CHAPTER 7
THE PRE-TOUCHPOINT MOMENT
The pre-touch moment is the touchpoint that’s not really a touchpoint. In its most simple form, it is when customers haven’t yet engaged your product or service and are deciding if they want to give it a try. They’re in the research phase.
For example, people may drive down the street and look at your restaurant to see if they’re in for a great meal or ptomaine poisoning. Or they might search for you on their desktop or mobile device, bringing up Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor ratings and reviews to find out your digital reputation among the highly influential community of existing and previous customers.
Most organizations have very little information about this all-important touchpoint primarily because it’s hard to glean insights about a potential customer when there’s been no point of contact. Whom do you ask and how do you make the connection? This is where social analytics is of enormous help.
Paradoxically, the main control you have over the pre-touch moment is found in the remaining four touchpoints. This is especially true digitally, involving your previous customers who interact and post reviews online assessing the quality of their experience with you. At the risk of sounding redundant, the key to the pre-touchpoint is to deliver amazing experiences across the other four touchpoints, digitally and non-digitally, across all of your customer types.
PLAY TO WIN: ENGENDER LOVE
In order to win at the pre-touchpoint, you must leverage the unbendable fact that we live in an information-sharing economy. It is hyper-connected and empowers your customers to promote you or destroy you.
If you’re delivering customer service at the baseline level of expectation, then there’s nothing for your customers to talk about. You have delivered an average experience, and they have no reason to even think about you again. If your customers are not talking about you, then you are not building your business. Your online presence is poor to nonexistent.
To get customers talking about you, you must deliver exceptional experiences across the other four touchpoints. This will make your customers want to rave about what a wonderful experience they had with you, which feeds the pre-touchpoint. Then, when prospective customers research you, they find that your customers love you.
The Zero Moment of Truth
The Zero Moment of Truth (or ZMOT) is what Google calls the pre-touch information phase and the value created through delivering exceptional experiences to your customers. Your customers can conduct a complete background search on your business or product literally in seconds. If you are bad, there is no place to hide. If you are great, your customers will do your promoting for you.1 The good news is that if you deliver exceptional experiences, digitally and non-digitally, across all your customer types, you develop a digital and non-digital community reputation that will significantly improve sales while reducing customer acquisition costs.
It’s great to know that we live in a universe where when we serve others well, we are rewarded with happy workplaces, happy customers, and financial prosperity. Not a bad result for just paying attention to the customers we serve and deeply understanding what they love and what they hate.
Digital Ubiquity and Your Reputation
A well-known anecdote tells us that if you place a frog in hot water, it will leap to safety, but if you place it in cold water and then slowly heat the water, it will be boiled alive. In the second scenario, the frog presumably doesn’t notice that the temperature is increasing and it sits calmly, blithely unaware that it’s about to be boiled to death.
While scientifically this story is not true, it aptly demonstrates what happens when good companies don’t pay attention to the changing environment. Many of these changes are gradual—for example, changes in your company’s digital reputation. If you haven’t caught on to the fact that your customers are talking to a whole lot of other people about their experiences with you, then you will suffer the fate of the frog and slowly be boiled to death.
Your digital reputation is the most important part of the pre-touch journey, as customers want to know if your product or service meets their needs. The digitally engaged customer community wants to know how you treat other customers. Digital equity is your best friend or your worst enemy. (Not all of your pre-touch moments are digital, but today most of them are.)
Digital connection is everywhere. The water has changed. Use it to thrive. Later in this chapter, I’ll show you how with my Three Step Pre-Touch Plan.
According to estimates, more than one-quarter of the global population, or more than 2 billion people, will use smartphones in 2016. The number of smartphone users is growing so fast it could reach 6 billion people by 2020.
Yet despite this massive sea change in the way people connect, an executive actually told me that the digital domain was irrelevant as it related to the way in which his company delivered customer experiences. Now that’s a frog about to be boiled.
Add to this the advent and popularity of new wearable technologies, and it’s clear that the way in which consumers connect will grow exponentially in importance. Organizations and executives in digital denial will be left behind by the organizations that leverage this opportunity to deliver exquisite customer experiences.
Non-Digital Perceptions and Your Reputation
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about your customer’s digital pre-touch experience. The fact is most of your customers experience you digitally prior to engaging you physically. It doesn’t matter if you are a donut shop or a multibillion-dollar business-to-business enterprise, because the same rules apply. You’re going to get Googled. Full stop.
However, for many businesses there is also a non-digital pre-touchpoint. If you are a local donut shop located on the main street of your town (or an In-N-Out Burger, as discussed in Chapter 4), your most important pre-touch moment might very well be the physical appearance of your business: the parking lot, your sign, the landscaping, what people see when they look into your windows, and all the other aspects of what customers might expect if they were to do business with you.
