CHAPTER 8

THE FIRST TOUCHPOINT MOMENT

As individuals, most of us are aware of the importance of making a good first impression, and we’re generally pretty good about it. Organizations, on the other hand, often fail miserably at this. They don’t understand that the first touchpoint is crucial. It is the point at which we have the greatest opportunity to create the trajectory for the rest of our relationship with the customer. In fact, if we fail at the first touchpoint, it is extremely problematic and ultimately expensive to fix the resulting damage. For this reason, it is essential to get it right from the beginning.

The first touchpoint occurs when your customers engage you and your brand, digitally, non-digitally, or sometimes both. They have done their research and they’re making initial contact; they haven’t bought anything yet. They might be speaking to a customer service representative or entering your shop and breathing in the scent of your business. If it’s a digital first-touch, they might be filling out the contact form on your website, reading your blog, or preparing to call the phone number listed on your website.

I called a prospective vendor the other day. On my first try, the phone rang twelve times before I finally hung up. The second time I called, I reached a surly representative. You can be sure I will never do business with that vendor.

Never neglect your first touchpoint.

Imagine walking into a dentist’s office for your first visit. It’s the first time you’ve gone to that dentist, with whom you want to create a long-term relationship. As you enter, you hear in the background the sound of the dentist’s drill and someone moaning. As you approach the front desk, the receptionist there is arguing with a patient about a missed payment. Dentist visits can be upsetting, but these poor first touchpoints make them triply so. The walls between the treatment rooms and the reception area should have been insulated. The receptionist might have taken the patient to a private area to discuss the payment, or if this was not possible, could have spoken softly. In general, a receptionist should always be friendly and engaging and make sure you are comfortable as you wait for your turn to see the dentist. Soothing music and an aquarium in the waiting area also help ease the anxiety of waiting patients.

What business owners often don’t realize is that as customers engage you, they are hit with a barrage of multisensory experiences. In many ways, it’s the totality of these fast-firing microexperiences that equal the first-touch. First touchpoints have multiple moving parts, and they all need to be aligned. And the closer the customer gets to the core value proposition—a pain-free and stress-free dentist’s visit, for example—the more important these experiences become. Remember, your mission statement expresses your core value statement. The closer the customer gets to the core experience you offer (see Chapter 9), the more closely aligned that experience must be to your mission statement. Every step along the way is important. So although a certain amount of trust was established at the pre-touch moment, it can easily be destroyed by a sloppy first-touch experience.

Exceptional organizations are extremely judicious about designing layered and dynamic experiences at the first touchpoint. Dutch Bros. is an amazing drive-through coffee kiosk. While there are any number of drive-through coffee stands that serve reasonably good coffee, Dutch Bros. stands apart because it does an amazing job of connecting with its customers. Employees are trained to engage the customers. They ask how your day is going and then try to make a connection with you beyond the superficial by opening authentic conversations. The purpose is to create a positive experience that goes far beyond great coffee at a great price. I recently went to my local Dutch Bros. I had not been there for more than a month, yet the attendant remembered my name and even what we had talked about. (I, on the other hand, have a hard time remembering what I had for breakfast.) Every time I visit the local kiosk, the relationship gets better.

YOUR BRAIN AND THE FIRST-TOUCH MOMENT

The human brain functions on both a conscious and subconscious level. We develop powerful and in some cases permanent opinions of people, brands, and businesses, and often these opinions are created without us even knowing it.

At the non-digital first touchpoint, customers’ brains rapidly absorb the smells, sounds, tastes, and sights of that encounter. Ask yourself, “Is my store or restaurant welcoming and filled with exceptional sensory details?” At the digital first touchpoint, customers take in the design, color, and sometimes music that might be playing on your website or blog. Ask yourself: “Is my site welcoming and are customers easily able to find the information they’re looking for?”

First touchpoints can be subtle or they can be obvious. For example, one of my daughters has a boyfriend whom I don’t particularly care for. I don’t know why. Outwardly he appears normal enough, but I just have a hard time liking him. My other daughter has a boyfriend who is virtually part of the family; we all love him. Presumably, both boys are sending subtle messages, which have an impact. The subtle messages you send during the first touchpoint accumulate, even if subconsciously, in your customers’ brains. So examine your first touchpoint very carefully.

