Employees have far more influence over the quality of the Customer Journey than they—or their companies—imagine. By knowing which touchpoints along the journey they can influence, directly or indirectly, employees can ensure those touchpoints result in positive feelings. For employees to know what those touchpoints are and what they can do to improve them, touchpoints need to be part of the employee communication strategy.

This is the latest installment in a series of posts exploring a new model of employee communication, designed to deliver measurable results that demonstrate the impact on the organization in ways that matter to leaders.

The four overlapping circles at the center of the model represent the best opportunities for employee communication to affect an organization on a day-to-day basis. This post looks at customer touchpoints, the second of three elements of the third circle, the Customer Experience (CX).

The customer journey is the cumulative sum of all of a customer’s experiences with your organization. These experiences tend to be linear: first experience with the company, first purchase, customer support interactions, and so on. The way to cultivate the customer experience is to understand every step of the journey and ensure each step meets or exceeds expectations. As I mentioned in the last installment, there are three kinds of touchpoints on the customer journey:

• Interaction with your people, products, and services
• Digital engagement
• Your outreach efforts

The customer experience/journey defines when customers encounter some of these touchpoints. Marketing, advertising, and PR create opportunities for customers to encounter the brand pre-purchase. Store displays, the retail environment, packaging, and salespeople represent some of the purchase touchpoints. Customer service and support, post-purchase surveys, and customer forums are some of the post-purchase touchpoints a customer can experience.

Customers also cross paths with the brand at unexpected times. Hearing something about a product or service from a friend or co-worker during a conversation. Seeing the product come up in a news story. Getting an Amazon request to answer a question some other consumer posted to the product page. During the customer journey, the opportunities for touching the product are endless.

As I worked on this post, a news item crossed my feeds that spoke directly to this point. The article, from CNN, told the story of a Southwest Airlines flight delayed for 2-1/2 hours. One passenger on the flight tweeted, “My flight to Washington DC has been delayed for almost 2 and a half hours and I was getting HEATED until this gate agent started playing games with everyone waiting to pass the time and now I’m like I’ll wait all damn night if you keep this up.”

Among the games: Which passenger has the worst driver’s license photo? The agent awarded $25 vouchers and Southwest merchandise to the winners.

I shared the story on Facebook. A longtime friend commented, “I was on a delayed flight out of Vegas a few weeks ago. The gate agents had some volunteers play a game with others cheering us on. I won some socks! SWA is the best.” She shared a photo of her socks.

Think about it: When was the last time a flight delay was a positive airline experience? These are the kinds of stories communicators should share to spark ideas among other employees about how they can ensure touchpoints—even those fraught with peril—can maintain a positive relationship with the customer, setting them up for the next step on their journey.

It is incumbent upon internal communicators to help employees understand when and where touchpoints may occur and how they can play a role. In general, employees have four types of opportunities to affect the customer experience in these various touchpoints:

• When it’s their job
• By supporting those whose job it is
• As part of an employee advocacy effort
• In random encounters with customers

When it’s their job

Sales reps, call center staff, and several other classes of employees routinely interact with customers during touchpoints that are easy to identify: sales pre-purchase, customer service post-purchase, and so on.

In general, the sales team has a good handle on who the customer is. Often, though, that’s less true for the call center, which is often measured based on how many calls they handle, not how well they handle them. Customer reactions are bound to improve when call center employees take the time to really address their issues. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, in his book “Delivering Happiness,” notes that it’s fine if a Zappos customer service rep spends the entire shift on the phone with just one customer—as long as the customer is satisfied at the end of the call.

In general, employees who interact with customers should know where in the journey their touchpoints occur, what they look like in a perfect world, and what impact they have on future touchpoints.

For example, employees who respond to inquiries from social media can make or break a touchpoint. I recently began using a beta service called Streamyard, an alternative to the defunct Google Hangouts on Air. Every question I have asked via Streamyward’s Facebook page—and there have been several—has been answered quickly, accurately, and with a genuine appreciation for my business. Even when I was frustrated with a feature I didn’t like, I was quickly given workarounds. It’s one of the reasons I have been recommending Streamyward to anyone who will listen.

