customer impact agenda phil winters

8/2/2019 Customer Impact Agenda Phil Winters

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Phil Winters 2011 all rights reserved [email protected] 20110413 Page | 1

Thefount of decision is determined by the well of need

Customer IMPACT Agenda

An Agenda for IMPACTing the Customer


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Customer IMPACT Agenda

Idea in Brief 3

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE & THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA 3

Defining the Decision Making Process 4

SHIFTING to the Voice of the Customer 5

Focus on Needs 5

Touchpoints and Moments of Truth 7

THE NEW BREAKDOWN OF OLD CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION 9

Visualizing Customer Touchpoints 10

IMPACT TOUCHPOINTS 10

FRAMING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 15

AN AGENDA FOR IMPACTING THE CUSTOMER: 16

REFERENCES 16


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Championed Best Practice:

Organizations enjoy measured success with CRM

programs and direct marketing when they embrace

Customer Experience Management as an extention

of their current customer centric programs.

Challenged by Customer Reality:

But customers have taken control over their

decisions, utilizing more information sources, in

particular social media, and making decisions far

earlier than the existing techniques can come to bear.

An Agenda for IMPACTing the Customer:

An approach and a framework are presented that extend customer experience to include the structured

understanding of the entire decision making process, focusing early on differentiated customer needs and

touchpoint choices particularly social media then proactively impacting those touchpoints in a process that

provides an updated, sustainable customer-organization interaction designed to understand and satisfy

customer needsalong every step of the customers modern decision-making journey.

Idea in Brief

Customer Experience & the Impact of Social Media

Customer Experience Management is the activity surrounding an organizations structured

approach to providing a customer with a positive experience. Traditionally, the focus has been on

the post-purchase sequence of events that begins when a customer actually starts using the

product or service and therefore begins measurably interacting with the organization. A recent

benchmark study (Peppers & Rogers Group and SAS, 2008) which defined and measured

customer experience maturity within organizations decisively concluded that customer

experience directly correlates to business results; many companies lack the understanding,

technology, and willingness to adopt effective customer experience programs; and the businesses

that do get it are gaining an edge against their peers, even in a difficult economy. If an

organization views customer experience as a differentiator and ingrains its importance into its

culture, measurable results will follow (Customer Strategist, Spring 2009, p. 7). Typically, a

structured program around this customer experience chain would look like this:

Figure1: Traditional Customer Experience Chain

A more widely encompassing definition of the customer experience that includes, for example, a

structured understanding of needs identification or options awareness, has traditionally not been

included in the customer experience chain because the attention paid to these very tangible

aspects has proven so important that it provided immediate and marked differentiators, even in

mature and highly saturated markets.


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For example, Audi tracks the customers post-purchase experience and ensures that the sales

representative can keep abreast of their customers status because at some point they will need

a new car. Even in areas where a focus on the customer has not been at the forefront of

differentiating strategies, like in the energy industry, there are clear leaders emerging. Lichtblick,

the 100% green energy provider in Germany, maintains its leadership not just through a

commitment to being green but through an extreme focus on knowing and understanding everypoint of contact with the customer, defining key metrics to measure them, setting targets, and

then checking weekly to ensure they are meeting these goals. It should come as no surprise

that Licktblick CEO Christian Friege has accepted the award for Germanys most customer-oriented

utility two years running (Deutschlands kundenorientiertester Energieversorger 2009 and 2010).

Marketing has focused strongly on early identification ofmarketneeds, particularly through use of

market research and focus groups. Successful organizations have translated this understanding

into programs that help promote their products, services and brands using above-the-line

techniques, such as television and print advertising, to reach their general markets and below-the-line direct marketing techniques for their target markets.

However, they have not typically concerned themselves in a structured way with understanding,

capturing and proactively responding to the decision-making process of the individual. Indeed: this

has not always proved easy to do. For most organizations, the needs identification and

awareness of target markets (handled many times by marketing) and the customer experience

of the individual processes (handled many times by customer service) have been separate topics,

but todays customer reality, particularly with the take-up of social media, is forcing a change in

that approach.

