The 6 touchpoints of the customer journey and how failing in one can impact your reputation

By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of?The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.?

How is the customer experience when your customers deal with you and your company??

Today, public relations isn’t just about what we get written about. It’s what other people say about us as well. And now, we’re on social media. Everybody can be an experience-sharer. Everyone can be a critic. And that can be magnified.

In the?new episode?of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, I shared some ideas about measuring the customer journey. I wanted you to think about how you manage your customer experience, making sure that you’re delighting customers once they’ve come in the door. I also shared some personal experiences and anecdotes that prompted me to discuss what I’ve discussed in the podcast.?

My Experience with an Auto Repair Shop

The customer journey used to be a very simple piece of PR work. Maybe you’ve read about someone — a restaurant or any other business — in a newspaper magazine. You may have seen an advertisement or a sign downtown or on the way to the airport.?

Now, the customer journey is not only one or two touchpoints. It’s consistent right up through the point of purchase,?at?the point of purchase, and?post-purchase.?

Recently, I went to get my Mini Cooper S serviced. And if you know anything about the customer service here in the UK, when you buy a car, the garage will be making the most money out of the after-sale service. It can be very expensive, so I was looking for an alternative.?

I went online and I found a big-branded repair shop called Halfords. I spoke to somebody via online chat and they guided me to look at the different service schedules that I needed. I then put my car registration number into the system and it told me the kind of car it was and the latest service that it required. The system also asked me if I wanted to book that in, and if I did, I could choose the nearest garage and service time.?

The online digital experience was awesome and the pricing meant that it was going to be less than half the price of the standard Mini garage. I thought that it was going to be fantastic: The digital experience — everything from the ad words to keywords to the blog and everything about what you can expect from a car service — was all done perfectly. What the digital and customer acquisition teams have done was done brilliantly.?

If we look at the customer journey as discussed on the?Talkwalker website, it has six steps.

Screengrab from?Talkwalker

Step one is awareness. In my case, I need to get my car serviced. Step two is the research. I went online and did a quick search for a Mini two-year service. Step three is engagement. I had a chat with the online assistant for the Halfords website. I was engaged and then they got me to convert, which is the fourth step. I committed. In fact, I even pre-booked and prepaid using the monthly interest-free payment.

Step five, which is about delivery, is where things went wrong.

I went down to the local garage to get the car service and the car park was completely full. There’s a harried-looking young man who said that it’s his first week in the garage and four of their six technicians were away. He asked if I didn’t mind waiting, he’d see what he can do for me. He asked for my registration and I gave it to him.

The delivery at the point of purchase isn’t quite as I’d expected based on my digital experience. My online experience led me to believe that I was going to be received and that they’ll be organised; that someone will be able to drive my car in because I received an SMS saying, “Remember to drop your car off at 8:30 to be on time.”?

I duly turned up at 8:30 after dropping my children off at school and I was met by this overwrought young man who told me he just arrived.?

Another customer came just after me and he had been told that he should be there at 8:45 for his Ministry of Transport (MOT) test. He was told by the young man who’d only been there a week that the person in charge of doing the MOT had been in a car accident and wasn’t going to be there. The young man then asked if the customer could leave the car or, better, still take it away.

Over the period of the next hour, the succession of people who received messages telling them to be there on time drove their cars to the service centre and found that there was nowhere left to park.?

I decided to say to the young man that I’ll remove one problem from his experience that day — I’d take my car and just come back another day. Then, I brought up to him that the centre did say that I could have a courtesy car because they wanted to have my car all day. The young man then provided me with the car which was parked around the side.

Image from?Unsplash

I got into the car and it was filthy, with cigarette ash everywhere. I turned it on and it was out of fuel. I had only 40 kilometres left and I was going to drive 10 kilometres home and 10 kilometres back. I was thinking that it isn’t really going to work out.?

I parked the car because I was making a phone call and then someone parked in front of me. It was a man wearing a Halfords-branded jacket. I said to him that I was about to leave but he said that I can’t take the car because it’s a mechanic’s car — it’s filthy and it has no petrol, and it’s not insured; it won’t be legal on the road.?

And so I got out of the car, took all my things out, and went inside.?

