Social Media Marketing, An Hour a Day: Touchpoint Analysis

Touchpoint analysis, as defined by Evans is:

-the rigorous discipline of carefully evaluating each point of contact between a firm and its customers has been used in traditional marketing to catch the divergence between what you want to convey and what you are actually conveying.

When talking about the Web, touchpoint analysis is extremely important because of the speed in which messages are transmitted from one party to another.  For instance, if your site promises a certain result or guarantee with whatever product or service you are selling, and you don’t deliver on that promise, you can almost be guaranteed to hear about it in social networks and/or from dissatisfied customers who have written about it in some other forum.  As Evans stated:

When you look at the difference between what you are saying about your brand versus what you hear coming back off the Social Web, any differences can often be traced to the difference between what you actually delivered and the expectation you set.

A Better Understanding

By understanding how touchpoint analysis works, you will be able to act more decisively, building on what works for you and your company while addressing any pitfalls.  At its core, touchpoint analysis is about understanding your product based on the degree to which your present customers feel that you’ve delivered what you said you would.  That being said, it is important to pay attention to what your customers are saying on the Social Web.  Their reflections about what you are doing will give you a more quantifiable approach to understanding whether or not you are keeping your promise to deliver either goods or services.

Gathering Data

Touchpoint analysis takes a more quantitative approach, meaning that you can measure your success based on customer feedback as well as what your competition is doing.  In order to begin gathering data to conduct a touchpoint analysis, you first need to decide what it is you are going to measure.  In order to figure this out, you must first begin by observing actual customer experiences.  So, for example, if you sell and/or deliver your product in physical stores, go and take pictures or notes.  If your business is telephone based, use recordings of conversations.  If you are an online marketing guru, use screen grabs (print screen function).  You are trying to determine what it feels like to be an actual customer using your goods/services.

By analyzing collected data based on your observations of customer interaction and reactions to your services, you should be able to put together a quantifiable list of information to help your business improve in areas where improvement is needed while scaling back in other areas that don’t need quite as much attention.

The Main Points According to Dave Evans

• Touchpoint analysis leads to an understanding of the core elements of the experiences that will be talked about on the Social Web in conversations relating to your brand, product, or service.
• The touchpoint map is a systematic representation that quantifies the contribution and performance of individual touchpoints.