Blind Spot. Nathan Shedroff

a premium to buy its products.

      In fact, the biggest obstruction to building relationships is a business’s need to focus on the short term. With quarterly numbers always around the corner, you’ll often find companies trying to bump up sales through gimmicks, without investing in long-term value. At the end of the day, you have to decide whether you want to sell Coke or generic soda. And that shouldn’t be a hard decision.

      DIMENSIONS OF AN EXPERIENCE

      What separates an ordinary, single interaction, like receiving a bill, from a valued experience? Research has found that experiences typically work in six dimensions: value, consistency, intensity, duration, triggers, and interaction.

      Value. On what levels does your experience (and relationship) provide and exchange value? Are you offering functional value for financial value? Are you engaging on a level of emotional value or triggering someone’s sense of identity? If you’re connecting with your customer’s core meanings, you’re providing the deepest value possible and customers are usually more willing to pay more, in return. Some companies are successful playing at the most surface levels while companies that reap the highest rewards operate at the deepest.

      Consistency. Experiences only work over time if they seem to come from the same place. Whenever a customer interacts with your company, no matter what the touchpoint, it must feel consistent. If your advertising promises one thing but your product delivers another, you look forced or fake, just as inconsistent people seem dishonest and untrustworthy—or at least, unprofessional.

      The trick, here, is that the experience should be consistent in human terms, not in absolute, engineering terms. Technically, this may make them seem inconsistent, but as long as they follow your customers’ expectations they will feel natural. For example, just because customers might expect to find one of your products in different places doesn’t pose a problem that all of your products aren’t also (consistently) in more than one place. Or just because some of your experiences are different in person than online (while others aren’t), doesn’t mean they’re wrong if it’s how customers think they should be.

      Intensity. Intensity involves how much the touchpoint resonates in someone’s mind. Some interactions are so low-key that they impact a user about as much as brushing their teeth. But most valued experiences have intensity. They have the power to captivate and change you. An adult’s experience of a NASCAR race should be as exciting and dynamic as it can be. A pair of shoes can make you feel terrific, and a blender can make you happy if it makes the perfect margarita—or makes it effortlessly. But your experience needs to be reasonably intense to be valued.

      Sometimes, of course, customers don’t want a particular interaction to be intense at all. Or they want to relax. Finding the proper intensity for a touchpoint is an important part of improving the experiences people will have.

      Duration. Duration is just what it says: how long an interaction lasts. Obviously, you want the wait for a customer service call to be as short as possible. You’d like a spa treatment to be much longer. Managing these intervals is as important as any other part of the interaction—for example, taking the right amount of time and making the transitions in and out of the experience smooth. More important is your understanding of when the interaction actually starts. (Hint: it’s much earlier than you likely think.)

      Triggers. Triggers involve how people react to different design elements within touchpoints. Every element of an interaction can evoke different responses in people. You may love bamboo because it’s a hard, environmentally responsible material, but some of your customers may think of it as a cheap artifact of the 1960s. You may like earth tones, but your customer may associate them with dirt. All of your design decisions trigger responses in people, and you have to be certain of what these are before you deploy them. You don’t get to define the reactions. The best you can hope for is to uncover and design to them.

      Interaction. Interaction commonly refers to interactive media; this definition is a little shortsighted. Whenever a business creates a touchpoint, it can choose how it interacts with customers—as passive objects, or responding to their actions like a skilled concierge. More and more, people expect the latter—though not everywhere. They want intelligent products and personal interactions that anticipate their needs and treat them appropriately.

      How Customers Interact with Companies’ Touchpoints

      On the other side of the universe from Disney is almost any Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in the United States. A visit to the DMV is universally dreaded. Typically, you arrive to a roomful of loud people and have to stand in line based on the DMV’s own bureaucratic categories, which make no sense to anyone who doesn’t work there. Is a motorcycle license the same as a driver’s license? Do you need a Marine Class 1 or Marine Class 2 boating permit? What if you just want an ID card and don’t plan to drive at all? Very few people know how the DMV categorizes these needs, and, as a result, they often wait too long in one line only to be told they need to go to a different one. Then, when they finally get to the right place, they are shunted through a confusing process of tests and paperwork. They have little understanding of what’s going on or where the endpoint is, and their only hope is to somehow emerge with the document they need.

      Unlike Disney, the DMV doesn’t seem to care much about your experience (and, therefore, you). If you hate it, so what? You like driving, don’t you? The DMV seems to only care about itself and its own way of working. It wants to frog march as many people as it can as quickly as possible through its own processes. As a result, it gives customers no ability to affect how they’re being treated. They can endure it or leave.

      Because they don’t have competition, the DMV doesn’t have to care about relationships. And, because they aren’t seen as a source of value, there’s no incentive to improve the experience beyond lessening their own costs. Few businesses, however, are in that position. Most face stiff competition, either from direct competitors or indirect ones (like workarounds). Comcast may have a particular territory locked-up as the exclusive cable provider, but it still faces competition from satellite TV and even piracy.

      The DMV and Disney show the range of interactions you can have with a company. When your child chats with a Disneyland character, the interaction is free-flowing. The character improvises on the spot to reflect whatever your child is saying and doing. By contrast, the DMV insists that you do exactly as it says, regardless of what you need or how you respond. There is seldom room for deviation, special circumstances, or even a modicum of graciousness.

      Design experts typically specify three major types of interactions you can have with a company: top-down, co-created, and improvised. Of course, many experiences can straddle or fall between them, but for simplicity’s sake, look at them one at a time.

      POTENTIAL TOUCHPOINTS

      Organizations connect with their customers (or governments with their constituents) in many ways. There are many kinds of touchpoints where the relationship is created and reinforced or starts to fail. Most organizations don’t plan for a complete list, don’t pay attention to many important ones, or never synchronize between them, which negates the power of each. Often, this is because touchpoints are the responsibility of different divisions—or even outside organizations. As such, the organization’s strategy doesn’t include them all, leaving gaps and blind spots in the relationship. Here is a (mostly) complete list of the kinds of touchpoints that most organizations create. All are potential points in which the relationship can be grown or destroyed:

      • Physical products

      • Telephone (including support call centers, office answering services, recordings, and voicemail systems)

      • In-person