Customer Touchpoints <Your Resource In Implementing Service Standards>

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Welcome to Customer Touchpoints

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enquiry@touchpointstandard.com

This website is developed to give a holistic perspective to customer champions (whether internal / external consultants) who have the passion to reinvent an organisation’s service experience. It seeks to provide resource by giving practical advice on how service standards could be designed to address customer expectations. It also provide resource to implement and communicate the service standards. This website also seeks to share stories on the various challenge or fun experiences that the customer champions faced in implementing service standards in organizations.

Have you received complaints whereby customers said that they were being ignored by retail staff when they come into the store? On the other hand, have you walked into a store and realized that the staff were busy attending to customers and have no time for you.

One would think the simple gracious act of greeting guests would be automatic, indelibly ingrained in every service provider's daily activities. Perhaps, such greetings standards may be strongly entrenched in Hotels’ culture. This might not the case when you visit certain domestic enterprises (restaurants, boutiques, transportation). The focus is still on the product delivery which may be insufficient to address customers needs for social relationship (someone who engage them in conversation), respect & esteem (acknowledging customers and making them feel good in their experience)

The struggle comes when the manager gets angry with frontline staff for their inability to greet and attend to customers promptly. This resulted in the removal of sales incentive or other rewards attached to the sales / retail staff just to communicate to them on the need to improve their service delivery.

Research found that up to 75% of a manager's time spent correcting shop personnel on behaviors that they never told them about in the first place. Setting the standards you want your employees to follow is only the first step. The most important step is communicating your standards and ensuring your communications got through the way you intended.

(Source: Jim Hamilton, A business coach for best practice group “Nexstar”)

Do you know?

Touchpoint refers to all of the communication, human and physical interactions that your customers experience with your organization. The salesperson, advertisement, web site, store environment or office, invoices and product or service are opportunities where customer would evaluate the service experience of an organization. The word ‘touchpoint’ was used in replacement of contact points as the word ‘touch’ involves engaging a person’s emotions and the word ‘point’ meant all areas that customers have contact with.

The word touchpoint is consistent with the “The Experience Economy’ written by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in 2002 which advocated that customers should be engaged in a personal and memorable way at all times. Hence the usage of touchpoints imply that customers’ emotions should be touched when they interact with the organisation.

Setting Touchpoint Standards

Touchpoint standards include five essential elements:

1. Descriptions of the service you intend to provide and, where applicable, the benefits clients are entitled to receive;

2. Principles focusing on use of appropriate language, courtesy, professionalism, where applicable, taking into account customer’s expectations

3. Measurable targets for key aspects of service, such as timeliness, responsiveness, tangibility and accessibility e.g. greeting customers within 7 feet upon notice

There are a few steps to follow when developing touchpoint standards

Translate Vision, Mission and Values into standards that conveyed desirable behaviours among staff.
Consult clients and affected staff in the implementation
Set non-negotiable service standards to recover service to the level that address customers’ expectations and include a few key standards that exceed market competition.
Empower service providers to make a difference
Communicate service standards through training, coaching by supervisors, corporate collaterals such as intranet or newsletter
manage service standards through regular measurements e.g. customer satisfaction index, mystery audits
Recognise Service Stars or staff that make a difference among the customer’s life.

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