Customer impact agenda engl

The fount of decision is determined by the well of need

Customer IMPACT Agenda

An Agenda for IMPACTing the Customer

Copyright© Phil Winters 2011 all rights reserved Phil.Winters@CIAgenda.com 20110413 Page | 1

Customer IMPACT Agenda

Idea in Brief 3

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE & THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA 3

Defining the Decision Making Process 4

SHIFTING to the Voice of the Customer 5

Focus on Needs 5

Touchpoints and Moments of Truth 7

THE NEW BREAKDOWN OF OLD CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION 9

Visualizing Customer Touchpoints 10

IMPACT TOUCHPOINTS 10

FRAMING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 15

AN AGENDA FOR IMPACTING THE CUSTOMER: 16

REFERENCES 16


Idea in Brief

Championed Best Practice: Challenged by Customer Reality:
Organizations enjoy measured success with CRM But customers have taken control over their
programs and direct marketing when they embrace decisions, utilizing more information sources, in
Customer Experience Management as an extention particular social media, and making decisions far
of their current customer centric programs. earlier than the existing techniques can come to bear.

An Agenda for IMPACTing the Customer:
An approach and a framework are presented that extend customer experience to include the structured
understanding of the entire decision making process, focusing early on differentiated customer needs and
touchpoint choices – particularly social media – then proactively impacting those touchpoints in a process that
provides an updated, sustainable customer-organization interaction designed to understand and satisfy
customer needs along every step of the customer’s modern decision-making journey.

Customer Experience & the Impact of Social Media
Customer Experience Management is the activity surrounding an organization’s structured
approach to providing a customer with a positive experience. Traditionally, the focus has been on
the post-purchase sequence of events that begins when a customer actually starts using the
product or service – and therefore begins measurably interacting with the organization. A recent
benchmark study (Peppers & Rogers Group and SAS, 2008) which defined and measured
“customer experience maturity” within organizations decisively concluded that “customer
experience directly correlates to business results; many companies lack the understanding,
technology, and willingness to adopt effective customer experience programs; and the businesses
that do ‘get it’ are gaining an edge against their peers, even in a difficult economy. … If an
organization views customer experience as a differentiator and ingrains its importance into its
culture, measurable results will follow” (Customer Strategist, Spring 2009, p. 7). Typically, a
structured program around this customer experience chain would look like this:

Figure1: Traditional Customer Experience Chain

A more widely encompassing definition of the customer experience that includes, for example, a
structured understanding of needs identification or options awareness, has traditionally not been
included in the customer experience chain because the attention paid to these very tangible
aspects has proven so important that it provided immediate and marked differentiators, even in
mature and highly saturated markets.


For example, Audi tracks the customer’s post-purchase experience and ensures that the sales
representative can keep abreast of their customers’ status – because at some point they will need
a new car. Even in areas where a focus on the customer has not been at the forefront of
differentiating strategies, like in the energy industry, there are clear leaders emerging. Lichtblick,
the 100% green energy provider in Germany, maintains its leadership not just through a
commitment to “being green” but through an extreme focus on knowing and understanding every
point of contact with the customer, defining key metrics to measure them, setting targets, and
then checking – weekly – to ensure they are meeting these goals. It should come as no surprise
that Licktblick CEO Christian Friege has accepted the award for Germany’s most customer-oriented
utility two years running (Deutschlands kundenorientiertester Energieversorger 2009 and 2010).

Marketing has focused strongly on early identification of market needs, particularly through use of
market research and focus groups. Successful organizations have translated this understanding
into programs that help promote their products, services and brands using above-the-line
techniques, such as television and print advertising, to reach their general markets and below-the-
line direct marketing techniques for their target markets.

However, they have not typically concerned themselves in a structured way with understanding,
capturing and proactively responding to the decision-making process of the individual. Indeed: this
has not always proved easy to do. For most organizations, the “needs identification and
awareness” of target markets (handled many times by marketing) and the “customer experience”
of the individual processes (handled many times by customer service) have been separate topics,
but today’s customer reality, particularly with the take-up of social media, is forcing a change in
that approach.

