In part I of my series about building unforgettable customer experiences, I shared some of the reasons why you want to focus on the experience you're delivering to your customers, defined what I mean by a memorable customer experience, and talked about the very place that every company should begin: a customer experience statement.

With our customer experience statement in place we're ready to put our money where our mouth is. It's time to put into action the very things that you define in your customer experience statement. Uh oh! I can hear some of you saying, "But we've defined the experience we want our customers to have in our customer experience statement. Isn't that good enough? Won't the staff know what to do?"

No! Think about it for a moment. As companies grow and staff change over time, things become unclear - priorities change, leadership changes, staff turnover happens. And with just the customer experience statement and nothing to back it up, how will one staff member interpret the statement differently from another? How will each member of your team know what the statement means to them and their jobs?

To really see the payoffs of delivering memorable customer experiences, you must do it consistently. There's no room for deviation or grey areas, no room for different interpretations of what it means to be 'memorable'.

After you've defined your customer experience statement, the next step towards delivering memorable customer experiences consistently is to map your touch points - the moments of contact between you and your customers. Make sure to map the entire experience from the first time a client hears about you or reads about you (say on the Internet, for example), to the initial contact, through the sales and support cycles, and ending with what you do after the sale. And it includes all of the different ways that you touch the customer: phone, fax, mail, Internet, etc.

There are three steps to mapping your touch points.

• Define the total experience that customers have with your company. Where does the experience begin and where does it end?
  
  
• Define the gates, or major points, at which customers come in contact with your organization. This is typically pre-sales, sales, support, and follow up. The pre-sales stuff includes all of the ways that a potential client hears about your company: word of mouth, advertising, Internet, conferences, associations, speaking engagements, etc. The sales stuff includes all of the ways that you touch your potential customer during the sales process. The support stuff deals with the touch points from the time the sale is made throughout all follow-on dealings with your company (This is where customer experiences typically break down because companies haven't clearly defined what the experience looks and feels like here). Follow up is the last gate - these are touch points dealing with staying in contact with your clients: marketing to them and supporting them on an ongoing basis to ensure that they continue to buy from you.
  
  
• Map all of the touch points within each gate. Once you've defined your customer experience gates, it's time to map each touch point. Take the sales gate, for example. What are all of the different ways you make sales? Do you have a sales force? Do you make sales via the Web? Do you take telephone orders? Define the touch points involved in each of these sales processes. Do the same thing with all of your customer experience gates.
  
  

Who should be involved in defining the customer experience gates and mapping the touch points? Everyone! All levels of employees. Try and do this without involving your team and watch them rebel. You'll get buy-in and tons of great ideas by involving your staff in this process.

In article 3...I'll talk about the next step in the process called defining customer expectations and emotions. Stay tuned. In the mean time, I'd love to hear about your challenges and successes in delivering customer experiences. Email me.

Ruth-Anne Boyd is the Business Development Director at The Customer Experience Company. She is an award-winning writer, consultant, speaker and trainer with over 15 years experience in plain language communications and workflow simplification. Ruth-Anne has won 11 awards for her communication material. She is a frequently invited speaker, and a member of PLAIN (the Plain Language Association International), Canadian Women in Communications (CWC) and DigitalEve.