Robert Howard

As companies around the globe enter the brave new world of customer experience management, they are introduced to a dizzying array of new concepts including the term ‘touchpoint’. While there is no shortage to the number of definitions for this term, the practical matter is that the devil’s in the details.

A touchpoint is commonly defined as any instance where a customer interacts with a brand, product, or service. Using this broad definition, the ecosystem of potential touchpoints that comprises the customer experience can be enormous. For most customer experience programs, it’s common for an audit of customer experience touchpoints to reveal 500 – 1,000 or more touchpoints.

Cataloging the entire portfolio of touchpoints in an organization can be a daunting endeavor. This challenge can become even greater when companies don’t know what they are looking for or how broad to cast the net. For example, if you were to ask a dozen people to identify the touchpoints in...

Most businesses understand the tremendous value associated with highly loyal customers. That is why businesses of every size and shape have implemented loyalty programs to keep their best customers coming back again and again. Unfortunately, this traditional loyalty model has grown tired and provides little differentiation in the market today. As a result, it’s time to rethink customer loyalty.

The Loyalty Flood

Unfortunately for many businesses, any advantage that was originally gained through loyal programs has quickly eroded. While airline, hotel, and car rental agencies were the pioneers of mainstream loyalty programs, other businesses were quick to jump on the loyalty program bandwagon. The result is a business environment where every restaurant, gas station and pet store has some form of loyalty card or program.

As a result, having a loyalty program is no longer a competitive differentiator. It has become a mainstay of a business environment where...

A critical - and yet often overlooked - component of customer relationship management (CRM) is the cultivation of existing customers. We’ve seen it all too often; companies spend nearly all of their time and scarce resources trying to attract new customers - while existing customers are largely ignored. This practice can be costly in terms of lower profitability and higher customer turnover rates. Companies seeking to improve their CRM practices should look no further than cultivating existing customer relationships.

The Importance of Cultivation

All too often, businesses large and small become focused on one simple thing: attracting new customers. While this is an important dynamic for real business growth, it can become toxic if it is overemphasized and becomes the ONLY focal point for the business.

Customer acquisition is often the most costly and least profitable component of the overall customer experience. Companies throw promotions, price...

Companies seeking to become more customer-centric should define the customer experience as a formal end-to-end process in their organization.

Business leaders that subscribe to the process-centric approach to business improvement understand the importance of having well-defined end-to-end processes. Typical end-to-end processes that are well-defined and optimized in businesses today include:

• Plan to Profits (Budgeting & Finance)
• Order to Cash (Operations/Order Fulfillment)
• Procure to Pay (Procurement)
• Recruit to Retain (Human Resources)
• Idea to Market (New Product Innovation)
• Forecast to Delivery (Manufacturing & Distribution)
• Market to Sale (Sales & Marketing)

For those organizations that have formally adopted a process-centric approach to business, the process is often formally defined, measured, monitored, and continually optimized. This level of discipline is critical to...