Want to Make Your Customer Happy? Consolidate and Eliminate Customer Touchpoints

Everyone of us has been frustrated at one time or another paying for a service and getting it done from a service provider. The most ridiculous one was the provisioning of a T1 Internet line in San Francisco that I had to do as the CTO of a startup company there.

You had to fill numerous forms and we essentially had to shepherd the application through various departments of the utility from which we got this service! They had the gall to ask for an additional "expediting fee" to speed up things internally within their company through various departments. This was five years ago. Hope this is not the case now and they have improved their process.

What a waste of time and effort, on our part, and on their part!

Service BluePrinting is a methodology to systematically identify Customer Touchpoints and simplify things from the customer's perspective. This is another way of making sure that a process you design from the point of view of the organization, is easy enough for a customer to use also.

Manual touchpoints are fraught with errors and potential for ticking a customer off. Automated processes with computer to computer handoffs have been known to have less errors than when a manual touchpoint is introduced. This can be true even across companies' systems. For example, if you are to initiate a UPS or a Fedex pickup directly from your computer systems to their systems (They have provided fabulous ways of doing this, BTW!), you stand much lesser chance of introducing any errors in the process than when you enter these manually.

Customers also will get an idea of all they need to do in one go, rather than bits and pieces here and there. When designing or redesiging processes, keeping Customer Touchpoints in mind always helps in making sure that they are customer friendly also in addition to eliminating errors.

A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day - Bill Watterson