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Brand Blog: Rate Those Customer Touch Points!

So your agency is still proudly giving customers those cheap plastic pens that always leak?

What happens when a valuable client reports you’ve ruined his best shirt (even if “best” is a matter of taste since you know how he dresses)? And the pen has your agency name on it!

Yikes! What can we do about this?

This is probably a symptom of a larger problem: Who is managing your agency’s brand touch points? Have you rated them lately? Have you isolated some that need work?

Let’s back up. What are brand touch points? These are all things about your firm—tangible and intangible—that impact a customer, prospect, employee, business partner, media, and community and opinion leaders. Some are obvious and easier to define—a giveaway item such as a logo pen. Some aren’t—customer service, for example.

To help your thinking about your touch points, here’s a fun and easy exercise for your agency:

Rate your brand’s touch points on a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being awful, mediocre, or inadequate, while a 10 is really solid).

Mix and match the list, rotating them as applicable or necessary—and obviously, some are sensitive, such as asking about the front desk support. Employees and partners should rate the list. Then have some, or many, customers rate some or all of the list. (This is a wonderful exercise to do on a continuous basis, by the way.)

Here are some brand touch points:

• Business name
• Company purpose/vision
• Customer perception
• Telephone and computer systems
• Employees and consultants as “responsible partners”
• Employee benefits program
• Receptionist
• Office: location, look (inside and out), parking, visibility, signage
• Ingredient brands (i.e. your carriers)
• Name recognition, media coverage, what opinion leaders say about you
• Prices
• Services and products
• Marketing materials, business cards, sales kits
• Giveaways (mugs, hats, pens, etc.)
• Advertising
• Web presence
• Customer communications

When you have some combined scores, work on the 1s, 2s and 3s first. (You likely won’t have to worry about the 8s, 9s and 10s.)

Be creative with your solutions. Watch for those taboo comments, such as: “We’ve handed out those pens for 20 years and we’re not going to stop now. People like ‘em!”

Okay, but if they’re actually hurting your brand, why do it? Why a cheap pen? Is that your brand? No!

Why not take the 500 bucks you spend on 2,000 cheap pens and put that towards, say, 100 really nice pens and give them to your best customers who pay you the most, complain the least, and give you the most referrals. Make sense?

The local dry cleaner might not be happy, but can always give them a nice pen as well.

Peter van Aartrijk (peter@insuranceisfun.com) (peter@Aartrijk.com) is chief fun officer at Insurance Is Fun! This is adapted from Zoom: Focusing on Brand Dominance, a guidebook by Peter and former colleague Larry Acord for Trusted Choice, the consumer branding program sponsored by the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America.