So Touching
Picture the scene – it is one of those restaurant booths that is like an oversized study carrel. We are completely enclosed in dark wood paneling with a burgundy curtain as a door shutting us off from the other diners. My business colleague and I are having a sales dinner with a pair of prospective clients. This new opportunity comes from an industry that we are not entirely familiar with, but it is something we really want to pursue. I am leading the conversation and in the course of my dinner-friendly interview ask the woman sitting across from me, a sales operations director, “what are all the different ways you are currently touching the client?”
My business partner almost chokes on his appetizer, nearly spraying it on the gentleman sitting across from him, the director if IT applications. We had teamed up for the first time that night and he was unfamiliar with the vernacular regarding the idea of “touching” the client. He thought he was witness to a potential harassment suit and I was afraid I was going to be performing a Heimlich in our intimate little dining space.
I have discovered since that awkward incident at the restaurant nearly a decade past that the term “touchpoint” has become much more commonly accepted within the world of CRM. I have less of a challenge breaking in new consultants and my clients have a precise understanding of my meaning when building a customer touchpoint map of the front end functions. That has made life a bit easier.
The Touchpoint Map, a diagram illustrating the span of customer interactions across the full customer engagement lifecycle, is a really powerful tool. It helps to quickly define the potential scope of CRM and illustrates, very powerfully, cross-functional dynamics in play for attracting, acquiring, and retaining customers. CRM, after all, is pretty much all about managing the effectiveness of your customer touches.
One of the misconceptions I find, however, is that many of the organizations that I work with get that they are touching the customer with their sales functions and that they are touching the customer with their services functions, but they don’t always recognize that they are also touching the customer with their marketing functions. And, I think that this can get in the way of marketing being as effective as would otherwise be possible.
So, I put this question out to all you marketers – are you touching your customers enough? All kidding aside, at least briefly, I would like to laud the merits of multi-touch campaigning, a topic that does not get enough exposure in my opinion. But, I think it is one of the best means for optimizing the value of marketing and getting the most from marketing investments.
Pretty much everybody with reasonably solid campaign management experience has learned that three impressions gets the best lift per buck (impressions = touches by the way). What seems to be less universally experienced is that three impressions spread across multiple channels can have even more success. Run two impressions on a new product prior to a sales visit and the customer will be softened up for the new pitch. Make an offer with an e-mail campaign followed up by an outbound call and the prospect will be more prepared to hear the terms of the deal. Push the interested party to the website for a whitepaper download and they will be more prepared for an SME visit.
I am a real fan of the multi-channel approach to creating customer touches, but it does require some orchestration. Marketing and sales do have to be in synch for this to be most effective. Campaign planning seems to work well with the tele-channel but sometimes there can be challenges getting programs rolled out to the field in an organized manner. This is where the use of a CRM tool gets really handy helping to keep everybody on the same page. The cross-channel multi-touch does require extra effort but I believe the return justifies the effort. More importantly, with lower value segments, the use of non-field channels in the approach has proven very successful with strong ROI results.
There was a pretty popular television advertising campaign run by AT&T a while back that had the tag line, Reach Out and Touch Someone. If I were to hijack that slogan my version would be, Reach Out and Touch More Often.
Enjoy the contact.
