Customer Touchpoints

List every point where a customer meets your process, note who or what delivers it behind the scenes, and rank which few make or break the relationship. This is the operations view of the journey: use it when you need to know what to change in the process, not only how the customer feels.

Customer journey mapping has been reviewed conceptually but the technique itself is a practitioner tool that no review shows to improve outcomes: practice, not research. Moments of truth is an executive's account (Carlzon, 1987), a prompt rather than a finding. Treat every statement about how customers feel as a hypothesis until a customer confirms it.

Use it when:

• Customers complain at the seams between teams, channels or suppliers, and each team says its own part works.
• You are improving a service process and need to see which contacts depend on which people and systems.
• You run a small business and want to know which two interactions deserve your attention first.

Skip it when:

• You want the marketing and sales view with stages and drop-off: use 6.3 Customer Journeys Map.
• You need to design the whole service with front stage and back stage in detail: use 6.14 Service Blueprint Lite.

Customers experience a journey across touchpoints, not across your departments, so quality judged inside each function can still add up to a poor experience at the seams. Journey thinking has been reviewed conceptually (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016), but the mapping practice itself is little tested and its terminology inconsistent. The second idea is that a few interactions weigh far more than the rest. It comes from an executive's account of running an airline (Carlzon, 1987), not from a research program.

So this page records the delivery chain behind each contact, because pain points cluster where responsibility changes hands, and it forces a ranking: a map where everything matters prioritizes nothing. The limit: your picture of the customer's feelings is a guess. The page therefore includes a step where you check it with a real customer before you act.

Pick one customer type and one goal. A journey for "everyone" fits no one.

Strong answer: "Customer: a private cyclist with a broken bike. Goal: ride again before spring, at a known price. Trigger: the chain slips on the way to work."

Illustrative example: the shop, the roles and the figures are made up.

A small bicycle workshop in Sweden gets many complaints in March, when repairs peak. The owner maps one journey: a private cyclist who needs the bike back before spring.

Section 2: six touchpoints: online booking, drop-off, the quote, the repair, a pickup notice and pickup. The worst row is the quote: the mechanic phones during work hours, and the customer often misses the call.

Section 3: two moments of truth: the quote (price surprise) and the pickup notice (sent after closing time, so customers arrive to a locked door).

Section 4: the owner asks three recent customers to walk through the journey. Two raise the quote unprompted; none mentions booking, which the owner had worried about.

Section 5: a text-message quote with approve and decline links, and a pickup notice sent only during opening hours. Owner: the workshop manager. Test for one month.