Defining the Decision Making Process

As seen from the prospective customers perspective, the customer experience starts with his first

interactions with his environment at the time he begins to think about a need, want or value

long before taking a decision or actually purchasing and using a product or service from an

organization. And this is just the first step in a series. To illustrate this concept, the above

customer experience chain has been extended below to include its true beginning and end,

starting with the earliest stages of the decision-making process and finishing with reflection

which could lead to continuing interaction for the next decision. We call this the customerdecision-making chain, as it encompasses the entire experience and maintains an awareness of

the needs and values to be satisfied at each step.

Figure 2: The Customer Decision-Making Chain


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The customer decision-making chain or the purchase decision making process of a customer is a

special form of the cognitive process every human goes through in making any kind of decision.

Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky were the first to define this well in their seminal research on

decision making and cognitive processes. An individual first becomes aware of a need or a want;

then a search is conducted for alternatives that will satisfy those needs. After undergoing a

complex mental activity of prioritizing the best possible options, given all inputs, a choice orcompromise is then made. The evaluation criteria are not purely rational or logical but contain

strong elements of emotion, personal values and risk assessment. After a decision is made, steps

are taken to approach and execute on that choice. A take-up and usage phase contributes to the

final step, which is to learn from that choice and remember the decision process, along with its

conclusions and a chronicle of what took place, for future reference.

SHIFTING to the Voice of the Customer

The concept of one-to-one marketing understanding the differences between customers, putting

them in groups with similar characteristics, and treating these groups appropriately is well

established and used in leading organizations. This differentiation has focused primarily on

understanding an individual customers value to an organization and the behavior of that

customer throughout his interaction with the organization along the traditional customer

experience chain (Fig. 1). But with our expanded definition of customer experience, there emerges

a business requirement to identify needs and interactions much sooner in the process, so that

appropriate, highly-differentiated responses can be undertaken while they are still relevant.

This is only achieved by an organization shifting its perspective from looking out at its customers

through the traditional customer experience chain to one of structured listening starting very

early on in the cycle in order to base its segmentation on a combination ofboth the customers

needs and the ways they prefer to interact with their environment during decision making.

Figure 3: Differentiated Needs and Interaction Customer Segments

Focus on Needs

When it comes to business, there is a tendency to confuse the delivery of a product or service with

the satisfying of needs, values or wants. Equally fallacious is to assume that offering a sensational

new product or service can self-generate the need for it; such apparent cases in the past were

most probably due to a lucky strike that fulfilled an existing customer need. When we define

customer needs around the jobs that customers are trying to get done, then we can see that new

innovationseven the most radical or disruptive innovationsdo not create a customer need.

They simply satisfy a customer need in an innovative way (Bettencourt 2009). For our purposes,


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needs, valuesand wants are interchangeable: something that is perceived by an individual

as being necessary or desirable to having a good/better life. These can be broken down into basic

categories.

Figure 4: Categorization of Needs, Values and Wants

This clear framework breaks down needs into Utilitarian, Social and Emotional components. On

the left side of Figure 4 are the basic utilitarian, functional (or rational) needs. Convenient,

Economicaland Safe are all what could be called the foundational criteria of any decision. These

topics relate to the cognitive function that makes analytical, logical, rational, objective decisions,looking at all parts individually.

In todays business world, these elements are not simply hygiene factors: they show basic

competence. Failing to fulfill these needs as a company may mean eventually forfeiting the right to

continue playing in that market. A spectacular (negative) example of failure to get these very

important factors right underlies the global financial crisis, where the perception of the public is

that financial institutions neglected to satisfy and, in some cases, blatantly betrayed, their basic

needs for safety, economy and trust.

Center and right in Figure 4 are the social (Prestige, Identity) and emotional (Pleasure, Sentiment

and Spirituality) needs and values, which play an extremely significant role in any decision-making

process, as witnessed by the tremendous effort that advertisers, creative marketers and product

designers pour into trying to address them.