Another story: I was conducting a focus group among front-line workers in a warehouse retail chain, part of an internal communication audit. I asked about worker autonomy and they were effusive in their response. The founder believed in it; it’s in the company’s DNA. I asked for an example and they gave me one—a good one. Then I asked how they shared what they had done with other stores in the chain. How did we do what now? was the befuddled reply.

Too few internal communicators help teams communicate with each other, sharing new ideas and best practices. The result is that each team, department, or business unit remains a bubble from which knowledge and information cannot escape. If one team figures out how to enhance a touchpoint, every other team should be able to find out about it and figure out if and how to apply it to their work.

By supporting those whose job it is

I once worked for a company president who frequently said, “If you don’t work directly for the customer, help someone who does.”

That’s good advice for a lot of employees. (It might be hard for someone who spends their day doing data entry or benefits administration.) Helping employees identify who in their hierarchy has direct dealings with the customer can make it easier for those employees to figure out what they can do to lend a hand. Even better: Make it easy for every employee who interfaces with customers to report their experiences down the chain, keeping members of the team in constant touch with customer input and feedback.

You can also aggregate feedback from different teams to create a high-level picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s efforts to make every touchpoint a positive step on the customer’s journey. I like the idea of an intranet resource that collects all of the customer feedback obtained through various mechanisms, sliced and diced by department, geographic region, demographics, and any other criteria that matters to your organization.

Ride-alongs (and their equivalents) are also great ways for employees who don’t interact with customers to grasp what the customer encounters. At one time, executives from one of the car rental companies (I’m pretty sure it was Avis) were required to spend one day every quarter working as a rental agent behind the counter. Another idea I’d like to see: Employees participating in a ride-along-type program should share their experience in a blog post, video, photo essay, or article so other employees get the benefit of what they learned.

As part of an employee advocacy effort

Employee advocacy (or ambassador) programs present unique opportunities for employees whose regular jobs don’t put them in front of customers to interact directly when them. On more than one occasion when, frustrated by a bad experience, I tweeted my displeasure, only to have a volunteer employee ambassador reach out to me and find a way to make it right. (It’s the reason I’m still a Sprint customer.)

In most companies, volunteer ambassadors undergo training about how to engage with customers. The roles they play vary. At Dell, for example, subject matter experts volunteered to jump into forums where problems are being discussed (a social media monitoring program identifies these issues quickly, then forwards the information to the volunteer SME.) At GM, when Christopher Barger was still managing social media, every member of the team monitored and participated in popular car-focused forums, establishing themselves as regular members of the group so when a GM issue arose, they wouldn’t be perceived as parachuting in from GM headquarters.

In random encounters with customers

I was speaking several years ago at a conference. A number of us, speakers and attendees, went to dinner. I found myself seated next to a communicator from Coca-Cola. As we chatted, I asked if the Tab and Fresca brands were still around. I told him that my mom used to drink these when I was growing up; they had a nostalgic place in my heart but I never saw them in stores. He told me they were in limited distribution and we moved on to other topics. A couple weeks later, a box arrived at my house. I opened it and found a bouquet of Tab and Fresca cans. Each can was taped to a sturdy stick, each one of which was burrowed into a styrofoam ball that was glued to a heavy base. When I saw it was a bouquet, I’m not kidding. The card attached to the bouquet said something like, “I couldn’t resist the opportunity to help you relive those memories.”

I told someone I knew in Atlanta, Coca-Cola’s headquarters, about this experience. Her response: “That’s such a Coke thing to do.” In other words, taking opportunities of random customer encounters is baked into Coca-Cola’s culture.

How can you help shape the culture of your organization to support these kinds of responses to unexpected customer touchpoints?

I’ll focus on ecosystems in the final post on the Customer Experience before we move on to the Employee Experience, the last of the major components of the model.

The graphics for this series were created by Brian O’Mara-Croft.