Touchpoints

The rise of new forms of customer contact via virtual channels throws up complex issues for companies as they seek to build and maintain relationships with customers. Understanding the interrelationships between these new forms of communications is crucial if companies are to create robust advertising, marketing and CRM strategies. The need to understand customers attitudes, behaviours and preferences to the plethora of touchpoints, for example; the telephone, SMS messaging, web, e-mail, iTV, or retail store is crucial if companies are to build consistent brands that connect and communicate effectively.

Teleconomy Research Consultancy has developed a methodology, TouchPoints that helps to unravel this complex situation and to make sense of customer preferences and consequent behaviour. The overriding purpose of TouchPoints is to help companies build appropriate contact strategies, brand enhancement and service delivery through understanding the many ‘mini interactions’ through which the customer relationship is built. This work will help you to understand the ‘fragmented’ nature of consumers, make them accessible to your organisation and enable the results from individual audits to be more significant.

Benefits

This piece of work will enable your company to:

1. Audit the effectiveness of your current customer channels
2. Evaluate your current costs against efficiencies
3. To discover the preferences of your customer groups and why they use a particular touchpoint over another and for what purpose

Touchpoints will give you both understanding and insight that you can feed into the design of robust marketing strategies that address customer needs and requirements.

Customers View

The diagram below demonstrates the many touchpoints through which a customer may contact an organisation.

As the figure illustrates, the quality of response and service the customer can receive may vary enormously.

Interactions Management

The most important aspect of the methodology is that it enables us to consult about the ‘design’ of the customer contact strategy, by advising and helping you to build a consistent brand and enhanced service delivery.

The research and consultancy is set within the context of Teleconomy’s behavioural, social and media research by drawing from our extensive experience in understanding interactive channels, customer satisfaction and call centre usage.

Over the last 20 years we have been researching, measuring and building methodologies to help our client understand the service levels being provided through their customer channels.

Our widely renowned ‘Soft Skills Benchmarking’ (SSB) was fundamental to changing the way in which call centre quality was analysed, measured and benchmarked. Since then we have created similar techniques for measuring and benchmarking Internet sites, IVR services and more recently Interactive TV services. All these techniques share a common philosophy of putting the customer at the centre of the measurement. Together with statistical accuracy, this ensures our analysis of the customer experience is highly robust and objective.

This philosophy and experience of measuring interaction is combined in this touchpoint audit.

What Touchpoints do we analyse?

The following outlines a number of points of contact, although we will tailor the analysis, research and consultancy to your particular needs.

· IVR – self service telephone channels
· Telephone – inbound telephone customer service
· Internet – self service web channels
· iTV – self service televisual channels
· Mobile – self service channels (text based, GPRS, 3G)
· Various above the line and below the line advertising

For more information please contact:
Teleconomy – 01524 382000 or enquiries@teleconomy.com