However, the systematic capturing of information about needs has traditionally focused on

gathering information about the utility or functional needs typically information that can be

gained through market research, focus groups, and surveys. These are used at a very high level to

roughly understand a markets needs. When it comes to the soft values of social significance

and emotion needs of people, not markets there have been some excellent academic papers,


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but so far, there has been no rigorous capturing of data leading to a comprehensive understanding

and structuring of these customer needs. However, identifying, understanding and positively

influencing needs can be achieved by looking at a targeted customer segments interaction

touchpoints across their entire decision-making process.

Touchpoints and Moments of TruthTo satisfy needs, an individual interacts with indeed, experiences the world around him

through his five natural senses. And just as different groups have different needs, so they also go

about interacting with their environment in the decision-making process differently. From a

business perspective, understanding the details of each point of interaction is the key to positively

identifying, differentiating and then satisfying those needs (with product or service offerings).

Each of these points of interaction in the decision-making process can be viewed as a touchpoint

between individual and environment.

The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Modern English defines a touchpoint as the time in development that precedes an appreciable leap in physical, emotional, or cognitive growth in

other words, touchpoints include those moments of truth during which a person, under influence

of his needs, forges mental connections among his own decision-making criteria. And these

moments of truth in the early phases of consideration turn out to be very important customer

experiences that contribute substantially to purchase decision-making.

Any enterprise wishing to promote its brand, product or service will want to interact appropriately

with these touchpoints before, during and afterpurchase or usage. This applies both to business-

to-business and business-to-consumer markets.

The emphasis on before and afteris to highlight the deficiency in the way that most organizations

currently focus on understanding touchpoints by looking at purchase or usage transactions.

Examples of this include signup or purchase process, customer service, customer care, problem

resolution and satisfaction surveys imminently important activities, but insufficient to ensure

that todays highly-connected consumers have the consummate customer experience.

The classic channels of communication managed by

marketing advertising, flyers, direct mail, invoices, letters,

telephone interaction, web sites, email and face-to-face

contact are all touchpoints through which companies

actively reach out to their customers, or vice versa. These

interactions are easy to register, track and measure and

for the most part, they are indeed registered, tracked and

measured. But in order to form a complete picture of the

customer experience, that is, to understand whether (and

where/when) it catalyzes a moment of truth, the touchpoints must be viewed from the

customersperspective with regard to the decision-making journey, and not just from an isolated

focus on internal systems and processes.


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When seen from the wider perspective of the Customer

Decision-Making Chain (see figure 2), relevant

touchpoints can also be informal channels such as

chatting with a friend or using a natural sense (such as

taste, touch or smell) to gain additional input. While

important for some decision-making journeys, thesetouchpoints are of the kind that organizations have

heretofore not been able to monitor or participate in

directly, except on the smallest of scales. But even that

is changing. The entire topic of social media represents a huge range of additional touchpoints

that are readily available and, to some groups, very important for their decision-making process.

There is also a trend to surface touchpoints electronically via new platforms which combine social

media and traditional touchpoints with new forms of telephony, computing and electronic

communication. Applications that scan a bar code while shopping and instantly compare prices,listen to a piece of music and instantly identify both the artist and music or use location-based

services to identify alternatives close to the user are just a few current examples of this trend.

But the fascination with the new technologies should not detract from understanding that to the

customer this is simply another touchpoint that may or may not play a role in their decision

making.

Whereas in the past, the private conversation

between individuals around a product, offering or

company remained private, social media and the

other new touchpoints now facilitate the

exponential sharing of those conversations and

opinions, exerting influence in ways that are not

only important for individuals, but are critical for

business. This means that one customers moment

of truth whether negative or positive can be

propagated to hundreds of others in a blink of an

eye, and again to thousands of others in the next

blink. Market-leading companies are already

starting to treat social media in this way: as a cheap

and effective repeating megaphone.