Unpleasant first touchpoints can also be blaringly obvious. There is a restaurant not far from where I live that serves truly excellent food and provides great service. However, the temperature in the restaurant is always freezing cold. Although we love the food, we rarely go there because sitting in the subarctic temperature is just too uncomfortable. Never underestimate the permanent impact of your first touchpoints on the customer experience.

Have you ever been on a blind date? If so, chances are you were disappointed. That’s because our preconceived romantic expectations are almost impossible to meet. Customer experience is very much like that: It is the difference between what the customer expects and what the customer gets. Companies that deliver experiences below customers’ expectations are disasters, and of course, those that deliver experiences above expectations are winners.

The Non-Digital First-Touch

Like a machine gun firing rapidly, first touchpoint experiences bombard your customers. As they pull into your driveway, they begin to form an opinion based on the cleanliness of your parking lot and the physical appearance of your building. They analyze the convenience of the parking as they walk to the door. Once they enter, they assess the smell, the sounds, the temperature, and many other subliminal and less conspicuous data points. All of these sensory inputs begin the process of customers forming a heavily weighted initial opinion. This is the first-touch experience.

Let’s say you have a fast food restaurant. As customers get closer and closer to their goal of buying and eating your hamburger, the importance of the smells, sounds, and appearance increases. It culminates with their first contact with the staff. Do the workers smile as the customers approach? Are they and their uniforms clean? Is the counter clean? Do the workers get the order right? Are they happy, or do they seem to be working reluctantly? Remember the Net Customer Value Strata (Chapter 3) when you’re thinking about designing your first touchpoint. Your non-digital first touchpoint should be outrageously good to compete in the hypercompetitive marketplace.

This Just Got Personal: When I was researching fast food restaurants, I found that the most popular ones quickly got personal. In great restaurants like In-N-Out Burger, as you pull up to the drive-through or approach the counter, you are greeted with a sincere smile and often asked how your day is going. This instantly changes the relationship from transactional to personal. As your neurons continue firing, you ingest the subtleties of the highly trained experts behind the counter.

The heavily weighted first touchpoint is so perfectly deployed at great businesses that you may not even consciously notice the signals the staff is sending your way. What you do know is that a friendly person is looking you in the eyes and engaging you in a way that creates a connection. As you design the perfect customer journey, remember that this personal connection is the perfect launchpad for an exceptional journey.

Failure to Launch: The flipside of an exceptional non-digital first-touch moment is, of course, a bad first-touch moment. For example, have you ever been greeted at an airport ticket counter by an employee determined to make your day go bad?

It’s incredible how many organizations have disconnected from their customers and the stakeholders who connect with their customers, and they are clueless about why they’re losing ground. Many businesses’ customer encounters are, at their very best, only at the baseline of customer expectation. Many more—perhaps most—are far below customers’ expectations. Much of this has to do with the first touchpoint.

If you blow the first touchpoint, you will have an expensive and difficult time bringing that customer back. Moreover, that customer is going to share their experience, destroy your reputation, and begin the process of killing your business. Does that sound overly dramatic? It’s not. I’ve seen this happen hundreds of times, and I’ve learned that it is so much easier to prevent this from happening than to try to fix it later.

The Digital First-Touch

Recently, I bought my daughter a food processor to take with her to college. Of course, my pre-touch meant going to Amazon and doing research. I learned that customers rated one brand higher than others. I read the customers’ posts and saw how many people rated the product. This is important because the greater the pool of reviewers, the more accurate the overall rating. This is pre-touch, and Amazon does it well.

The first-touch was the moment when I decided to buy the product, but before I clicked and actually became a customer (the core touchpoint). At this first touchpoint, Amazon engaged me with relevant offers. Based on what I was viewing, Amazon showed me other food processors as alternatives—maybe cheaper, maybe more advanced, maybe a newer release. The company offered free shipping and accessories (like storage covers and additional blades) based on what other customers had bought. All of it was relevant. Amazon wasn’t insulting me with offers for women’s shoes or car parts. The company knew what I was looking for and provided highly pertinent information based on what other people looking for the same thing had purchased.

