind. Specifically, start with your intended customer experience. Define it, explicitly, in terms of what you want your customers to think and feel as a result of spending time with your business. For example, we have friends who want their customers to feel "indulged" as a result of eating in their restaurants. This is a great start, but you then need to identify the opportunities you have to make your customers feel truly indulged. You can call them moments of truth if you like, but we like to call them TouchPoints because they are the "points" at which you "touch" your customers and create a feeling, thought, and memory. By focusing on these TouchPoints and keeping the desired customer experience in mind, you can create a system that leaves nothing to chance in terms of earning that customer’s referral and loyalty. And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, the people who are executing at each of these TouchPoints are the ones who represent your brand to your customers. So, if they don't have the skills, ability, or desire to execute the way you want them to, they are sabotaging your brand. Further, if they don't know what you want them to do, you are sabotaging your brand. The implications of both types of sabotage are the same: declining customer counts, market share, and the status of a "has been."
This issue of our newsletter focuses on these TouchPoints and their importance in creating alignment between what you intend your customer experience to be and what it actually is. As we all know, wishing your customer experience to be something it isn’t doesn’t get you very far. Instead, we suggest you focus on putting systems in place to actually keep the promises your brand makes. TouchPoints are the foundation for keeping those promises.
What Are TouchPoints And Why Are They Important?
by: Dr. Paige Graham, Director of Experience Solutions
A TouchPoint is any opportunity you have to impact a customer's experience. These opportunities can range from the way in which your parking lot is maintained, to the sound level of music and brightness of lighting in your business, to the way your employees greet your customers. TouchPoints are critical because they are the points at which you are able to create meaningful experiences with your customers. To illustrate the importance of customer TouchPoints, let's examine how a customer is greeted. Whether in a restaurant, hotel, or retail establishment, your employees have many options and ways in which they can greet your customers. Greetings could range from ignoring the customer, or alternatively, enthusiastically and genuinely welcoming each individual because the employee is glad the customer has chosen your establishment. One of the greatest challenges in dealing with TouchPoints is the impact of your employees and how they choose to convey words and actions as well as non-verbal cues. For example, when entering an establishment you might notice the eye contact, posture, and authenticity of the smile of a person greeting (or not greeting) you. Likewise, that person’s behavior of actively opening a door or simply holding it open by leaning against it also impacts your ultimate experience as a customer. These are the fine details that make a luxurious hotel or a warm and friendly family owned business so memorable.
I will emphasize, the most critical TouchPoints involve your people. While you can enhance the décor of your business and pre-set the lighting and temperature, employee to customer interactions are much harder to control unless there is clear direction, great training, and consistent feedback along the way. Consider this, your people handle TouchPoints such as taking care of special requests, resolving problems, and providing additional information to a customer regarding new products or services. While the majority of employees can be trained on “what” to say, TouchPoints focus not only on the “what” but “how” the information is delivered. This “how” is a key differentiator that can separate your business from your competition. For this reason, it is imperative to have the right people in place who can, and will chose to, deliver the desired brand experience to each and every customer. By hiring individuals with the natural tendencies to interact with your customers in a way that is consistent with your brand, you will spend less time and money on training and supervision. In addition, the employee will feel at ease, comfortable with the job requirements, and energized because he or she gets to use his or her natural strengths throughout the day…it's a win-win for everyone involved!
Creating Brand Alignment Through TouchPoints
by: Dr. David Hyatt, President and Partner
As we have already discussed, TouchPoints are those myriad opportunities to impact your customers’ experience. The piece we have left off until now is that these TouchPoints are also the opportunity to ensure there is alignment between your intended brand and your customers’ experience. As any marketer worth his or her salt will tell you, all of the information that is “out there” and accessible by your customers and prospective customers will be used to form an impression about your business and will have an impact on how your brand is perceived. To some extent, you control this information through your marketing, advertising, social networking, and blogging efforts. The elements you cannot directly control are the pieces of information disseminated through the people who have actually experienced what you have to offer. Forums on the web such as blogs and various feedback sites as well as word-of-mouth are all potential sources of information (both good and bad) about your organization and your brand that you cannot directly control. Given that consumers tend to value these informal sources of information, it is in your best interest to ensure that the information shared using these avenues is positive. The best way to do this is to ensure there is 100% alignment between the promises your organization makes and the promises kept by the people in your organization who are responsible for delivering your brand.
A basic fact we can all agree on is that your people are the ones who actually keep your brand promises to your customers. To keep these promises, your people need to have the basic ability and desire to deliver your brand promises, they must know what the brand promises are, and most importantly they must have an understanding that how they deliver service affects the customer perception on whether the brand’s promise is delivered or not. As we already mentioned, those opportunities to keep your brand promises are your TouchPoints and they are the hundreds of opportunities to create alignment between the experiences promised and delivered. Because there are so many opportunities to keep those brand promises, it is impossible to train your people how to behave at every TouchPoint and in every possible situation. Instead, the key to consistent brand alignment is to first teach the concept of TouchPoints and then ensure clarity on how the organization wants the customer to feel about the brand at every TouchPoint. If you have hired the right people and they truly understand what you want to accomplish, you will be able to unleash the creativity and problem-solving skills of a completely engaged workforce. Let’s take an example to walk through this concept.
We have already discussed the notion of greeting customers, so let’s dig into this scenario a little deeper. A common TouchPoint in any customer-centric business is how the employee greets a customer. Most training dictates the greeting should happen in terms of steps of service listing greet times, specifying scripts, and describing the type of smiles required. Unfortunately, this training rarely ties these actions back to the brand promises of the organization.
If your business approached this scenario differently by first specifying the brand promise (i.e., we want our customers to feel truly welcomed, indulged, at home, or empowered) and identifying the opportunities to make that happen (our TouchPoints), you can then ASK your people how to keep the promise. This makes it easier for your people to remember what they are supposed to do. This will also encourage them to deliver your brand genuinely and will greatly increase the likelihood that your organization will keep your brand promises. Keeping our example going, if we tell our people that we want our customers to feel truly welcomed (brand promise) at the very first greeting (TouchPoint) we can help our employees understand why it is important to do things such as introduce ourselves using our names, making eye contact, asking questions, etc.
By taking this extra step and keeping our brand promises in mind, we ensure alignment between what our customers expect from us and what they actually experience. And this consistency will drive loyalty, sales, and profits.
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