“Customer touchpoints are all the different ways consumers experience a product or service, from when they first become aware of it, until they dispose of it,” Michelle Greenwald writes for Forbes. “I have personally never seen a brand master as many customer touchpoints as well as Apple does. I’m convinced the primary reason most companies fail to do so is that management does not go through the exercise of experiencing their own brands like their customers do. I always advocate that every product or service create a customer touchpoint map to chart the journey consumers take when engaging with their brand.”
Steve Jobs, “in addition to caring deeply about delivering great, innovative products that are intuitive, easy to use and beautifully designed, cared just as much about excelling at all the myriad touchpoints throughout the ‘journey’ (during the product exploration, purchase, use and after use phases) to make the entire experience great,” Greenwald writes. “It’s highly innovative to excel at customer touchpoints because so few firms do it well. Here’s my own personal list of Apple touchpoints done well and it’s only a fraction of all the touchpoints they master.”
1) A Clean, Easy to Navigate Website
2) Packaging
3) Demo Units in Store
4) The Number of Employees, Attitudes and Training of Employees in Stores
5) The Cleanliness of the Stores, No Clutter, and Consistency of Design
6) Store Locations
7) The Genius Bar
8) One to One
9) Acknowledgement of Appointments
10) Staff Collaboration
11) Short Wait Times to Check Out
12) Personal Set-Up
13) In-Store Classes
14) Guest Speakers and In-Store Events
15) Rebate Receipt Acknowledgement
16) iBooks Author Software
17) iBooks Author Phone Support
18) When You Call The iBooks Author Support Line, Apple First Gets Your Phone Number & Apple ID
19) Software Development Kits
20) Questionnaires on Satisfaction
Each point above discussed in the full article here.
Not sure why iBooks is on the list, unless he happens to be writing something using it. Actually, there are lots of easier ways to author an ebook.
Two reasons:
1) The author had recently written a book with it, and was still enamored with the experience.
2) He needed two more items to get to a nice round 20.
I wish they’d hose down one of their touchpoints — the demo units in stores — once-in-a-while. They can get pretty grubby during the day. Maybe they have someone running around with some Windex, but I’ve never seen it.
I once met a recovering hypochondriac, 30 days clear of an imaginary disease, he made several observations each day just as you have done Bob.
Get well soon Bob!