The Origins Of Touchpointing Touchpointing shares the same goals as wayfinding. It seeks to ease visitor frustration, reduce mistakes, and mitigate confusion in complex physical spaces such as hospitals, large corporate campuses, and entertainment and recreation venues. Touchpointing expands on wayfinding. Wayfinding is largely pointing. But adding touch to the pointing gives greater weight to the customer's point of view. When we first applied touchpointing to projects at Main Line Health, Lankenau Hospital, we made a surprising discovery. Evaluations showed that touchpointing didn't just remove negatives, it added positives. We observed a marked improvement in customer satisfaction, employee morale, efficiency, and enhanced reputation for the hospital. Extracting principles and ideas from our practical experience with these projects, we formulated touchpointing into a method that can improve any customer-centered environmental design. |
Expanding Customer Service Touchpointing expands customer service in two dimensions: scope and time. Touchpointing expands the scope of customer service by embracing every way the customer might engage with the institution. For example, touchpoints are what customers see and read in any medium-signs, brochures, web pages, and maps. It's interactions with employees. It's how they experience the physical space and what they feel as they move around and navigate. Even smells and sounds are part of the experience. The design gauges the emotional reactions to all of these experiences and weaves them into a coherent design scheme. Second, the concept of touchpointing stretches the timeline to embrace every step of the customer's journey surrounding the actual core service. Institutions touch customers days before they actually visit, and these early touchpoints are incorporated into the design. Examples of early touchpoints are: The initial awareness of the institution (advertising, PR). The first actual contact-website or printed material. The first call to make an appointment. In the same way, touchpoints extend to moments and days after the actual visit. |
Benefits Of Touchpointing Touchpointing benefits customers. Their experience of the institution is less nerve-wracking and more productive. From the first contact they're feeling good about the upcoming visit. They have the information they need. This has long-lasting emotional benefits that can't be underestimated. Customer satisfaction translates into customer loyalty and improved results for the institution. It leads to greater efficiency because employees spend less time re-explaining and less time reassuring customers. Our experience shows that touchpointing helps employees feel better about the service they're giving, and thus they feel better about their jobs. The word-of-mouth promotion from satisfied customers builds the customer base for the institution. So the institution grows. And we discovered a surprise benefit. When the client management team adopts the touchpointing method, they become more sensitive to the customer experience. It's a consequence of drilling down to examine these small-scale engagements with customers. They begin to see and feel what the customer sees and feels. The process leads to new thinking and fresh solutions as the institution's executives align their objectives more with the customer point of view. |
The ex;it Process ex;it implements touchpointing the same way it implements any project. First we understand. We ask questions. We do research. We benchmark. We report and collaborate. We evaluate everything in the context of the client's realities and make sure we understand the client needs and goals before we proceed. Then we design. We bring to bear all our experience, all our design disciplines, all our experts to create an original solution. Dive deeper into our process in the Understand and Design sections. Check out case studies to see how we've applied touchpointing. Contact us for an appointment to see what touchpointing can do for you. |