Defining the Decision Making Process
As seen from the prospective customer’s perspective, the customer experience starts with his first
interactions with his environment at the time he begins to think about a need, want or value –
long before taking a decision or actually purchasing and using a product or service from an
organization. And this is just the first step in a series. To illustrate this concept, the above
customer experience chain has been extended below to include its true beginning and “end”,
starting with the earliest stages of the decision-making process and finishing with reflection…
which could lead to continuing interaction for the next decision. We call this the customer
decision-making chain, as it encompasses the entire experience and maintains an awareness of
the needs and values to be satisfied at each step.

Figure 2: The Customer Decision-Making Chain


The customer decision-making chain – or the purchase decision making process of a customer– is a
special form of the cognitive process every human goes through in making any kind of decision.
Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky were the first to define this well in their seminal research on
decision making and cognitive processes. An individual first becomes aware of a need or a want;
then a search is conducted for alternatives that will satisfy those needs. After undergoing a
complex mental activity of prioritizing the best possible options, given all inputs, a choice or
compromise is then made. The evaluation criteria are not purely rational or logical but contain
strong elements of emotion, personal values and risk assessment. After a decision is made, steps
are taken to approach and execute on that choice. A take-up and usage phase contributes to the
final step, which is to learn from that choice and remember the decision process, along with its
conclusions and a chronicle of what took place, for future reference.

SHIFTING to the Voice of the Customer
The concept of one-to-one marketing – understanding the differences between customers, putting
them in groups with similar characteristics, and treating these groups appropriately – is well
established and used in leading organizations. This differentiation has focused primarily on
understanding an individual customer’s value to an organization and the behavior of that
customer throughout his interaction with the organization along the traditional customer
experience chain (Fig. 1). But with our expanded definition of customer experience, there emerges
a business requirement to identify needs and interactions much sooner in the process, so that
appropriate, highly-differentiated responses can be undertaken while they are still relevant.

This is only achieved by an organization shifting its perspective from looking out at its customers
through the traditional customer experience chain to one of structured listening – starting very
early on in the cycle – in order to base its segmentation on a combination of both the customers’
needs and the ways they prefer to interact with their environment during decision making.

Figure 3: Differentiated Needs and Interaction Customer Segments

Focus on Needs
When it comes to business, there is a tendency to confuse the delivery of a product or service with
the satisfying of needs, values or wants. Equally fallacious is to assume that offering a sensational
new product or service can self-generate the need for it; such apparent cases in the past were
most probably due to a lucky strike that fulfilled an existing customer need. “When we define
customer needs around the jobs that customers are trying to get done, then we can see that new
innovations—even the most radical or disruptive innovations—do not create a customer need.
They simply satisfy a customer need in an innovative way” (Bettencourt 2009). For our purposes,


“needs”, “values” and “wants” are interchangeable: something that is perceived by an individual
as being necessary or desirable to having a good/better life. These can be broken down into basic
categories.

Figure 4: Categorization of Needs, Values and Wants

This clear framework breaks down needs into Utilitarian, Social and Emotional components. On
the left side of Figure 4 are the basic utilitarian, functional (or rational) needs. Convenient,
Economical and Safe are all what could be called the foundational criteria of any decision. These
topics relate to the cognitive function that makes analytical, logical, rational, objective decisions,
looking at all parts individually.

In today’s business world, these elements are not simply “hygiene” factors: they show basic
competence. Failing to fulfill these needs as a company may mean eventually forfeiting the right to
continue playing in that market. A spectacular (negative) example of failure to get these very
important factors right underlies the global financial crisis, where the perception of the public is
that financial institutions neglected to satisfy and, in some cases, blatantly betrayed, their basic
needs for safety, economy and trust.

Center and right in Figure 4 are the social (Prestige, Identity) and emotional (Pleasure, Sentiment
and Spirituality) needs and values, which play an extremely significant role in any decision-making
process, as witnessed by the tremendous effort that advertisers, creative marketers and product
designers pour into trying to address them.

