Mapping your customers’ journey, moments of truth and the experience is essential. To innovate, ideate and create profitably across every delivery channel. While, it is important to focus on all touch points related to attraction, interaction, and cultivation phases in a customer lifecycle, it is realistically restricting given cost and profitability constraints. Segmenting your customers, looking at silver, gold and platinum, lifetime profitability, etc. enables alignment of your cost, profit, and customer objectives.
Once your segment and differentiate your customers, optimize touch point strategies to:
• Convert existing ‘profitable customers’ into ‘more profitable customers’
• Increase ‘profitable customers’
• Focus on unprofitable, but potentially profitable customers, to be more profitable.
• Identify and deflect absolutely unprofitable customers
Along the continuum of service we look at the multiple touch points (Attraction, Interaction, Cultivation) where customer experience, moments of truth are present. The myriad of opportunities to deliver the brand, value, and vision and build lasting customer relationships is enormous. Certainly, every touch point demands investments in terms of cost and efforts to achieve profits. So how can leverage each touch point to attract, interact and build customer relationships?
Attraction – These are pre-purchase touch points, which can be static, interactive or dynamic, where your prospects and customers become aware of your brand (through TV ads, brochures, 800#’s, direct mail, websites, etc.,) and if empowered with sufficient knowledge (through blogs, email, conversations, demos, social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.,) can turn into valuable brand considerations (as knowledge and pre-sales interactions increase). To improve the efficiency of these touch points the logical approach is to:
• Identify your target audience through in-depth market research
• Concentrate your resources on your target customer segments
• Customize your products/services and marketing portfolio strategies
• Convey your brand message accurately to the right audience, based on the portfolio, through the most effective channels
• Measure the effectiveness of your strategies in attracting your customers, constantly
Interaction – Effective interactions can influence prospect/customer intentions, selection and use positively, resulting in sales or post sale satisfaction and advocacy. The channels of communication are the same as above. To build efficiency at these touch points you can:
• Give customers in-depth information about your product/service journey
• Customize offerings to suit individual customers needs (one size does not fit all)
• Carry out reliable transactions and offer convenient modes of payment
• Deploy your product/service on time and make sure it works!
• Assist your customers on all post-purchase queries, issues and resolve them.
Cultivation – These touch points when executed effectively result in satisfied customers inclined to brand loyalty and brand advocacy. You build personal rapport, acquire customer wisdom, and create more value and opportunities at these touch points. Drive touch point efficiency by:
• Delivering a proactive service after a sales or customer service interaction
• Carrying out regular customer conversations, not necessarily always on sales, to promote personal relationships
• Implementing customer feedback for improvement
• Monitoring and analyzing customer behavior to understand emerging needs
While there are numerous opportunities to build your brand value experiences, a dedicated, disciplined, and complete involvement from across the organization is crucial for the success of your touch point objectives.
