Customer experience: The touchpoint- contexts-qualities nomenclature

In today’s business landscape, customers interact with firms in complex, nonlinear ways through diverse touchpoints such as online and mobile channels. These customers also expect personalized and contextualized experiences. This puts great pressure on firms. It is thus not surprising that customer experience is a key battleground on which firms fight to attract, retain, and develop customers. Failure to deliver risks losing customers to competitors who can provide a more compelling customer experience. Despite the tremendous growth of opportunities for gathering and analyzing data, many firms are at a loss regarding how to win the customer experience game. A key starting point toward successful customer experience management is a clear understanding of what customer experience entails, and a common language to discuss customer experience initiatives. This chapter zooms in on De Keyser et al.’s (2020) language system—the touchpoints‒contexts‒qualities (TCQ) nomenclature—and discusses three ways in which it can be used. To this end, we also rely on the expertise of a United States marketing agency that employs the TCQ framework with its clients. Essentially, TCQ offers a descriptive language to aid firms and managers in organizing thoughts, discussions, and projects linked to customer experience, in a clear and consistent way. Moreover, TCQ is not limited to any specific domain, industry, or context and may be applied to business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer, business-to-business, and business-to-government settings. Ultimately, it offers a simple, manageable, and flexible way to take a step forward in the customer experience space.