However, the systematic capturing of information about needs has traditionally focused on
gathering information about the utility or functional needs – typically information that can be
gained through market research, focus groups, and surveys. These are used at a very high level to
roughly understand a market’s needs. When it comes to the “soft” values of social significance
and emotion – needs of people, not markets – there have been some excellent academic papers,


but so far, there has been no rigorous capturing of data leading to a comprehensive understanding
and structuring of these customer needs. However, identifying, understanding and positively
influencing needs can be achieved by looking at a targeted customer segment’s interaction
touchpoints across their entire decision-making process.

Touchpoints and Moments of Truth
To satisfy needs, an individual interacts with – indeed, experiences – the world around him
through his five natural senses. And just as different groups have different needs, so they also go
about interacting with their environment in the decision-making process differently. From a
business perspective, understanding the details of each point of interaction is the key to positively
identifying, differentiating and then satisfying those needs (with product or service offerings).
Each of these points of interaction in the decision-making process can be viewed as a touchpoint
between individual and environment.

The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Modern English defines a touchpoint as “the time in …
development that precedes an appreciable leap in physical, emotional, or cognitive growth” – in
other words, touchpoints include those moments of truth during which a person, under influence
of his needs, forges mental connections among his own decision-making criteria. And these
moments of truth in the early phases of consideration turn out to be very important customer
experiences that contribute substantially to purchase decision-making.

Any enterprise wishing to promote its brand, product or service will want to interact appropriately
with these touchpoints before, during and after purchase or usage. This applies both to business-
to-business and business-to-consumer markets.

The emphasis on before and after is to highlight the deficiency in the way that most organizations
currently focus on understanding touchpoints by looking at purchase or usage transactions.
Examples of this include signup or purchase process, customer service, customer care, problem
resolution and satisfaction surveys – imminently important activities, but insufficient to ensure
that today’s highly-connected consumers have the consummate customer experience.

The classic channels of communication managed by
marketing – advertising, flyers, direct mail, invoices, letters,
telephone interaction, web sites, email and face-to-face
contact – are all touchpoints through which companies
actively reach out to their customers, or vice versa. These
interactions are “easy” to register, track and measure – and
for the most part, they are indeed registered, tracked and
measured. But in order to form a complete picture of the
customer experience, that is, to understand whether (and
where/when) it catalyzes a moment of truth, the touchpoints must be viewed from the
customers’ perspective with regard to the decision-making journey, and not just from an isolated
focus on internal systems and processes.


When seen from the wider perspective of the Customer
Decision-Making Chain (see figure 2), relevant
touchpoints can also be informal channels such as
chatting with a friend or using a natural sense (such as
taste, touch or smell) to gain additional input. While
important for some decision-making journeys, these
touchpoints are of the kind that organizations have
heretofore not been able to monitor or participate in
directly, except on the smallest of scales. But even that
is changing. The entire topic of social media represents a huge range of additional touchpoints
that are readily available and, to some groups, very important for their decision-making process.

There is also a trend to surface touchpoints electronically via new platforms which combine social
media and traditional touchpoints with new forms of telephony, computing and electronic
communication. Applications that scan a bar code while shopping and instantly compare prices,
listen to a piece of music and instantly identify both the artist and music or use location-based
services to identify alternatives close to the user are just a few current examples of this trend.

But the fascination with the new technologies should not detract from understanding that – to the
customer – this is simply another touchpoint that may or may not play a role in their decision
making.

Whereas in the past, the private conversation
between individuals around a product, offering or
company remained private, social media and the
other new touchpoints now facilitate the
exponential sharing of those conversations and
opinions, exerting influence in ways that are not
only important for individuals, but are critical for
business. This means that one customer’s moment
of truth – whether negative or positive – can be
propagated to hundreds of others in a blink of an
eye, and again to thousands of others in the next
blink. Market-leading companies are already
starting to treat social media in this way: as a cheap
and effective “repeating megaphone”.

The reality is that social media and other modern touchpoints are no longer merely interesting
trends to be watched: in fact, they represent additional, critical touchpoints that must be
understood in the context of their relevance to each stage of the decision-making process for
targeted customers. And the need to re-evaluate and re-focus traditional channels, particularly
television and print advertising, around that same decision-making process is now more important
than ever. Once companies understand each touchpoint – whether traditional, social media or


otherwise – and its relationship to their customers’ needs, they can begin capturing information
about those touchpoints as the first step in positively influencing the decision-making process
towards their product or service.