The reality is that social media and other modern touchpoints are no longer merely interesting

trends to be watched: in fact, they represent additional, critical touchpoints that must be

understood in the context of their relevance to each stage of the decision-making process for

targeted customers. And the need to re-evaluate and re-focus traditional channels, particularly

television and print advertising, around that same decision-making process is now more important

than ever. Once companies understand each touchpoint whether traditional, social media or


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otherwise and its relationship to their customers needs, they can begin capturing information

about those touchpoints as the first step in positively influencing the decision-making process

towards their product or service.

The New Breakdown of Old Customer Segmentation

There are many anecdotes about youth using social media touchpoints, and this fast-growing

market segment has been termed millennials, referring to their coming of age a fter the year

2000. It is clear that these young consumers, who take for granted the omnipresence of

computers and internet, will have vastly different modes of interaction with their environment

BUT this fundamental extension of touchpoints in the decision-making process is affecting every

segment of customers, even those that may have previously been typed with a fair degree of

confidence. Lets use a concrete example by looking at one very specific market segment: the

Super Granny. The Zukunftsinstitut, a German Think Tank dedicated to research on changes,

trends and mega-trends, defines a Super-Granny as a well-to-do, highly educated and activeretired woman who is open to new ideas and spends a large amount of her time, energy and

money on her grandchildren. In this group, we look at a desire that a Super-Granny might have: to

support her grandchild financially in the future for further education. This will comprise needs

around cost and financial return, fiscal safety, and convenience, as well as social significance and

emotional factors.

Traditionally (that is, up until about two years ago), this grandmother would have simply gone to

her bank to open a savings account in the name of her grandchild or, at most, discuss options in

person with her banks customer service representative. The underlying needs would not have

been discussed directly, but a decision would have been made that satisfied those needs. And

there are definitely still a lot of grannies that will do just that.

However, in a November 2009-based focus group session, it was discovered that the average

Super-Granny will, first, search on the internet to gain awareness of her options; because she is an

educated, computer- and internet-savvy woman, this is a natural first step. Once she has done

research on a number of ideas and approaches she will next go to the public library and further

inform herself on those topics, usually relying on independent consumer reports to gain an

understanding of the options from a source that she trusts. Note that while she is modern in using

internet sources, she is still not comfortable with relying on them as her sole source of

information. After that she will email or more and more likely facebook her friends and

family to ask their opinions on the topic, usually giving them a short summary of what she has

learned and the options she is considering. She may use that feedback to make a call to a friend or

relative to get a point or two clarified, after which she will develop her short list. Then, and only

then, will she visit an organizations website, pick up a phone or possibly drop by a physical

location to start her approach towards purchase.

In this example, the current customer experience processes CRM systems, customer care

programs, IT systems, etc. are only able to capture data on, monitor and influence the parts of


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the decision making cycle that were not even being usedby this very high value segment. And this

was just the awareness part of the decision process!

If we multiply the missed opportunities in this small example by the myriad new touchpoints that

people are using and their different needs, it is no wonder that we do not understand our

customers as well as before. Those additional touchpoints need to be tracked and documented.

Visualizing Customer Touchpoints

The concept of capturing the customer experience through documenting touchpoints is not new.

It was a technique first used in early 2000s to systematically document the customer experience

process for an organizations products or services and identify all relevant customer touchpoints.

From this, a graphical representation could be developed that depicted the current state of a

customers interactions with the organization.

While very successful as a technique, these so-called touchmaps were often limited to looking at

only the very restrictive definition ofcustomer experience post purchase and usage (see Figure

1) as seen from the organizations internal perspective. Drawing on documentation of internal

processes, focus groups of staff, surveys and existing customer insight, the touchmap created an

inside-out snapshot focused primarily on the internal IT systems and business processes that

affected customer interfaces during the purchase and usage cycle, such as in the call center, on

the website, at the branch counter or ATM, or through direct sales contacts and emails. It is

important to note that the touchmap captured only how systems and processes interacted with

these classic touchpoints: it did not attempt to record what the CUSTOMER was perceiving

throughout the decision-making journey. It was the marketing equivalent of looking at thefootprints of the animal as it passed, not at the animal itself.

