We continue to expand on customer touchpoints. Understanding the Service Experience. The illustrations from the slide show are hardly different than the original Levers, moments of truths, etc. have been added but the same drivers of Value; Functional, Social, Emotional are still part of the experience. Create your own Journey Maps at the beginning, making them very simple either on a wall or in Excel or on Google Docs. Make them collaborative and share them at every opportunity. I have even created a Single Touchpoint card for anyone that comes in direct contact with a customer or prospect.
If you are having trouble getting started Simon Clatworthy of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design developed the At Once Cards which is a tool that focuses upon assisting you in creating and discussing touchpoints. I encourage you to review the linked PDF.
Simon had sent me the cards several months ago and I have used them several times now to explain how to create a Customer Journey Map or to facilitate Brainstorming idea. In these applications, they have met with a great deal of success.However, I have struggled when using them for direct applications ESPECIALLY IN THE SALES FIELD. I created an extension of the Touch-Point card to be used in the field.
These cards are not so much about ideas but the actual use of the Touch-point Card. It is a combination of the features of the AT-ONE Project and the time management system called The Action Method. The Action Method is my management planner of choice. Scott Belsky’s (founder of Behance) book, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, describes this approach. The methodology is based on boiling down projects to the most basic elements with an emphasis on action.
The Back of the card describes the WHAT we are trying to accomplish. This is the heart of the AT_ONE project and from Simon’s paper:
Touch-points are one of the central aspects of service design. They describe one of the major differences between products and services, and are the link between the service provider and the customer. In this way, touch-points are central to the customer experience. It is not surprising then, that touch points are mentioned as one of the three pillars of service design.
The Back of the Card also includes my rendition of The Action Method and which I coin ARTIC. It is essentially the elements to perform the touch point. The bottom of the card allows space to take note of several of the preceding and post Touch-points in the process. The front of the card is specific to an individual Touch-point. It gives you space to make sure that you have everything in order to perform the touch point and to record any points of interest. I use the term to describe it as a mini sales-report. The cards can be easily duplicated, used electronically and/or as a post-it-note in creating a journey map.
I highly recommend using any of the tools of Lean such as Check Sheets, Run Sheets, Histograms, Pareto Charts, Flowcharts, Cause and Effect, Scatter Diagrams, Control Charts, etc. If you have a failing touchpoint that is happening by all means use what you are comfortable with to solve and improve the process. But unless you are experienced with using these tools from an outside-in perspective, I would recommend a rather slow implementation of usage. The tendency is to jump to the tools and turning the exercise into an internal improvement process.
There has been a few significant developments in SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing) and recent work on The Service Dominant Strategy Canvas by Egon Lüftenegger is starting to help move SD-Logic from academia to practice. His outline provides an excellent review of your touchpoints and your Trilogy Journey Maps.
Go to the next page; Service/Close
Adapted from Wikipedia: I struggled on whether to include an introduction to ServQual at this juncture for measurement. I believe the process has been made somewhat complex and at this juncture exploring a more simplified process. There has been created a RATER model, which is a simpler model for qualitatively exploring and assessing customers’ service experiences. It is an efficient model in helping an organization shape up their efforts in bridging the gap between perceived and expected service.
The five gaps that organizations should measure, manage and minimize:
- Gap 1 is the distance between what customers expect and what managers think they expect – Clearly survey research is a key way to narrow this gap.
- Gap 2 is between management perception and the actual specification of the customer experience – Managers need to make sure the organization is defining the level of service they believe is needed.
- Gap 3 is from the experience specification to the delivery of the experience – Managers need to audit the customer experience that their organization currently delivers in order to make sure it lives up to the spec.
- Gap 4 is the gap between the delivery of the customer experience and what is communicated to customers – All too often organizations exaggerate what will be provided to customers, or discuss the best case rather than the likely case, raising customer expectations and harming customer perceptions.
- Gap 5 is the gap between a customer’s perception of the experience and the customer’s expectation of the service – Customers’ expectations have been shaped by word of mouth, their personal needs and their own past experiences. Routine transactional surveys after delivering the customer experience are important for an organization to measure customer perceptions of service.
Recommended Reading/Listening