CAVEAT EMPTOR:
TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY

A national electronics retailer misses opportunities to create exceptional first-touch experiences by stationing a security guard at the entrance. While this might help prevent theft, it’s a lousy way to greet your customers and is a classic example of a misused first touchpoint. If you’re like me, you want to be loved and trusted, and I assume everyone feels this way.

At the other end of the spectrum, the first touchpoint at an Apple retail store is entirely different. Instead of being greeted by a security guard, you are attended by friendly Apple-evangelists who know and love the product. They politely probe to find out who you are and what you love and hate, and they deliver a well thought-out, beautiful experience. Apple understands that customers don’t want to feel distrusted. Instead, they want specific experiences that are both relevant and exceptional.

Just like the incredible attention to design the company puts into its minimalistic packaging, Apple mindfully designs its first touchpoints. Apple’s retail environments are open, nonthreatening, and by most customers’ accounts, delicious.

The takeaway: Although we need to deliver exceptional and holistic experiences at every touchpoint, the first touchpoint is turbocharged. The good news is that many organizations—some of which might be your competition—design these heavily weighted experiences haphazardly. They give no more thought to the first-touch than they do to any other customer journey touchpoint. This is where you can gain a competitive advantage by delivering a truly exceptional first touchpoint.

Think about how the first touchpoints below might affect a customer. Remember, at this point the customer has already done research and decided to consider using the company’s product or service. Now put yourself in the customer’s shoes and imagine, for example:

•What you see as you walk into a new dentist’s office

•The smells and sights as you walk into a restaurant for the first time

•The greeting you receive as you approach the reception counter at a hotel

•The first few words you hear as you listen to a keynote speaker

•The flight attendant’s greeting as you board an airplane

Now consider these first touchpoints as they relate to your organization:

•What visitors see when landing on your website

•The quality of the free value you deliver on your website and whether it is meaningful

•How easy it is to get what you want from your digital resources

•How your graphic images communicate your quality and value

All of these powerful first touchpoints can communicate a story of value, quality, and excellence. However, many organizations communicate an ill-thought-out set of human experiences that are incomplete or flawed.

The first touchpoint is where the low-hanging fruit is, yet most businesses pay little attention to these experiences. As a result, they are under-invented and unimaginative, which leads to mediocre customer experiences. By paying careful attention to your first-touch moments, you can outperform the competition.

DESIGNING FIRST TOUCHPOINTS FOR
ALL YOUR CUSTOMER TYPES

Some companies have a very narrow set of customer types. For example, I recently did some work for Freightliner, a great, well-run company that manufactures trucks. Freightliner dealers all serve a similar customer type: truck drivers. Although not identical, truck drivers have many common success drivers, which makes it easy for dealers to design relevant and exceptional experiences for this very narrow customer type.

Conversely, businesses that sell to macro markets need to do significantly more heavy lifting to identify the range of their customer types to be certain they deliver exceptional human experiences to their customers. Amazon, for example, appeals to all kinds of customer types. The company understands what people universally care about, so its interface is easy-to-use. After that, Amazon appeals to different buyer types—for example, the price conscious, the transactional, the analytical, and those interested in highest quality. In this way, the company addresses everyone. It also allows for social ratings and comparative price points and provides remarkable visual detail.

The range of your customer types affects how you manage your first touchpoint. Once again, we circle back to your types in order to make sure each finds an exceptional experience at that first point of contact. For some companies, like Freightliner, this is easy. For others with a wide range of customer types, like Amazon, it takes more work and creativity. Whatever your customer type range, this first contact is full of opportunity—for success and failure.

You Can’t Spend Your Way to Exceptional

Not long ago, I began working with a multibillion-dollar client that spends $17 million a year to gain consumer insights. Data is gleaned from every possible big data source you can imagine. The company was willing to spend a great deal of money to gain this information, because it rightly assumed this could drive the best customer innovations.

