How can you analyze touch points along the customer journey as part of a design process? Are there contemporary models that can be illuminating in analyzing touch points in the process of design?
This article will review a few of these models and then arrive at practical and theoretically sound questions that can be used as a basis for analyzing and redesigning touch points as part of a customer journey and the surrounding ecosystem of value co-creation. This falls within the approach that I have been describing in previous posts about adaptive design for collaborative ecosystems.
Design Thinking
Design Thinking is a contemporary paradigm in developing innovative approaches to rendering service and products to clients and customers. It has been applied by IDEO to product development; by REOS Partners to global societal issues; and in the UK to improve government services. Others have adapted it to healthcare environments such as in the case of the Fairview Medical Center as described by Winby, Worley and Martinson. The Design Thinking, Innovation Lab approach is now in use by many others.
The Design Thinking methodology centers on the customer journey and customer experience. It focuses on touch points that occur along the customer journey. Touch points are specific points where the customer engages with the providing enterprise in order to obtain goods or services. Ethnographic research is utilized to follow the customer and actually be with the customer along the customer's journey and at each touch point.
In ethnographic research, the customer is placed at the center of the analysis which seeks to understand what the customer is trying to accomplish. The analysis delves into the customer's context as part of exploring the customer's experience. Inquiry looks at the context of the customer with regard to how their lifestyle, emotions, support systems, family, etc. impact their needs and experience. The goal is to arrive at a deep understanding of their point of view in the customer's own language. Otto Scharmer refers to this process as one of dialogic interviewing. Essentially we learn to "walk a mile in their shoes."
Key questions in understanding touch points are as follows.
- What are the emotional highs and lows of the user?
- What role does the surrounding context of the user: life style, culture, relationships, support systems play in creating their experience?
- What is the user's experience and how does this compare to what they would perceive as an ideal experience?
- How do technical processes support this?
Service-Dominant Logic (S-D Logic)
What may be missing in our current approaches is a conceptual underpinning which addresses our contemporary world that increasingly looks at value in terms of the knowledge and skills exchanged. This can be either exchanged directly or indirectly by being embodied in goods. I believe this conceptual underpinning is provided by the growing discipline of S-D Logic set out by Vargo and Lusch (2004, Journal of Marketing, updated in Vargo and Lusch (2016, JAMS) initially with regard to the field of marketing. In endeavoring to apply the S-D Logic approach to the field of redesign, there are a number of factors that can be considered in the process of analysis. I believe that these can be applied to a given touch point.
S-D Logic talks about an exchange. The exchange has been described overall as an exchange of services or more specifically as an exchange of resources especially of skills and knowledge. Key here is a focus on how these resources are accessed, adapted and integrated.
The questions that I believe can be asked in an S-D Logic view fall into the following categories.
- Accessibility: How accessible are actors and resources to the customer from the network surrounding the customer? How can this network of actors be reconfigured to make resources more accessible?
- Adaptability: How are resources customized to fit the needs of the customer?
- Integration: What actions does the customer take to help realize value from the resource - to co-create their own consumption experience?
Knowledge Management
As one delves into the S-D Logic approach, one notices some similarities to the field of Knowledge Management. Knowledge Management conceptualizes steps in the process of knowledge absorption and use which is what S-D Logic describes in terms of an exchange.
- Knowledge development, acquisition, generation, exploration. This consists of activities which bring to light knowledge that is new to the individual, group or organization.
- Knowledge transfer, knowledge absorption. This is the movement of knowledge from one location to another and modification of the knowledge in the receiving unit.
- Knowledge retention, integration, exploitation. The knowledge becomes embedded in routines, processes, communities.
My Approach to Touch Point Analysis
The following represents what I would want to inquire into and impact as part of a touch point analysis and redesign. These questions benefit from all of the past work by others set out here.
- What knowledge, skills and resources are exchanged. By whom?
- What is the accessibility of knowledge, skills, resources and necessary people. How does the configuration of the network surrounding the user impact this?
- What is the user experience: current and ideal?
- Where and how does the actual experience of the user deviate from the expectations of the ideal?
- What activities does the customer-user and others perform including those people in the user's social context that impact value to the user?
- How can IT devices and platforms best support value to the user?
- What are helpful institutional supports, e.g. roles, integrating mechanisms, effective communication.
With these questions as a basis, one can hopefully begin to analyze the touch points along the customer journey as a basis for future redesigns.
