On Logic+Emotion, David Armano writes about the growing ubiquity of interaction touch points between customers and products. For me, this is a very timely article. Previously, we have explored here the idea of listening to what customers are saying as an essential element of understanding the innovation opportunity space. An important aspect of this is to recognize all the customer touch points that your product and the delivered customer experience create.
Do you know all of the touch points you should be addressing? Don’t make the mistake of assuming you do. We all design products and services to deliver specific interactions for our clients’ benefit. However, it is often the unanticipated touch points that are most important to understand. What are unanticipated touch points? There are all the ways in which your customers will interact or will want to interact with your product, your brand, and your company that you had never actually considered.
Recently, I gave my product team just such an assignment. I asked them to review every aspect of the customer experience and identify the critical danger touch points—those places where the customers have opportunities to be confused or disappointed by their product experience. The result is that we now have a very clear understanding of opportunities to delight our clients with an outstanding customer experience.
The understanding of touch points helps to frame both key problems and some of the import evaluation criteria for innovation. Understanding the problem space and the criteria of success is fundamental to sustainable innovation practice. Products, and hence innovation, are all about the touch points—it all begins with a touch.
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