Find Better Architecture — Here’s a (Touchpoint) Map
Align improvement efforts with moments-that-matter. Touchpoints are powerful levers in the digital transformation toolkit.
This article highlights journey and touchpoint maps as strategic tools. It shows how an enterprise architect can create and use these tools in her practice, and why it’s beneficial. While set in the context of enterprise architecture, this is useful for any consultant, technologist or driver of change.
These strategy tools offer fantastic, at-a-glance insights into the customer, employees and the broader organization. They help us intelligently shape large strategic investments, scope those medium-sized projects and even drive the finest of fine-tune system or process adjustments.
Key Concepts
- A touchpoint is a point of interaction between a persona and organization to exchange information, provide service, or handle transactions. These may occur in any number of different channels.
- A channel is a medium or platform where interactions between a persona and organization take place.
- A persona is an abstract representation of a typical user or customer.
- A journey represents a series of steps that a persona goes through when they engage with an organization’s product, service, or brand.
Moments That Matter
A great way to start with touchpoints is with those moments-that-matter. Why? Just ask any Chief Marketing Office, VP of Brand Strategy, or your Chief People or Customer Officer. The folks over at Pyn have a fantastic definition, as does Gartner.
Sometimes called “moments of truth,” we focus on these special touchpoints because when people encounter them during their journey that moment has an outsized impact on the experience. There’s incredible leverage in these moments; great risk and great reward. Get them right, ensure they’re positive, seamless, easy to produce, valuable — and as our brand, marketing and people-focused executives will confirm — these moments drive positive sentiment and/or revenue. Fail, create friction or disconnect in these moments, and we experience loss. It’s a big range, but it includes everything from lost revenue, data, customer or employee attrition, and negative social sentiment.
Iterate and Optimize
Moments-that-matter, when well understood, include well defined metrics. Using these key moments to align work, I can take some risk out of my prioritization efforts. It makes it easy to demonstrate we’re aligned to the right goals, working on the right things and driving valuable outcomes. The goal is to improve how we create, deliver or capture value. In a world of finite resources, I want to avoid science projects, and tech development for tech development sake. I want to prioritize work important to the business.
The touchpoint focuses the lens to a moment of interaction. It brings persona, journey and channel to a point. If something about that moment is sub-optimal, that supporting context helps me focus and quickly identify opportunities for improvement.
Get to Better Architecture
Isn’t it funny how often it comes back to people, process, technology? This touchpoint-focused lens lets us peer into all those aspects of the architecture. I can inspect how the touchpoint is produced and how people work together to produce it. I can examine how that moment of interaction shows up in enterprise systems. The image below offers a deeper view. The efficiency and effectiveness of job performers, data and systems — these can all be made better.
Even if the touchpoint is not a special moment, we can inspect it the same way. Consider an example. In discovery conversations, I often hear something like, “the whole promos thing is a mess,” or, “promotions in mobile is just broken.” It’s a starting point. The ‘promo’ is a touchpoint. The customer is on some type of buyer-journey. She’s in the mobile channel. Discovery yields more detail.
Clarifying questions follow
- Is it the promo itself? Are promos a mess in other channels?
- Is it how we create promos? Is creation too slow? too complex?
- Is it the data we collect, or fail to collect? Can all that need it access it?
- Is it a technology issue? Too many screens? Too many systems?
I can build shared understanding with a touchpoint map. With map in hand, I can use it to facilitate improvement conversations. I can inspect and optimize various components of the architecture.
Create Your Touchpoint Map — A Layered View
Follow these steps to create a journey/touchpoint map you can use as a strategic tool for your enterprise. As with many strategy tools, a layered view affords different strata to represent slightly different, but connected concerns.
First, the Standard by which All Touchpoint Maps are Judged
Dramatic? Yeah, of course. But, I must credit my favorite example of a touchpoint map. I found it on Pinterest (read about that here) and traced the image source back to this article by Oliver Buchberger. I’ve since expanded and re-swizzled the original to suit my needs. Follow below, and you’ll see it’s a fantastic transformation tool.
Value Stream Layer
I start at the top with the basic value stream of the organization. Simply described, the value stream is an abstraction of the end-to-end sequence of activities required to derive value outcomes with a customer.
Different, connected layers let us facilitate understanding and offer ways to tie in other components. The value stream connects next to the journey steps, but it is especially powerful here because it’s often used in other business strategy tools. Using the same value stream in multiple tools (for example a capability model; read more here) creates linkage.
Journey Steps Layer
Use this layer to describe the series of steps that a persona goes through when they engage. For readability, match the color of each journey step to the color of the aligned value stream sequence above it.
Important detail — observe how this structure lets us model different journeys. The steps above convey that this journey is heavily focused on conversion. I could show a different journey focused on loyalty. The structure lets us consider any number of happy or unhappy path scenarios as we assess and optimize.
Touchpoints Layer
Capture high level touchpoints important to your organization. Again, match the color of each to the color of the aligned journey steps above it.
A few pointers: if you’re capturing too many touchpoints in too fine a grain, constrain to only those important to the journey steps above. If you struggle with touchpoint vs. channel, a useful clarification point to keep in mind is touchpoints are a ‘thing’ and they often present differently in different channels, for example welcome-kit is a touchpoint delivered differently face-to-face vs. email. It will be a tad bit subjective and bring some debate; use the language of your organization.
Performers or Departments Layer
Who made that welcome-kit or that promo? The answer is often, “a lot of people contributed to make that.” Create a list of departments that are required to work together to produce the touchpoint. Plot the intersect, and use the color scheme above.
Different organizations will demonstrate different levels of capability in how they work together to produce touchpoints. Immaturity shows up when I hear,“the whole promos thing is a mess.” Let’s say we unpack promo management. Maybe we find its end-to-end production requires marketing, creative/brand, legal and compliance for content, and then on the tech side it requires web, maybe mobile, plus pricing and product team. Beyond ‘who made it,’ the ‘are we good at making it,’ question arises.
With our touchpoint map we can inspect and improve how these departments collaborate, manage work, approvals and escalations. In some cases, improving the touchpoint requires improving how it is produced.
Systems & Data Layer
Create a list of systems that matter. These should be the systems where the data lands or is consumed to create or add value. Plot the intersect; color scheme aligns up and down.
Different questions emerge here. Are there too many systems, redundant systems? Do we see needless complexity that impedes our ability to see the complete picture? It sometimes becomes clear that touchpoint data should surface in additional systems; sometimes it’s too many.
All the Other Layers — Experience, Persona, Channel, Metrics, Oh My!
Everyone journeys. Or rather, many of us create journey and touchpoint maps. The view above showcases a few layers. The designer may want to represent different concerns, like sentiment. The Chief Digital Officer may ask us to reduce friction in hand-offs between channels. To respond to this request, we add other layers to the map as needed. We can also raise additional elements — duration, counts, gradients — to add other value. The final image below illustrates some of this.
Closing
Using a touchpoint map allows us to inspect and improve many aspects of the architecture. It is a strategy tool, useful across the broad enterprise, but also more narrowly focused to single system or process improvement. Some touchpoints are truly special moments-that-matter. These special touchpoints are critical instances in the user journey where the experience can be significantly shaped and optimized to lead to positive outcomes for the user and the organization. Remember, the touchpoint map is easily extended to add different layers. It is a powerful tool to help create shared understanding for any number of concerns.
Thank you
Thank you for reading. As always, much gratitude to those along the way that influenced me and helped nurture my craft.
