Читать книгу Orchestrating Experiences - Chris Risdon - Страница 23

Here’s where things get tricky. To orchestrate experiences, you should think about touchpoints in two different but related ways.

First, customers encounter an organization, service, or product in a specific context. This encounter may be planned or unplanned; it may be designed or not designed. But they happen. You can observe the encounter, describe what is happening, and determine its effect. These encounters are touchpoints, and as branding folks will tell you, they will impact the customer’s perception of a brand, product, or service positively or negatively.

Second, organizations can design proactively for specific customer moments. They can determine the value that they want to provide, choose channels to interact with customers, and use design craft to meet customer needs optimally. These series of choices result in a family of touchpoints that are produced in advance or cocreated with customers in the moment. For example, a greeter at a retailer’s front entrance can be trained on how to greet customers while handing out a weekly specials coupon. The online store can welcome the customer with copy at the top and display the weekly specials below. The same touchpoint types—greeting customers and informing them about weekly specials—are delivered in different ways in different channels (see Figure 2.1).

FIGURE 2.1 Greeting customers and informing them of weekly specials are touchpoints that take on different forms when delivered via different channels.

Touchpoints represent an important architectural concept in experiences that can span channels, space, and time. An organization can holistically craft an interconnecting system with a better chance of consistently and predictably meeting customer needs in many contexts. This system should be adaptable and extensible as new channels and interaction types emerge over time.

Such a systematic approach to end-to-end experiences requires creating more consistency in how touchpoints are defined within an organization. In the previous example, your colleagues may ask: “Isn’t the greeter a touchpoint?” or “Aren’t the weekly specials on the website a feature?” Yes, in the language of the separate domains of store operations and product management, respectively. But to orchestrate experiences, these differences in language must be reconciled. To this end, touchpoints can be defined as having the following dimensions:

• Have a clear intent based on identified needs.

• Create customer moments individually or in combinations.

• Play varying but specific roles.

• Can be evaluated and measured for appropriateness and efficacy.¹