More Touchpoints, More Complexity

Businesses have been advocates of touchpoints for quite a while. The crucial moments when consumers interact with a business seemed to be able to tell how happy a customer actually was. Unfortunately, the narrow focus of satisfaction at those moments actually gives us a rather distorted picture. The picture we need to be looking at is the customer’s entire journey from start to finish. Businesses that are able to carefully manage the experience in its entirety reap enormous benefits across the board.

Churn is a big problem for many companies and for typical reasons. The ways to reduce this are well known, but costly (upgrades, discounted rate plans, etc). This is where customer experience saves the day. It turns out it can not only reduce churn but build a competitive advantage as well. Creating an exceptional customer experience cannot be achieved solely by perfecting touchpoints. While customers might seem happy at certain times during the interaction, many are unhappy with their overall experience. Most customers aren’t fed up with any one phone call, field visit, or other interaction; they don’t really care about these singular touchpoints. They do, however, care about cumulative experiences across multiple touchpoints and multiple channels over time.

Creating this benefit-generating experience is a bottom-up effort that starts with additional research into customers’ experiences of their journeys to determine which ones matter most, both to customers and to business performance. Businesses need to draw on customer and employee surveys along with operational data across functions at each touchpoint, to assess performance and gauge how it is doing relative to the competition. Best-in-class companies use regression models to understand which journeys have the greatest impact on overall customer satisfaction and business outcomes, and then run simulations to get a picture of the potential impact of various initiatives.

Acquiring this research and analysis is no easy task. Often times it means obtaining new types of information and packaging it together in new ways. Combining operational, marketing, and customer research data can take months. However, the fact base that’s built is invaluable and will allow a business to clearly see the customer’s experience over various journeys and decide how to prioritize.

Of course, analyzing journeys and redesigning service processes get a company only so far. Implementing the changes across the firm is hugely important—and hugely challenging. VoiceFoundry can help you navigate through this process. Our focus is to enhance the quality of each interaction a customer has with your company which drives customer satisfaction and loyalty. We will conduct an analysis to evaluate your current process and provide solid recommendations for migration and overall development and implementation.