The New Breakdown of Old Customer Segmentation
There are many anecdotes about youth using social media touchpoints, and this fast-growing
market segment has been termed “millennials”, referring to their coming of age after the year
2000. It is clear that these young consumers, who take for granted the omnipresence of
computers and internet, will have vastly different modes of interaction with their environment –
BUT this fundamental extension of touchpoints in the decision-making process is affecting every
segment of customers, even those that may have previously been “typed” with a fair degree of
confidence. Let’s use a concrete example by looking at one very specific market segment: the
“Super Granny”. The Zukunftsinstitut, a German Think Tank dedicated to research on changes,
trends and mega-trends, defines a “Super-Granny” as a well-to-do, highly educated and active
retired woman who is open to new ideas and spends a large amount of her time, energy and
money on her grandchildren. In this group, we look at a desire that a Super-Granny might have: to
support her grandchild financially in the future for further education. This will comprise needs
around cost and financial return, fiscal safety, and convenience, as well as social significance and
emotional factors.

Traditionally (that is, up until about two years ago), this grandmother would have simply gone to
her bank to open a savings account in the name of her grandchild or, at most, discuss options in
person with her bank’s customer service representative. The underlying needs would not have
been discussed directly, but a decision would have been made that satisfied those needs. And
there are definitely still a lot of grannies that will do just that.

However, in a November 2009-based focus group session, it was discovered that the “average”
Super-Granny will, first, search on the internet to gain awareness of her options; because she is an
educated, computer- and internet-savvy woman, this is a natural first step. Once she has done
research on a number of ideas and approaches she will next go to the public library and further
inform herself on those topics, usually relying on independent consumer reports to gain an
understanding of the options from a source that she trusts. Note that while she is modern in using
internet sources, she is still not comfortable with relying on them as her sole source of
information. After that she will email or – more and more likely – “facebook” her friends and
family to ask their opinions on the topic, usually giving them a short summary of what she has
learned and the options she is considering. She may use that feedback to make a call to a friend or
relative to get a point or two clarified, after which she will develop her short list. Then, and only
then, will she visit an organization’s website, pick up a phone or possibly drop by a physical
location to start her approach towards purchase.

In this example, the current customer experience processes – CRM systems, customer care
programs, IT systems, etc. – are only able to capture data on, monitor and influence the parts of


the decision making cycle that were not even being used by this very high value segment. And this
was just the awareness part of the decision process!

If we multiply the missed opportunities in this small example by the myriad new touchpoints that
people are using and their different needs, it is no wonder that we do not understand our
customers as well as before. Those additional touchpoints need to be tracked and documented.

Visualizing Customer Touchpoints
The concept of capturing the customer experience through documenting touchpoints is not new.
It was a technique first used in early 2000s to systematically document the customer experience
process for an organization’s products or services and identify all relevant customer touchpoints.
From this, a graphical representation could be developed that depicted the current state of a
customer’s interactions with the organization.

While very successful as a technique, these so-called “touchmaps” were often limited to looking at
only the very restrictive definition of “customer experience” – post purchase and usage (see Figure
1) as seen from the organization’s internal perspective. Drawing on documentation of internal
processes, focus groups of staff, surveys and existing customer insight, the touchmap created an
inside-out snapshot focused primarily on the internal IT systems and business processes that
affected customer interfaces during the purchase and usage cycle, such as in the call center, on
the website, at the branch counter or ATM, or through direct sales contacts and emails. It is
important to note that the touchmap captured only how systems and processes interacted with
these “classic touchpoints”: it did not attempt to record what the CUSTOMER was perceiving
throughout the decision-making journey. It was the marketing equivalent of looking at the
footprints of the animal as it passed, not at the animal itself.

With the focus now shifted to understanding the customer’s perspective, a documentation
approach now requires different techniques. Customer surveys, customer focus groups and ways
of recognizing the relevance of touchpoints from the outside-in perspective become the focus of
the exercise. Even mass-market techniques can be focused specifically on targeted segments as
they walk through (and share what touchpoints they are using) along the customer decision-
making chain.

