Based on yesterday’s post regarding touchpoint analysis, the following is a compilation of 22 questions that Dave Evans proposes throughout the chapter, which you can utilize in order to improve your marketing:

21 Questions for Sorting Out the Customer Experience & Improving Your Marketing

1. What are the primary promises?
2. How are these promises related to the needs of your customers?
3. How are these promises supported?
4. What is the actual delivery mechanism that validates each promise?
5. What are the actual customer experiences that demonstrate successful delivery?
6. What channel has been used to convey each particular aspect of your promise or brand?
7. How important to your customer are each of the promises and points and delivery?
8. Does your marketing claim “leadership” as a provider of whatever it is that you do?  If so, ask yourself how you measured this.
9. Is your message getting picked up, and is it being reflected on the Social Web?  How effective is it as a conversational element?
10. Are you meeting, exceeding or falling short on the expectations you’ve set?  What is your performance versus expectation?
11. How important is this specific touchpoint and its outcome (satisfaction versus disappointment) from the perspective of your customer or prospect?
12. What is its relative contribution in regards to talk value?  Rate this on a 10-point scale.  For example, is your message getting picked up?  Is it reflected on the Social Web?  If this is a dominant message, its talk value is toward the “10″ end of the scale.
13. Rank your performance or similar selected measure, again on a 10-point scale.  For example, are you meeting, exceeding, or falling short on the expectations set?
14. What are your lowest talk-generating touchpoints?
15. What are your highest talk-generating touchpoints?
16. Which of your high-talk touchpoints are low-performing from your customer’s viewpoint? Make note of these.
17. Which of your high-talk touchpoints are high-performing from your customer’s viewpoint?  Identify and save these.
18. What is the issue?  Is this the wrong audience or a poor customer experience?
19. Did you set the right expectation?  Did you over-promise or under-deliver?
20. Who else is involved? Who are your primary internal constituents when it comes to moving this touchpoint up and to the right or down and to the left on your touchpoint map?
21. Which of the required actions are directly within your control?
22. How are you going to fix the problem?

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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.