A touchpoint is the first point of contact a customer has with your product, and it’s almost always offline.
It could be your receptionist, manager, or just someone in the community that they heard about you from.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “I’ve seen my company’s ‘touchpoints,’ and they are so underwhelming.” So have I. And that’s exactly why we should be focusing on them.
“First impressions last a lifetime.” So it goes with the first touches. They set the theme for how your customer will forever perceive your product, brand, or service. If you have a bad first touchpoint, it’s really hard to fix. Conversely, if your first touch rocks, then you can easily build on that and build up your love points.
As Nicholas Webb says in his brilliant book “What Customers Hate”:
“The first touchpoint is too often riddled with customer hate points. It includes: The car dealership that attacks you with a pushy salesman that makes you recoil and leave. The medical clinic that makes you fill out thirty-page forms and wait for an hour to see a doctor. How about the hotel that has one person checking in guests, and there are thirty people in line? I could literally list hundreds of examples of how a bad first touchpoint can destroy an enterprise.
So why do we do it? Executives and leaders are so busy spending money on customer acquisition and looking at new ways to cross market to existing customers that they’re clueless as to how bad they are at the first touchpoint.”
Do you know how much your first touchpoint is costing you?
When we talk to executives and leaders, they’re often so busy spending money on customer acquisition and looking at new ways to cross market to existing customers that they’re clueless as to how bad they are at the first touchpoint.
It’s one of those things that if you don’t get it right, it’s really hard to fix. Conversely, if you get it right, then you can easily build on that and build up your love points.
If we can just get the first touchpoint right, with a little bit of effort on our part, imagine how much easier it would be to turn prospects into customers and turn customers into raving fans?