The business process understanding, the IT infrastructure and the customer intelligence functions
retain their importance but shift roles to become the major resources for impacting the
touchpoints identified as relevant for our customers. But first, it is important to decide how to
engage these newly-documented touchpoints.

IMPACT Touchpoints
Customers WANT personalized contact with their chosen suppliers and they demand continuity in
their relationships to their vendors across communication types. A recent survey conducted by
Genesys found that “the ability to communicate across multiple channels is critical to loyalty”.


Consumers wished to, for example, “start in voice self-service or the Web and get live assistance
from an agent, and to start in e-mail and have better integration with agent-assisted service” –
without having to repeat all their information. And they were not bothered by the concept of their
suppliers monitoring their touchpoints and even reaching out to them to “improve their
experience through extended offers or help during self-service transactions”. In fact, 86% of
consumers per country said “they would find proactive engagement either a ‘strong benefit’ or
would ‘welcome proactive assistance’ when they were stuck on the Web or in self-service”. (The
Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience and Engagement
in 16 Key Economies, Genesys, November 2009).

In many industries, this has already been implemented for the “controllable” touchpoints:
customer service centers, websites, written communication, self-service contact centers.
However, others, such as many of the social media touchpoints, cannot and should not be
“owned” or controlled. Indeed, this fallacy is a tripping stone for many companies who attempt to
harness the strengths of social media in all the wrong ways. In Socialnomics: How Social Media
Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business, Erik Qualman draws the following pertinent
analogy:

“Now and in the future, marketers need to adjust their way of thinking because it’s no
longer about building out the existing database. Instead, you could be in communication
with fans and consumers on someone else’s database (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.).
Yet, many companies fail to grasp this new concept. They build elaborate YouTube or Flicker
pages, placing callouts and click actions that send the user outside the social network, often
to their company website or a lead capture page. These companies still believe they need to
get users into their prospecting databases in order to market to them. They are doing a
disservice to their loyal fan base and in turn a disservice to themselves. It’s analogous to
meeting a pretty girl in a bar and asking if she would like a drink. When she responds ‘yes,’
rather than ordering a drink from the bartender, you grab her and rush her into your car and
drive her back to your place; because after all, you have beer in your fridge” (Qualman
2009).

While it is still important to get potential customers into the database, at the same time there is a
need for alternate approaches for those situations where it is not practical, appropriate or possible
to simply “capture” the customer. And a decision on that approach needs to be taken at each
touchpoint.

At each touchpoint, especially in the uncontrolled/uncontrollable social media channels, it is
necessary to determine which types of interaction make most sense and then decide how to
engage with the customer appropriately along the decision making journey. We have identified
five types of engagement that an organization can exercise with these touchpoints – and a fitting
mnemonic for them – described here in order of increasing level of influence and involvement:

Ignore, Monitor, Participate, Activate, ConTrol: IMPACT


In most cases, the engagement types can be mixed and matched as needed for maximum client-
customer interaction benefit.

The first step is recognizing that a touchpoint exists and may have relevance. From there, these
next levels involve making the conscious decision as to whether one should do anything proactive
about the particular touchpoint, and if so, what.

Ignore: This is a documented go/no-go decision. For any touchpoint that is currently irrelevant
or of little to no interest to target audiences, any level of proactive engagement can carry a high
cost: precious resources should not be spent frivolously. In this case, the best approach is to take
the documented, definitive decision to ignore the touchpoint for the present.

A good example here is Second Life, the free 3D virtual world. While still an important marketing
channel to those organizations offering 3D virtual world products and services, many other
organizations have found it not to be “relevant” for reaching out to and communicating with their
target audiences. This could be because Second Life does not figure as a relevant touchpoint
during most customers’ decision making cycles for the targeted products or services.

The decision can always be reviewed again at a later time to see if there is new justification for
treating that touchpoint in another way.

