Key takeaways:
- Marketing operations involve numerous complex touchpoints that can lead to issues if overlooked.
- Forgotten touchpoints may result in revenue loss, unanswered complaints, and outdated information.
- Organizing touchpoints into a customer journey map facilitates systematic checks and clear accountability.
- Assigning accountability to each touchpoint ensures team members take responsibility.
- Tools like Out of Dark enable easy assignment of accountability, leading to efficient management and issue prevention.
As we often mention on our blog, marketing operations are getting more and more complex – they have a broader scope than ever, require more tools than ever, have more variations than ever, and are better targeted than ever.
They also contain more customer touchpoints than ever – and these touchpoints are themselves more complicated than ever. What this simply means is that if the whole marketing apparatus of a company isn’t organized, there are more than enough places (touchpoints) where things can go wrong – and if they do, it’s not guaranteed it will be immediately spotted. It can go unnoticed for weeks or even months.
Since the responsibilities are usually formulated only very vaguely and there’s no single person accountable for a given touchpoint, there’s not a lot of motivation for individuals to keep track of them – if something happens, there’s always a possibility to hide behind other team members who “forgot”, too.
Forgotten touchpoints can cause many issues: revenue streams they were connected to may dry up, customer reviews or complaints may go unanswered, outdated ads may still run and cost money, outdated information can still be communicated to customers, and so on. Usually, it’s the customers themselves who point this out, but by that time the damage is already done.
The first thing that has to happen to mitigate this is to put together all customer touchpoints – they rarely are, and therefore any systematic checks are difficult. They can be nicely organized into a customer journey map where they will not only be all together but also in a logical sequence that will make them easy to browse.
Second, every touchpoint should be assigned to at least one accountable person. Whatever happens or doesn’t happen with the touchpoint is on this person. Sounds good in theory, but how to assign them in real life without creating yet another Excel spreadsheet or Trello list? Sure, this would do the job, but at the price of being difficult to navigate – and we all know how these docs end up. It’d be best to keep the accountability tracking right where it belongs – in the touchpoint itself.
If you used Out of Dark for creating your customer journey map, you have this accountability feature built in. You can simply open a touchpoint (called Activity in Out of Dark) and choose which team member(s) will be in charge. That’s it.
By clearly assigning accountability, team members will have a clear understanding of what they’re primarily responsible for, and they will know that everybody else does, too, so they will be motivated to look after it – if they don’t, it will be very clear they’ve messed up.
But even your team members will appreciate this feature – if they need to talk/ask about something regarding a specific touchpoint, they don’t have to go around asking who to ask because they will have this information in the touchpoint reference.
In the end, a lot of time, money, and company reputation will be saved. CMOs won’t have to wake up in the middle of the night wondering whether there isn’t something bad going on at the moment – because if there is, there are assigned people who will spot and take care of it.
