By Mark Smiciklas

Your small business will have the opportunity to forge relationships with clients, prospects, suppliers and employees across many different touch points. It’s important to understand where these touch points can occur and how the cumulative effects of these independent interactions can shape your brand.

Where are the Touch Points?

We are living in an age where infinite touch points exist – the reach of your small business extends far beyond the traditional four walls of your retail store, office or warehouse. Here are some touch points to be aware of and a few questions to ask yourself while looking at the list (With so many touch points, I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface – please feel free to add to the list by posting a comment):

Questions to Ask Yourself

1. How many of these touch points have an interaction strategy attached to them i.e. Your small business recognizes these as touch points and has a goal in mind when communicating through each channel?
2. How does your small business interact across the various touch points?
3. What could you do to improve your interactions across each touch point?

Interactions Build Brands

Wikipedia defines the relationship between touch points and brand loyalty as follows:

“Individuals develop perceptions of organizations based on the
quality of the touch points they encounter. These perceptions can be
positive or negative. Cumulatively, touch points serve as the foundation
of the relationship, and the organization’s brand.

For most prospects and customers, touch points are the basis on which
purchase decisions are made. Once a customer, it is touch points that
can motivate satisfaction or loyalty, or result in dissatisfaction or
defection.”

Think of your small business as a “brand account” and each Micro-Interaction as a simple banking transaction. All the positive interactions are deposits into your account while all the negative interactions are withdrawals.

Now take it a step further and recognize that the ratio of positive:negative interactions needs to be quite high in order for your small business brand to be successful. What is the ratio for success- 100:1; 1000:1; 10,000:1? Your stakeholders will decide how many positive interactions will be required to build trust in your company, product or service and how many negative interactions will be tolerated before your brand becomes bankrupt.

Check out Seth’s blog for a good example of how fine the line is between positive and negative interactions.

Being aware of as many of your touch points as possible will help you begin to think of ways to communicate across each channel. Recognizing the importance of each interaction will hopefully allow you to embrace the philosophy that every relationship and every transaction is the most important when it comes to building your small business brand.