I overheard the exchange between the young man who’d only been there for a week and was trying to sort everything out and the man who turned out to be the regional manager.?

Meanwhile, a young technician (the only one who was actually working that day) wandered around with an oil-stained rag, wondering which car he’d start servicing. I peered through into the workshop and I could see spanners on the floor — I could see oil with lids off and cars in various states of starting and finishing.?

The supervisor then proceeded to talk to me in front of the young man. He was explaining that the agency staff had let them down. It was all really chaos and that he never normally worked in the said shop at all. However, they’d get to the bottom of it.?

I have quite an important two-year service that needs to be done — brake linings, brake pads, oil filters, micro filters, and so on. I’m starting to think that the Mini garage, although twice the price, may have been a much less risky investment of my time.?

Whilst I’m waiting to get my keys back, the manager explained to the young man and to the rest of us who are waiting in the slightly crowded and slightly anxious-feeling reception that four out of their six staff are not turning up.?

Not only that, the young man who’d been doing the MOT wasn’t in an accident at all. That was a lie that the young man concocted to try and make everybody feel somehow better about the situation. The man who is going to have his car MOT-ed took his keys back and decided to leave.?

I said that I’ll also get my keys back. And then the supervisor told me what really happened: A young technician had an electric vehicle (EV) on the ramp. He thought that the EV was in park mode. He got out of the car because there was no engine noise and thought that it had been turned off. And then the EV shot off the ramp across the garage and drove into the wall. They gave the spare pool car to the EV’s owner only to find that when he, unfortunately, had an accident, the car wasn’t insured.?

The whole story, in itself, was not so reassuring. I said that I’ll just take my car back home with me.?

How Crucial the Customer Journey Is

Step five of the Talkwalker customer journey is delivery. When it comes to advocacy, which is step six, you can imagine how people like me who feel aggrieved (because, frankly, we’ve been lied to) will likely share that story.

Image from?Unsplash

Happy customers share once or twice. But unhappy customers share multiple times — in fact, 9 to 10 times. It’s a social desire to warn other people not to go there.?

The manager rang me 20 minutes later and said that they might be able to fit me in in two weeks’ time at a different facility. When they asked me if I’d like to book that in, I said, “I don’t think so. I think I’ll just have my money back.”?

Having raised awareness and having got me through the research and the conversion funnel, if I have my issue under the delivery aspect and if I’m not happy, I’m not only going to?not?buy from them — I’m also going to start to share.

And because of social media, we can share at scale. We can post photographs of the workshop in disarray. We can put it on our Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages. If we’re really not happy, we can start to do what I’ve been doing with one company.?

Using?Loom, I’m recording the unhappy experiences I’m having and I’m sending the recording through to them. I’ve also started to share those on social media saying, “Do you know this is your customer service? Why are you not responding to us?” I was asking that because the promise was there. If there was no promise, I wouldn’t worry. But if there was a promise and it’s unrequited, then I’m going to be really unhappy.?

The Need to Build a Good Reputation

Public relations is about building a great reputation. But if your customer journey is poor at any stage, it doesn’t matter how much good PR you’ve done — because you’re going to have churn, you’re going to have disloyalty, and, worse, you’re going to have your potential users becoming anti-users.?

When we look at PR, we have to manage all the touchpoints in the customer journey.

Let’s face it: Customer journey is reflected by how good we are. For example, technology. How good are we when it comes to serving the disabled, the under-abled person, or the old person who doesn’t know how to use the app when it’s the only way to communicate with your customer service?

Image from?Unsplash

We have to think about PR not from our point of view but from what the customer experiences. And there are metrics —?Net Promoter Score?(NPS), customer effort score, task completion score, and customer lifetime value — that you can find out about on the?Talkwalker website.?

There’s no point in doing good PR if we give bad customer service or customer experience. The best advocates, as we know, are happy customers. And if they’re not happy customers, they’d go to Amazon ratings, Net Score, or any other of these rating products — and that could be the kiss of death.

As you’re thinking about your PR, don’t just think about the front end. Think about it the whole way through. Because, otherwise, when people get bought in and feel embarrassed and stung, they’ll become your worst PR nightmare.?

This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur,?you can listen here.

Cover image by?UX Indonesia?on?Unsplash.