With the focus now shifted to understanding the customers perspective, a documentation

approach now requires different techniques. Customer surveys, customer focus groups and ways

of recognizing the relevance of touchpoints from the outside-in perspective become the focus of

the exercise. Even mass-market techniques can be focused specifically on targeted segments as

they walk through (and share what touchpoints they are using) along the customer decision-

making chain.

The business process understanding, the IT infrastructure and the customer intelligence functions

retain their importance but shift roles to become the major resources for impacting the

touchpoints identified as relevant for our customers. But first, it is important to decide how to

engage these newly-documented touchpoints.

IMPACT Touchpoints

Customers WANT personalized contact with their chosen suppliers and they demand continuity in

their relationships to their vendors across communication types. A recent survey conducted by

Genesys found that the ability to communicate across multiple channels is critical to loyalty.


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Consumers wished to, for example, start in voice self-service or the Web and get live assistance

from an agent, and to start in e-mail and have better integration with agent-assisted service

without having to repeat all their information. And they were not bothered by the concept of their

suppliers monitoring their touchpoints and even reaching out to them to improve their

experience through extended offers or help during self-service transactions. In fact, 86% of

consumers per country said they would find proactive engagement either a strong benefit orwould welcome proactive assistance when they were stuck on the Web or in self-service. (The

Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience and Engagement

in 16 Key Economies, Genesys, November 2009).

In many industries, this has already been implemented for the controllable touchpoints:

customer service centers, websites, written communication, self-service contact centers.

However, others, such as many of the social media touchpoints, cannot and should not be

owned or controlled. Indeed, this fallacy is a tripping stone for many companies who attempt to

harness the strengths of social media in all the wrong ways. In Socialnomics: How Social MediaTransforms the Way We Live and Do Business, Erik Qualman draws the following pertinent

analogy:

Now and in the future, marketers need to adjust their way of thinking because its no

longer about building out the existing database. Instead, you could be in communication

with fans and consumers on someone elses database (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.).

Yet, many companies fail to grasp this new concept. They build elaborate YouTube or Flicker

pages, placing callouts and click actions that send the user outside the social network, often

to their company website or a lead capture page. These companies still believe they need to

get users into their prospecting databases in order to market to them. They are doing a

disservice to their loyal fan base and in turn a disservice to themselves . Its analogous to

meeting a pretty girl in a bar and asking if she would like a drink. When she responds yes,

rather than ordering a drink from the bartender, you grab her and rush her into your car and

drive her back to your place; because after all, you have beer in your fridge (Qualman

2009).

While it is still important to get potential customers into the database, at the same time there is a

need for alternate approaches for those situations where it is not practical, appropriate or possible

to simply capture the customer. And a decision on that approach needs to be taken at each

touchpoint.

At each touchpoint, especially in the uncontrolled/uncontrollable social media channels, it is

necessary to determine which types of interaction make most sense and then decide how to

engage with the customer appropriately along the decision making journey. We have identified

five types of engagement that an organization can exercise with these touchpoints and a fitting

mnemonic for them described here in order of increasing level of influence and involvement:

Ignore, Monitor, Participate, Activate, ConTrol: IMPACT


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In most cases, the engagement types can be mixed and matched as needed for maximum client-

customer interaction benefit.

The first step is recognizing that a touchpoint exists and may have relevance. From there, these

next levels involve making the conscious decision as to whether one should do anything proactive

about the particular touchpoint, and if so, what.

Ignore: This is a documented go/no-go decision. For any touchpoint that is currently irrelevantor of little to no interest to target audiences, any levelof proactive engagement can carry a high

cost: precious resources should not be spent frivolously. In this case, the best approach is to take

the documented, definitive decision to ignore the touchpoint for the present.

A good example here is Second Life, the free 3D virtual world. While still an important marketing

channel to those organizations offering 3D virtual world products and services, many other

organizations have found it not to be relevant for reaching out to and communicating with theirtarget audiences. This could be because Second Life does not figure as a relevant touchpoint

during most customers decision making cycles for the targeted products or services.

