Touch up Your Touch-Points

In this era of digital communications, your opportunities for connecting with customers, and of providing impressive service, have greatly expanded. But so, too, has the chance of disappointing—or even angering—those customers, notes Paul Schwartz.

In a post at the Customer U blog, he lists ways that digital touch-points are actually harming customer relationships. "Many of these touch-points offer confusing, unclear, or incorrect information," he explains.

Among his examples: social-media apps that are just too hard to use; complex sign-up and security procedures for content that "isn't that important"; meaningless file names on downloadable content; and countless confusing email-preference/unsubscribe processes.

Schwartz offers the following action tips to help companies ensure they're keeping customers happy with every touch.

1. List all the ways your business touches customers (blogs, downloads, email, RSS feeds, social media, website, webinars, etc).
2. Determine the call to action. What do you really want the customer to do at each touch-point?
3. Test each touch-point—and not just once—for quality, calls to action and customer experience. Test on a regular basis, Schwartz insists, because "a change in your website may impact any or all of the touch-points in ways you didn't consider."
   
4. Always test from the customer's perspective. Does the touch-point allow customers to do what they want as well as what you want them to do?
5. Don't have those who created the touch-point/process test it themselves. "Have someone else test it," Schwartz advises, someone who is "not at all related to your department."

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