Apple is one of the largest and most successful companies on Earth. Have you been to an Apple store lately? They’re the epitome of cool and hip, just like Apple products. The size of your company doesn’t matter or whether you sell donuts, iPhones, or something in between, but if you have a physical place where customers come to check you out, make sure you don’t let them down. It’s as simple as that. If you have a shabby sign and landscaping and if your interior isn’t clean and wow-looking, then you will bite it digitally when you are reviewed.
In order to understand how to build the perfect pre-touch moment, you need to get out of your chair and do research—to listen and observe strategically. Drive down the street and envision how customers might perceive the quality of your food and/or experience based on what they see. Walk around your building and peer through the windows as if you were a potential customer. What do you see, hear, smell, and think?
In order to succeed in developing the perfect pre-touch moment, you need to understand that you are delivering both digitally and non-digitally. Although some businesses are far more digital than others, it’s important that you research both aspects to make sure that you are providing an integrated quality experience.
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is
much better than two doubles.”
—STEVE JOBS
When You’re Great,
You Have Nothing to Hide
It’s amazing how much work companies put into trying to push down derogatory business ratings. However, people are smart. Ultimately your potential customers will find out who has been naughty and who has been nice.
If you deliver exceptional experiences, your customer community will share the good news digitally. They will become your best source of advertising. Regrettably, however, customers are far more likely to post derogatory information about your business, and that’s why digital reputations tend to skew negative.
The only way to solve this is by being really, really good. Will some nutcase say something bad about you anyway? Yes, of course, but what I have found is that your real customer community typically neutralizes negative comments, especially if those comments are wrong or false.
I had an almost perfect 5-star rating on Amazon for one of my books. Then an anonymous competitor posted lots of critical comments about my book. One of my readers snapped back at the reviewer and actually exposed him as a competitor.
There are hundreds of examples of how companies with a large fan base have been protected by their customers. These advocates protect you from “madvocates,” the customers who decide to hate you.
THE THREE-STEP PRE-TOUCH PLAN
If you follow the steps in my pre-touch plan, you not only won’t boil in the changing water temperatures of the fast-paced world but you’ll be able to use the changes to your advantage and help current customers get you more customers.
Step 1:
Do the Research
The first step in designing the perfect pre-touch moment is to understand what your customers are already experiencing at this key touchpoint. You must conduct comprehensive digital and non-digital research on what your prospective customers experience when they look at your business or organization.
It’s surprising to me how few organizations take time away from their internal focus to actually think about the way people see their business, especially when this simple step can reveal huge inadequacies and surprising positives that you otherwise wouldn’t know about. It doesn’t take long and is massively worth the effort.
The other day I was at a popular restaurant in California. I noticed behind the counter a hospital can of bug spray, and I instantly thought, “My God, this place is infested with bugs! I’m outta here!” So I left. Superficial analysis? Maybe, but customers do see us superficially. If we’re not mindful of this, we can make big mistakes that have long-term consequences for our organization.
Step 2:
Invent
Many find the words “invent” and “innovate” lofty. They might bring up schoolroom memories of Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. I believe, though, that the best innovations of the future will not be about products but will be more about business model changes and the way in which we serve customers.
Everyone is an inventor, so don’t let the idea intimidate you. Your goal is to gain insights about what your customers hate and what they love so you can create layered and dynamic value. Start from this angle and your innovations will make doing business with you much more worthwhile than doing business with your competitors.
In many ways, humans are superficial in how we initially decide what we like and what we hate. For example, we might judge a person’s intelligence by their vocabulary, yet vocabulary rarely is an indication of real intelligence. We judge products by their package design, yet there is no direct correlation between a great package and a great product.
Based on this, some might suggest that image is more important than actual quality, but they would be wrong. Every single touchpoint tells the story of the quality, sophistication, and ultimately value of your product or service. Therefore, in the superficial world we live in, you need to be judicious and surgical about how you create every single component and experience no matter how irrelevant they may seem.
Step 3:
Hardwire Customer Insights
What customers like and what they hate changes every day. You need to develop a range of systems and processes to monitor both digital and non-digital customer experiences, so that you continually increase incremental and breakthrough customer innovations.
Following is a checklist of ideas you can use to continually improve your customers’ experience by gaining better insights.
Insight and Innovation Checklist
GOOGLE ALERTS If you’re in a smaller organization without a big social analytic budget, set up Google Alerts on keywords that are relevant to your business name, industry, and competition. It’s easy to do—just Google it. Alerts can keep you in the loop on industry news.
SOCIAL ANALYTICS If you’re in a larger organization, use social analytics to monitor keyword themes. This can help you understand the dialogue around your industry and competition as well as your specific business.