Monitor: Any touchpoint that plays any significant part in customers’ decision making
processes should, at a minimum, be monitored. For traditional touchpoints, the methods are well
documented: the entire topic of Customer Intelligence has traditionally been concerned with the
capturing of such touchpoint data that can be transformed into new, fact-based information about
the customer. For other, “modern” touchpoints such as kiosk, new telephony devices, etc., the
same holds true. The data is there and can be captured and monitored – if it contributes to a
better understanding of the customer.

Social monitoring tools are becoming available almost as quickly as new social media touchpoints
appear. Sometimes these are standalone tools: Twitter monitors, blog search tools, search
analytics and news consolidation services are just some examples. But of even more significance
are the emerging tools and services that span ALL social media touchpoints, allowing an
organization to tailor its own touchpoint and search criteria through a single interface.

Next it is important to decide whether the monitoring should be done as a standalone activity –
i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, reports, etc. – or if it should rather be included into a more
structured process of data capture and utilization within the organization’s existing customer
intelligence infrastructure.

At a minimum, the monitored touchpoint information should be distributed to those within the
organization that have a clearly defined responsibility to take action for that touchpoint. Another


step could involve taking that new, fact-based insight and feeding it back into a corporate memory
of the customer – either in the customer data warehouse or the customer intelligence practice –
so that it can be used to tighten and tune the accuracy of the models for describing the customer
or – by association – the segment that accurately represents this customer.

Participate: The next type of involvement is to participate, which means taking the decision
to assign responsibility within the organization for proactively replying or corresponding through
an existing targeted touchpoint that the organization did not create or control. Often, participate
will be the right involvement type for an existing social media touchpoint, since the conversation
and interaction cannot be controlled or screened and, in general, there is a very wide audience
that can listen in to the dialog between any two parties. Examples here include responding to a
comment in an existing blog, interacting with Twitter comments or openly joining social networks
and communities and participating in the dialog.

When participating, it is important to observe four fundamental rules:

1. Any participation must be real. It cannot be a ghost writer or an automated response.
Many organizations have spent time and effort building a brand promise for their
organization. This is where they need to ensure its authenticity.

2. Participation authenticity can be achieved employing an organization’s own staff or
specialized external personnel who have been trained to respond in the organization’s
name. The highest level of authenticity comes through enthusiastic customers who are
natural advocates of the organization.

3. Remember that participation is not control; it will not always be possible to predict the
course of interactions, or to stop activity that does not perfectly suit.

4. A solid social media policy, based on existing corporate, brand and communications
guidelines, is how organizations best steer and guide the participation in touchpoints.

Activate: In many cases, it is appropriate to go beyond participation – that is, to activate a
new platform, offering a new way of providing target audiences with a way of exchanging and
communicating via this touchpoint. Some examples here include forums, communities, blogs,
ideas capture and product/service rating mechanisms. Frosta, a provider of ready meals, runs a
forum site that proactively encourages comments – both good and bad – about the meals it
provides. The occasional negative comment is far outweighed by the sense of community and
closeness generated by the users of the forum. In addition, it provides valuable insight into future
product requirements.

Activation can happen even for touchpoints that are not online or social media. The Italian bank
Banco Mediolanum knows that a touchpoint with key implications for their customers’ decision


making is the interaction with their friends in informal settings – so the bank occasionally rents the
best coffee shop in each town and then simply invites their customers to bring a friend along. In all
cases when a touchpoint is activated, the organization is the facilitator – not the owner – of the
mechanism.

Many of the best examples of Social Media and Social CRM, whether planned or impromptu, turn
out to be very good examples of activation.

ConTrol: There are touchpoints that can be controlled. A call center, an email channel, a web
site, a retail location or direct sales staff are all examples of touchpoints that an organization
owns, and therefore can (and should!) control. In fact, there is a danger in not doing so: recently a
major European telco was lambasted in the media for having responded to a comment on Twitter
within 20 minutes – but only because the equivalent email to the official customer support
address was never answered at all. Bad press for an apparently good customer service response
(quick reply to a Tweet) is unfortunate, but failure to react to customer inquiries that come
through the proper, company-prescribed channels is perhaps unforgivable.

