Creating and Refining Your EPOC Strategy
Brands that excel in both the Age of AI and the Age of Distraction are those that prioritize every point of contact (EPOC) with their customers.
This approach, known as the EPOC strategy, is crucial for brands aiming to foster deeper customer loyalty while driving sustained growth—as well as capturing, and keeping, the attention of their customers.
But there are a few terms that come into play here that you need to understand before you can develop your EPOC strategy: touchpoint, customer journey, and omnichannel user experience.
Here’s how I define them.
- A touchpoint is any interaction your customer has with your brand.
- A customer journey is the end-to-end process that a customer goes through in order to complete a task over time.
- The omnichannel user experience is a macro-level user experience that addresses the whole customer journey, meaning it takes into account users’ (or customers’) transitions across channels, and their ability to smoothly proceed through various journey stages over time.
It’s important to remember that your customers’ experience with your brand lives inside of a dynamic ecosystem that’s made up of lots of individual touchpoints.
Your customer has a pressing business problem—what we think of as the “inciting incident” in fiction—and embarks on a journey to solve their problem, a journey that ultimately results in them hiring you.
Along that customer journey, your customer has a number of interactions with your brand.
Perhaps they read a piece of thought leadership you’ve published, then fill out your contact form, then have a conversation with a sales person, then read through some marketing collateral your sales rep sent them, then see one of your trucks on the road, then scroll past one of your LinkedIn posts.
To you, each of those interactions is separate.
But to your customer, it feels like one, single interaction with your brand.
This is because your brand, from your customers’ perspective, primarily boils down to a feeling they have about you.
Which is precisely why your EPOC strategy is so important.
Focusing on EPOC allows you to systematically think about every possible point of contact your customer might have with your brand.
Thinking about every point of contact, every micro-level user experience, allows you to optimize each waypoint on your customers’ journey, which means that the experience they’re having, their omnichannel user experience, will be altogether better.
Kim Salazar, senior user experience specialist with Neilson Norman Group, the world leaders in research-based user experience, writes, “A great customer experience is the product of an effective and well-designed omnichannel ecosystem. To achieve it, organizations must research and understand the customer journeys that users take…To every single customer, a journey is one holistic interaction with your organization, one experience rather than a collection of individual experiences.”
The margin between success and stagnation, or worse, between success and failure, often hinges on the quality of those individual experiences, because those individual experiences ultimately form the entire brand experience.
It’s those small moments that create the big moment, a moment that’s either good or bad for your business.
Salazar later points out that customers won’t understand or tolerate experiences that are fragmented, meaning that one poor individual interaction can taint the entire experience.
Understanding EPOC is essential to improving your overall brand experience. It’s also incredibly helpful as you level up your business.
With that in mind, here are three steps you can take as you attempt establish or optimize your EPOC strategy.
- Map Your Customer Journey: Identify all touchpoints and interactions a customer has with your brand from initial awareness to post-purchase support.
- Conduct a Touchpoint Audit: Evaluate the effectiveness and consistency of each touchpoint. Identify gaps, redundancies, or pain points in the customer experience.
- Define Your Brand Voice and Values: Ensure that your brand’s personality and core values are clearly articulated and can be consistently applied across all touchpoints.
Even though we’re in the midst of a sea change that appears to be as consequential and transformative as the adoption of the internet was, where everything from commerce to marketing to the role of work itself is in the midst of a metamorphosis, the fundamentals of business still matter—at least for now.
It’s still feasible for your brand to stand out in the Age of Distraction and the Age of AI. It’s still possible to be heard amidst the noise.
However, in order to do this—to distinguish yourself in the mind of your customer, to tell your story memorably—you need to think about your brand experience in a much more comprehensive and intentional way.
You need to think in terms of EPOC.