WALK ABOUT It’s amazing how few executives get out of their corner office to experience their business across all touchpoints through their customers’ eyes. But some of the best organizations in the world routinely place top executives in frontline positions so they can see firsthand what their organizational policies look like when they are delivered to the customer. This shouldn’t be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Rather, it should be done weekly. Start with the commonsense approach of “walking a mile in your customers’ shoes.”
INSIGHT CHALLENGES Create a challenge for stakeholders that offers incentives for ideas on how to improve the customer experience. (This is similar to the challenge for your customers that we discussed in Chapter 6.) I use this approach in my consulting practice with tremendous success. Although digitizing the challenge isn’t required, the process works best when used within enterprise social networks or an internal social platform. Insight challenges are amazing, inexpensive, and work every time.
I recently worked with a large hospital chain where we created the “What Patients Hate Challenge.” We discovered that patients hated sitting with other sick people in the waiting room for forty-five minutes before seeing the doctor. Surprise, surprise!
Nobody had ever asked the patients what they hated. Unfortunately, this is common across all industry categories. For some reason, we don’t ask the people actually affected: our customers. Once we understand what our customers hate, we can usually fix it. So we created a patient throughput plan that virtually eliminated any waiting. As a result, we increased customer satisfaction and profitability. For the same hospital chain we also successfully created a “What Patients Love Challenge” so we could find ways to deliver more of the same.
INSIGHT CHAMPIONS Some of the best organizations hire “chief listening officers” or appoint “insight champions.” Their express purpose is to get timely and meaningful insights about customers’ loves and hates. Every business should have the equivalent of an insight champion who can report to top leaders on opportunities to design better experiences.
VOODOO AND THE IPHONE BOX
Recently, I surveyed customers who bought the new iPhone, and I had some fascinating insights. Amazingly, 80 percent of the customers kept the box the phone came in for more than three months after their purchase. What kind of voodoo magic does Apple have over these intelligent people? What would make them keep their iPhone box? More important, why should I or you care about the answer?
You could easily argue that the iPhone box is nothing more than the package the product came in. You already decided to buy the phone before you ever experience its box.
The fact is that the box is important because Apple’s tremendous success boils down to one simple concept—and this concept is the core message of What Customers Crave: Apple understands that it is in the human experience business. Every single touchpoint at an Apple retailer and with the Apple product is exquisite. There are no interruptions in the continuum of great experiences. Apple provides a holistic, incredible experience at all touchpoints, and this includes the box in which the product arrives.
I’ve heard some people describe the iPhone box as if it were a Fabergé egg because it’s just that beautiful. And the voodoo doesn’t stop at its looks. The big surprise when you open the box isn’t what you get—it’s what you don’t get: warranty cards, instruction booklets in nine different languages, cross-marketing material, and other propaganda that no one wants.
You don’t need the instruction manual because the product is designed to work intuitively and there are no error codes because the product itself is nonproblematic. Apple doesn’t cross-market because the company delivers an exceptional product that makes you want to buy its other products. The moral: What appears to be simple and almost accidental is the product of tremendous research and thought. For this reason, Apple made something as superficial as a box absolutely delicious.
GETTING THE PRE-TOUCH MOMENT RIGHT
All industries, companies, and cultures are unique. Your pretouch plan needs to be customized in a way that fits the distinctiveness of your organization. When you apply this simple concept of a tailored pre-touch moment both digitally and non-digitally, it has an amazing impact on the success of your business.
As you formalize this process and hardwire it to your organization’s behaviors, you will begin to lead your industry in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
One of the biggest problems with the pre-touchpoint is that much of the customer contact is behind the scenes. It’s the point at which your customer is vetting you, looking at social networks, and researching you, your product, and your service on platforms such as Google and YouTube. Because this is happening without your knowledge, it’s sometimes hard to intervene.
The best way to have a good pre-touch experience for your potential customers is to deliver free and valuable resources prior to their commitment to buying your product or service. Get them to love you first, and then they’ll come to you of their own choice and volition.
Remember, too, that if you are not delivering exceptional experiences across your other touchpoints, the research your consumers unearth will be negative. Billions of dollars are deflected away from companies because customers have done their research and decided not to do business with them. As I’ve said before, it’s impossible not to have the odd irrational customer who hates you for no real reason; nevertheless, most derogatory comments on influential social networks and other digitally visible directories contain some grain of truth. The issues could have been resolved had the company put the time and effort into building an integrated customer experience plan.
The sad truth is each month, dozens, hundreds, or maybe thousands of customers are researching companies like yours and deciding not to do business with them based on what they discover. Don’t let this happen to you!