The decision can always be reviewed again at a later time to see if there is new justification for

treating that touchpoint in another way.

Monitor: Any touchpoint that plays any significant part in customers decision makingprocesses should, at a minimum, be monitored. For traditional touchpoints, the methods are well

documented: the entire topic of Customer Intelligence has traditionally been concerned with the

capturing of such touchpoint data that can be transformed into new, fact-based information about

the customer. For other, modern touchpoints such as kiosk, new telephony devices, etc., the

same holds true. The data is there and can be captured and monitored if it contributes to a

better understanding of the customer.

Social monitoring tools are becoming available almost as quickly as new social media touchpoints

appear. Sometimes these are standalone tools: Twitter monitors, blog search tools, search

analytics and news consolidation services are just some examples. But of even more significance

are the emerging tools and services that span ALL social media touchpoints, allowing anorganization to tailor its own touchpoint and search criteria through a single interface.

Next it is important to decide whether the monitoring should be done as a standalone activity

i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, reports, etc. or if it should rather be included into a more

structured process of data capture and utilization within the organizations existing customer

intelligence infrastructure.

At a minimum, the monitoredtouchpoint information should be distributed to those within the

organization that have a clearly defined responsibility to take action for that touchpoint. Another


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step could involve taking that new, fact-based insight and feeding it back into a corporate memory

of the customer either in the customer data warehouse or the customer intelligence practice

so that it can be used to tighten and tune the accuracy of the models for describing the customer

or by association the segment that accurately represents this customer.

Participate: The next type of involvement is to participate, which means taking the decisionto assign responsibility within the organization for proactively replying or corresponding through

an existing targeted touchpoint that the organization did not create or control. Often, participate

will be the right involvement type for an existing social media touchpoint, since the conversation

and interaction cannot be controlled or screened and, in general, there is a very wide audience

that can listen in to the dialog between any two parties. Examples here include responding to a

comment in an existing blog, interacting with Twitter comments or openly joining social networks

and communities and participating in the dialog.

Whenparticipating, it is important to observe four fundamental rules:

1. Anyparticipation must be real. It cannot be a ghost writer or an automated response.

Many organizations have spent time and effort building a brand promise for their

organization. This is where they need to ensure its authenticity.

2. Participation authenticity can be achieved employing an organizations own staff or

specialized external personnel who have been trained to respond in the organizations

name. The highest level of authenticity comes through enthusiastic customers who are

natural advocates of the organization.

3. Remember thatparticipation is not control; it will not always be possible to predict the

course of interactions, or to stop activity that does not perfectly suit.

4. A solid social media policy, based on existing corporate, brand and communications

guidelines, is how organizations best steer and guide the participation in touchpoints.

Activate: In many cases, it is appropriate to go beyond participation that is, to activate a

new platform, offering a new way of providing target audiences with a way of exchanging andcommunicating via this touchpoint. Some examples here include forums, communities, blogs,

ideas capture and product/service rating mechanisms. Frosta, a provider of ready meals, runs a

forum site that proactively encourages comments both good and bad about the meals it

provides. The occasional negative comment is far outweighed by the sense of community and

closeness generated by the users of the forum. In addition, it provides valuable insight into future

product requirements.

Activation can happen even for touchpoints that are not online or social media. The Italian bank

Banco Mediolanum knows that a touchpoint with key implications for their customers decision


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making is the interaction with their friends in informal settings so the bank occasionally rents the

best coffee shop in each town and then simply invites their customers to bring a friend along. In all

cases when a touchpoint is activated, the organization is the facilitator not the owner of the

mechanism.

Many of the best examples of Social Media and Social CRM, whether planned or impromptu, turn

out to be very good examples ofactivation.

