Customer Touchpoints

One important exercise to do in your company is identify customer touchpoints. A customer touchpoint is defined as the communication and interactions your customers experience during their relationship lifecycle with your company. Customer touchpoints can include: talking to someone at your company, going on your Web site and going in to a store or office. How I look at it is that every customer touchpoint is an opportunity for you to strengthen your relationship with your customer.

Last fall, we did an exercise at our company where a team of us mapped out all the customer touchpoints we could think of and we came up with about 70 touchpoints! I don't think any of us had an idea how many touchpoints there are and therefore how many opportunities we have to build the relationship with customers. It was an incredible experience and it helped us figure out which ones we wanted to work on first in 2008.

Here's some good articles on customer touchpoints, if you want to learn more about this topic
"Defining Customer Touchpoints"
The 6 Most Overlooked Customer Touch Points
Customer Touch-Points in Strategic Marketing

Go through an exercise with your company and representatives from other departments. I think you'll be surprised how many touchpoints your company actually has!