Editor’s note: Terry Vavra and Doug Pruden are partners at research firm Customer Experience Partners. Vavra is based in Allendale, N.J. Pruden is based in Darien, Conn. 

It sounds straightforward. You map the customer journey for your brand. You identify all the touchpoints along the way. You conduct satisfaction research to objectively quantify your performance at each of these touchpoints (that comprise the customer experience you're delivering). Then you review your findings to determine the largest opportunity gaps. Subsequently you plan and execute a strategy to improve your performance on the weakest touchpoints, relying on your improvements to increase retention, generate more positive word of mouth and grow your share of wallet. Simple!

But it's really not that simple.

It’s much more complex because most of your touchpoints are composed of both physical and emotional components. Customers experiencing your delivery and product are using all their senses to capture and process all kinds of data at each touchpoint. This is often done without them even recognizing how active their senses are. Your total customer experience is much more than the nice, neat list of attributes recounted in the typical customer satisfaction research study. That’s because most customer satisfaction projects are driven by departmental concerns (inside looking out) not the experience from the customer's senses (outside looking in). The following are a few sets of examples to consider of what customers are picking up.

In a business in which the customer enters your office environment: 

  • Colors – How much buying energy do they help generate? Do they say “trustworthy?” Do they show good taste? Is traditional too stuffy? Does ultra-modern suggest a lack of stability?
  • Layout – Is the arrangement inviting and comfortable? Does it feel disorganized and suggest confusion?
  • Signage – Does it reinforce your brand promise? Suggest well-structured business processes? Telegraph professionalism?
  • Temperature – Too hot for comfort? Too cold? Does it suggest a lack of concern for the planet?
  • Small touches – If you have lush foliage, for example, does it signal a high level of care? Does it indicate a keen attention to detail or just the opposite?

Retail setting or check-in lobby:

  • Lighting – Does the low lighting make it difficult to read the form you're being asked to complete? Do bright lights keep you from relaxing?
  • Sound – Does it set the right mood? Is it so loud customers can barely hear the staff speak? Or does it make you feel the facility is lost in time?
  • Smells – Some facilities pump in a unique fragrance. In others you can tell what the staff is having for dinner behind the desk. Does either one subtly encourage a return visit? Or future avoidance?

Through customer service channels:

  • Attire – What traits do your company uniform or dress standards emphasize? Professionalism? Approachability?
  • Process – What questions do your frontline employees ask and in what order? Does their personal concern for buyers rank highest on the list?
  • Setting expectations – Do employees make it clear, in simple terms, what buyers can expect?
  • Flexibility – Are buyers offered a range of convenient options for doing business with you?

Via your e-mail communications:

  • Continuity – Are you sending updates at each stage of the buying process?
  • Capturing input – Are you giving buyers a voice and making them feel valued via satisfaction surveys? Do you report back and tell customers what changes to expect?
  • Visibility – Are you sending periodic newsletters to keep in touch and stay top-of-mind?

Your social media presence:

  • Are you posting consistently and frequently?
  • Does your activity align with your brand identity and your followers’ expectations?
  • Are your posts inspiring? Do they feel like conversations, promoting audience engagement?

Identifying touchpoints

You might be thinking that this list game could go on forever. It probably could. We’re not suggesting that the typical customer satisfaction questionnaire be made any longer than it currently is. (If anything, we’d suggest most be made shorter.) The goal of the CSAT processes is to identify – either by competitive gap analysis or by a derived key driver study – what the two or three touchpoints are at which you are disappointing your customers the most. We recommend isolating two or three touchpoints on which to improve your performance over the course of a quarter or two. It’s within these two or three high-importance touchpoint targets that you’ll want to employ our multisensory exploratory approach.

Let’s look at the approach through a supermarket example. You identify that the manager’s desk/podium or the clerk/checker is one of your key drivers of satisfaction. To improve satisfaction at this point you need to elicit from a group of your customers all their impressions at this touchpoint. The easiest way to do this is with customer experience sessions.

  1. Recruit groups of eight to 14 customers to visit your premises. (Yes, it’s an on-site focus group.)
  2. Have group members experience the touchpoint as they would during a routine interaction. But have them identify every experiential component of the touchpoint they’re encountering (seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, etc.). Group members can do this verbally – building on one another’s perceptions – or they can record their perceptions privately to be shared later.
  3. Next, the experiential components need to be prioritized for possible improvement. This can be accomplished through managerial judgment using three criteria: cost, likely benefit/impact and ease of accomplishing. Or members of the customer experiencing group can be asked to evaluate the experiential components according to their intrusiveness, their annoyance factor or their uniqueness to this one competitor. In either case the experiential components will be rank-ordered to assist in directing remedial attention to them.
  4. Formulate an action plan with ownership for each experiential component assigned to an employee/manager with improvement goals specified to be accomplished within certain time frames.

Experiencing through your customers 

By involving customers in helping you specify the contributing sensory components within your most critical touchpoints you’re avoiding the myopic trap of internal perspective (inside looking out). You’re benefitting from experiencing the touchpoint through the senses of your customers (outside looking in).