ConTrol: There are touchpoints that can be controlled. A call center, an email channel, a website, a retail location or direct sales staff are all examples of touchpoints that an organization

owns, and therefore can (and should!) control. In fact, there is a danger in not doing so: recently a

major European telco was lambasted in the media for having responded to a comment on Twitter

within 20 minutes but only because the equivalent email to the official customer support

address was never answered at all. Bad press for an apparently good customer service response

(quick reply to a Tweet) is unfortunate, but failure to react to customer inquiries that come

through the proper, company-prescribed channels is perhaps unforgivable.

Touchpoints that we can controlare still the most critical in any decision-making process exactly

because customers KNOW we own those touchpoints and they expect a professional client-

company interaction. However, those touchpoints, whether call center, email or physical location,

are sometimes expensive to maintain -- which is exactly where alternative controlledtouchpoints

can come in: Dell has made a huge success of going from email-based to community-based

customer interaction, where not only staff but also other, user-rated experts help answer

customer questions. Customer satisfaction is up and costs are down all thanks to understanding

the IMPACT of alternative touchpoints.

Even traditional above-the-line marketing channels such as billboard and television advertising

are being refocused based on a better understanding of where they play as touchpoints in target

customers decision-making processes. A good example comes from The Economist, who knows

that advertising on newsstands around London is extremely relevant as a reminder touchpoint

that reinforces its loyal readership with the message I am proud of being a part of this

community, which naturally supports customers in renewing their subscriptions but more

importantly serves as an occasional prompt to recommend the magazine to a friend.

The five IMPACT types of engagement are all valid and relevant. Any given touchpoint type may

warrant more than one form of engagement depending on its relevance to the targeted customer

group. In addition, it may be appropriate to treat a touchpoint, say, during a customers awareness

stage differently than in the purchase stage. Deciding which engagement strategy is right for

which touchpoints needs to be made within the context of a Customer Experience Framework and

the organizational capabilities that affect the experience.


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Framing the Customer Experience

The focus of this discussion has been on the customers perspective. However, in reality, the

actual and any future desired experience that an organization wishes to achieve will only come

about by utilizing the resources that an organization already has. This will bring all its

organizational capabilities to bear: people, brand, structures, business processes, informationexchange abilities and, more and more as the complexity rises, IT platforms and infrastructure.

To create an ongoing process that nurtures the different segments with a differentiated customer

experience along the entire decision-making chain, it is important to not only understand but to

document the relationship between the outside-in customer experience process described above

with that of the organizations capability to transform and maintain the experience.

This is best done by viewing each of the topics as a layer, with the various interface points to be

identified and linked based on the target audience, its needs and decision-making journey.

Figure 5 Framing the Customer Experience

Within such a framework, touchpoint and decision journey elements can be prioritized and

described from the customers perspective. Both current and desired future states can be mapped

and a gap analysis performed across the organizational aspects to highlight necessary changes.

Such a framework is useful for developing scenarios, benchmarks and simulation, or for providing

the foundation for trying out new and innovative aspects of customer experience in a controlled

and focused manner. Resource allocations, timing and change or implementation priorities can be

highlighted and tracked.


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While this can be done manually or with normal computer tools, there are also new software

packages that make the process of capturing, documenting and linking touchpoint interactions

efficient and effective.

An Agenda for IMPACTing the Customer:

For an organization to be successful with its customers today, it must fundamentally change the

way it looks at the customer by taking the customers perspective through his own decision-

making journey. By employing a Customer IMPACT Agenda approach and framework, an

organization stands to gain a measurable and sustainable competitive advantage by extending its

understanding of the customers experience to include the entire decision making process,

focusing much sooner on differentiated customer needs and choice of touchpoints, including

social media, then proactively impacting relevant touchpoints. The Customer IMPACT Agenda is a

process that provides an updated, sustainable customer-organization interaction designed to help

organizations understand and satisfy customer needs along every step of the modern, tech-savvycustomers decision-making journey.

References

Bettencourt, Lance A., Debunking Myths about Customer Needs, Marketing Management, American

Marketing Association, January/February 2009, pp 47-52

Boztepe, S., User Value: Competing Theories and Models, in International Journal of Design, Vol. 1 No. 2,

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customer impact agenda phil winters

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