Indeed, touchpoints are in many different places on the Customer Journey, on- and offline, between you and the customer or between the customer and his peers. From a company perspective, regarding the touchpoints they have in common with the customers (in-store, contact center, thru social media and the like), of this only 1% represent Social Media contacts.

Don’t get me wrong, Social Media is an important channel and I’m not saying that you should neglect it – but currently only represent a very minute amount of the contacts that are currently happening between the company and its customers. There is certainly potential to increase this percentage drastically and possibly with impressive results – but currently the maturity is not there yet on the side of the companies.

Ciao!
Mark

thanks for your insights.

I do wonder: when you say only 1% of the interactions is on social media that is a direct contact. That is not the same as a touchpoint: customers do read and see a lot about companies on the (social) web although they are not directly in touch with a company.

Remind that customer orientation often starts at the internet and social media (especially blogs, forums, review sites) have a lot of impact.

So I do think that contact via social media as a direct channel (twitter, facebook) is Hyped right now, but the impact of mentions on other social media is underestimated.

I do agree with Graham that those touchpoints should be part of the customer journey to understand not only what our customers want but also what they expect, because expectations are often based on marketing (but few customers who still believe wat marketing tells them) and in peer recommendations.

A very timely post. And one that exposes ‘social’ for what it is; a growing but still very small part of the customer journey. If anything, the 1% statistic is probably a huge over-estimate.

We tend to think that the only contacts the customer has with us are where the customer contacts us or one of our proxies directly. Or where we contact the customer directly. That’s why CRM typically only covers marketing, sales and customer service touchpoints.

From the customer’s perspective these touchpoints often do not create much value at all. In fact they are mostly non-value adding costs. Remember the last time you gave up trying to contact your bank after being stratnded in the middle of IVR hell? Much more value for customers is created through the continued ownership and use of products. services and experiences. Either directly or through what they enable. Yet these touchpoints are rarely counted in the statistics and even more rarely acted upon.

Maybe it is time to take a proper view of the entire, end-to-end customer journey, including those all important usage touchpoints. Only then will we really understand what customers want, what touchpoints they hire to get it and where we can help them get more of it. All at a handsome profit of course.

Graham Hill
Customer-centric Innovator
@grahamhill

Totally agree. It is only when we understand the customers journey – both the value journey (from JTBD to value in use) and the experience journey (those interactions in between) that we can make the changes necessary to achieve mutually beneficial value – a win-win for both parties.