Customer touchpoints, experiences and journeys…oh my! CX Mini Masterclass – E16

[Intro music] Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thank you for tuning in to the third installment of my customer experience mini masterclass series. These weekly episodes are designed to be punchy, bite-sized overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer-centricity.

Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional. If you’re busy driving to the mall to get holiday gifts or baking some Christmas cookies while you listen to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, julia-ahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Today we’ll be unpacking what customer touchpoints, experiences, and journeys are all about.

If you listened to my last episode, you’ll remember my comment about how a person’s use of the word touchpoint is a quick and sure-fire way to assess how much they really know about customer experience. When people talk about customer experiences, they love to bat this term around, and very often they do so incorrectly. There are times that I’ve been guilty of this myself, so I don’t want to throw too many stones, but what I would like to do is equip you with the right definition. I decided to include the definitions of experiences and journeys into the mix because these three concepts are inextricably linked, and I figured it would just be easiest to cover all of them together.

So buckle up and let’s dive in. All right, let’s start with touchpoint, the controversial one. This term is so frequently misused. So what is the right definition?

A touchpoint is the channel of interaction that facilitates a customer experience. So if I go to the gym for a workout, the physical gym is a touchpoint. If I call my bank asking for a resolution support on a query that I made, the contact center is my touchpoint. If I pick up my phone and order something through the Amazon app, then the app is the touchpoint.

We can think of customer touchpoints as sort of conduits for experiences. This sounds pretty simple. And I can imagine that you might be scratching your head and wondering why or how this definition gets bungled so frequently. The most frequent misuse of this term is when people use the word touchpoint when they actually mean experience.

They’ll say something like, “Speaking with a store associate is an important touchpoint in the shopping experience.” Speaking with an associate is an important component of the customer’s experience, but the touchpoint in this case would actually be the store, or possibly even the store associate as a representative of the brand. My first two CX mini masterclasses explored the concept of customer experience. So if you aren’t clear on that definition, I’d encourage you to go back and listen to those episodes for a comprehensive answer. But essentially, customer experience broadly encompasses all the ways that a customer interfaces with a brand.

Customer experiences, when we’re referring to them specifically, are the culmination of actions and interactions that a customer has or does as they’re going about their lives, fulfilling various needs. When an experience is instigated by the customer, it’s often considered a sort of job to be done, or something that the customer is trying to achieve. So for example, if I go shopping on a Saturday morning, perhaps it’s to pick up a new pair of shoes for work or maybe just to entertain myself. But either way, I’m doing this to achieve some bigger objective, whether I as the consumer am thinking about it in this way or not.

And this is where the concept of customer journeys comes into play. A customer journey is a series of experiences that a customer has while they’re trying to fulfill some larger need in their life. So if we take my Saturday morning retail therapy example, perhaps I want to maintain my professional appearance and have identified that a new pair of shoes would really help me do this. Or maybe this is just part of my routine to unwind after a busy week at work.

Either way, my customer experience is part of a broader objective that likely incorporates many different experiences. We can think of customer experiences as little episodes or components within the journey. And we can think of touchpoints as the conduits for these experiences. Now what’s important to note, and it’s something that a lot of people lose sight of when they’re mapping journeys, is that a customer’s experience rarely involves just one brand or one organization.

If we keep running with my shoe shopping example, before I hit the shops, I might have asked a friend for recommendations or checked out the most recent posts from my favorite fashion blogger. Maybe I even perused a few online retailers or checked my inbox for emails about shoe promotions. But as is most often the case, my journey will involve a lot of different touchpoints, some of them controlled by the brand of shoes that I ultimately ended up buying and some of them not. It can be easy to forget that the consumer landscape is filled with interactions, and a customer’s journey is almost never a linear path that’s laid out by a single brand.

The digital realm in particular has given rise to an explosion of touchpoints, making journeys all that much more varied and unique. In coming episodes, I’ll be covering journey mapping and how CX professionals can help their organizations navigate this complex world. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this CX mini masterclass. If you’re interested in doing some more intensive online training in the field of customer experience, I’d definitely encourage you to check out CX University.

They offer a broad array of e-learning options on a flexible monthly subscription plan. Listeners of this podcast can use the discount code PODCAST10 to get 10% off their first month’s subscription and help support this show. Next Thursday’s episode of Decoding the Customer will be an interview format show, and after that, I’ll be back with more mini masterclass episodes every week through the rest of December. I’ll be focusing on customer journey mapping, where to start, how to facilitate mapping with your team and classic pitfalls to avoid.

If you have journey mapping on the horizon for 2019, be sure to tune in in December. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My contact details are listed on my website. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next week.

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