However, after a one-week audit of the data, I realized something shocking. I could not find one piece connecting the insights the company paid for to any actionable innovations that delivered improved customer value. Wow!

Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated incident. I believe it is now commonplace for organizations to pay for consumer insights they have no system for or way to use. Typically, when I conduct a customer insights audit, I find thousands of pages of graphs and charts. While sometimes bits of information are actually useful, most often there’s little of value. But the bigger problem is that even when the data is useful, the company has no way to make the insights actionable. The personnel don’t know, or haven’t bothered to learn, how to transmute the information into something that delivers real value to the customer and the market. I believe the best way to gain great insights at all customer journey touchpoints is for businesses to get closer to their customers to find out what they really care about. By navigating to where your customers are and observing what they love and hate, you will be able to design amazing experiences that matter and execute them like a ninja.

How to Create the Perfect First-Touch Moment

Good insights are the key to any successful innovation. In order to build out great customer value across the customer journey, you must find out what they hate and what they love. Below are some simple questions that can have an enormous impact when you shape your first touchpoints. Ask yourself:

•Have I identified the various components that make up the first touchpoints across all my customer types?

•Have I set up listening posts digitally and non-digitally to gain the kinds of insights I need to invent a better experience?

•Do I conduct weekly or monthly brainstorming sessions where I invite customer-facing, frontline employees to present ideas on how to improve first touchpoints?

•Have I developed an incentive or rewards program for the best ideas on how to improve the customer experience across various touchpoints?

•Do I use social and other digital analytic tools to gain insights about what my customer types hate and love about the range of products and services I provide?

•Have I developed vendor and customer innovation groups to help come up with better ideas on how to uniquely serve my valued customers?

Dig Deeper: Go Granular

My goal is to provide you with an easy-to-understand roadmap that is actionable for both large and small companies. For this reason, I broke down the various customer touchpoints into five easy-to-understand moments. As you become more skilled at building the perfect customer experience, you will want to become more granular.

For example, if you own a burrito stand in Los Angeles, you may want to start by asking yourself if your signage is clear so potential customers driving by can easily find you. You may ask yourself how simple or secure it is for customers to park. You would likely want to ask yourself what’s going through the heads of your customers as they approach your business; how you communicate quality, cleanliness, and the deliciousness of your burritos; what the expressions on the faces of the counter staff convey; and if the aroma of your burritos wafting through the window is enticing. All of these elements are part of the first touchpoint.

Next, break these down into more granular components, so as to make an amazing totality. A word of warning: Don’t become so granular that you turn this into a doctoral thesis. You just want to make sure you’re not missing anything as you dissect the touchpoint. Loves and hates are relative; they come in degrees. Some people aren’t bothered by standing in line; other people abhor it. Some live and die for a great burrito; others can take them or leave them. Understand these gradations and how granular you need to be. It would be too granular, for example, if a fast food restaurant had its front counter people keep track of how many customers of different age groups, ethnicities, and hair color come into the restaurant. At the end of the day, the data you accumulate should lead to innovating better customer experiences, not create complexity and inertia. When you design your customer experiences, make sure the process is both complete and customized to your customer types and your business culture.

In this age of big data, we assume more is better. I worked for a client that actually had a data war room where the team would examine its customer database, which included sometimes erroneous and certainly irrelevant small data points, to insane levels of granular detail. The competition was ahead of them simply because they offered better products and service. Understand what data you need, then acquire and aggregate it. The best way to know if you’re at the right level of granularity is if you end up delivering more customer and business value than the resources required to accumulate and assess your data.

Two things will determine whether or not your design of the perfect first-touch moment is successful:

1.The experience must be complete. You need to deliver wonderful experiences across each of the five distinct customer touchpoints in both digital and non-digital channels, and you have to do it across the entire range of customer types. Most organizations succeed at doing just one of these, and as a result, the competition destroys them.

2.The experience must be designed in a way that’s customized for your customer types and fits the culture of your business.

It is essential that you focus on making sure your first-touch moment is flawless so you don’t have to spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to fix it later. If you start off on the wrong foot with customers, in most cases you never win them back. Even if you do, it will be at great expense and pain.