Touchpoints that we can control are still the most critical in any decision-making process exactly
because customers KNOW we own those touchpoints and they expect a professional client-
company interaction. However, those touchpoints, whether call center, email or physical location,
are sometimes expensive to maintain -- which is exactly where alternative controlled touchpoints
can come in: Dell has made a huge success of going from email-based to community-based
customer interaction, where not only staff but also other, user-rated experts help answer
customer questions. Customer satisfaction is up and costs are down – all thanks to understanding
the IMPACT of alternative touchpoints.

Even traditional above-the-line marketing “channels” such as billboard and television advertising
are being refocused based on a better understanding of where they play as touchpoints in target
customers’ decision-making processes. A good example comes from The Economist, who knows
that advertising on newsstands around London is extremely relevant as a reminder touchpoint
that reinforces its loyal readership with the message “I am proud of being a part of this
community”, which naturally supports customers in renewing their subscriptions but more
importantly serves as an occasional prompt to recommend the magazine to a friend.

The five IMPACT types of engagement are all valid and relevant. Any given touchpoint type may
warrant more than one form of engagement depending on its relevance to the targeted customer
group. In addition, it may be appropriate to treat a touchpoint, say, during a customer’s awareness
stage differently than in the purchase stage. Deciding which engagement strategy is right for
which touchpoints needs to be made within the context of a Customer Experience Framework and
the organizational capabilities that affect the experience.


Framing the Customer Experience
The focus of this discussion has been on the customer’s perspective. However, in reality, the
actual – and any future desired – experience that an organization wishes to achieve will only come
about by utilizing the resources that an organization already has. This will bring all its
organizational capabilities to bear: people, brand, structures, business processes, information
exchange abilities and, more and more as the complexity rises, IT platforms and infrastructure.

To create an ongoing process that nurtures the different segments with a differentiated customer
experience along the entire decision-making chain, it is important to not only understand but to
document the relationship between the outside-in customer experience process described above
with that of the organization’s capability to transform and maintain the experience.

This is best done by viewing each of the topics as a layer, with the various interface points to be
identified and linked based on the target audience, its needs and decision-making journey.

Figure 5 Framing the Customer Experience

Within such a framework, touchpoint and decision journey elements can be prioritized and
described from the customer’s perspective. Both current and desired future states can be mapped
and a gap analysis performed across the organizational aspects to highlight necessary changes.

Such a framework is useful for developing scenarios, benchmarks and simulation, or for providing
the foundation for trying out new and innovative aspects of customer experience in a controlled
and focused manner. Resource allocations, timing and change or implementation priorities can be
highlighted and tracked.


While this can be done manually or with normal computer tools, there are also new software
packages that make the process of capturing, documenting and linking touchpoint interactions
efficient and effective.

An Agenda for IMPACTing the Customer:
For an organization to be successful with its customers today, it must fundamentally change the
way it looks at the customer – by taking the customer’s perspective through his own decision-
making journey. By employing a Customer IMPACT Agenda approach and framework, an
organization stands to gain a measurable and sustainable competitive advantage by extending its
understanding of the customer’s experience to include the entire decision making process,
focusing much sooner on differentiated customer needs and choice of touchpoints, including
social media, then proactively impacting relevant touchpoints. The Customer IMPACT Agenda is a
process that provides an updated, sustainable customer-organization interaction designed to help
organizations understand and satisfy customer needs along every step of the modern, tech-savvy
customer’s decision-making journey.

References
Bettencourt, Lance A., “Debunking Myths about Customer Needs”, Marketing Management, American
Marketing Association, January/February 2009, pp 47-52

Boztepe, S., “User Value: Competing Theories and Models”, in International Journal of Design, Vol. 1 No. 2,
August 2007.

Kahneman, D. Tversky, A.,(2000) Choices, Values, and Frames, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Liebetrau, Axel, „Bankless Banking”, BankInformation, December 2009.

Baxley, B., (2002) Making the Web Work, Indianapolis: New Riders Publishing, 73-90.

Surowiecki, J., (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds, New York: Anchor Books, 26-29.

Qualman, E. (2009) Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business,
Hoboken: Wiley & Sons, 38 - 49.


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