Customer Touchpoints - What's in the Packaging

There are many points along the customer journey with your company where the customer has the opportunity to interact with your brand, whether it’s a light touchpoint (like glancing at your logo or an ad) or something more substantial, like visiting a store, buying their first product, or calling your company. Ideally, you’ve spent time thinking through the main ways a customer may find you, and you’ve engineered that meeting to impress your message on the customer. 

When you consider a pure-play ecommerce company, the need to maximize each interaction along the customer journey is even higher (if it’s even possible to have a higher level of importance). Often the companies I’ve worked with have put a great deal of effort into making sure their websites have a cohesive experience (sometimes even personalized), have trained their customer service people to be knowledgeable, professional, and friendly, and have quality content on the web, including their ads. They have not, however, thought of the experience when the customer receives the package.

In some ways, Amazon has thought a bit about that experience because every box from Amazon that arrives at my doorstep has the familiar Amazon smile on it. I have to admit, it’s really nice to get a box from Amazon. And there is the confidence that I’ll most likely receive it on time, and that if I need to return it, they’ll take it back nearly painlessly.

If you’re playing in the ecommerce space, Amazon is a formidable opponent in terms of sheer market share and customer experience. Yet Amazon is such a huge player in the ecommerce space, that they are not able to do much more for this touchpoint than to put their logo on the outside of the box.

I ordered some fountain pen cartridges the other day from The Goulet Pen Co., and received the envelope today. I’ve looked for ink on Amazon, but it was too hard to know whether I was getting authentic ink and whether it was really a quality brand (I’m a fountain pen novice). Somehow I ended up on Goulet’s site, and they had good options for ink that were comparable to what was available on Amazon, good usability, and good information, so I ordered some. I was so impressed with the package I received today that it prompted me to write a blog post!

It was a small order -- just a box of 18 ink cartridges for $11 with shipping. Here is a list of things I saw that were small personal touches:

• Instead of only the company name on the envelope, there was the name Rachel Goulet followed by the company name.

• The packing slip had a personal note on it

• The envelope included four items I had not ordered, a nice bookmark, a sticker, a little sucker, and a business-card size note about why they took so much time packaging the item

Will I think of them again? Every time I take the ink out of the package. Will I order from them again? Probably. Why? I guess it’s because I want to feel like I’m buying my stuff from somebody. It’s like I actually received some personal attention with my package.

These days, we even send our gifts directly from Amazon to our loved ones, and we have Amazon include a little gift note (which I usually don’t even notice). While this automation has driven prices down and created incredibly efficient logistics pathways, it has also created an increasing hunger for human touch. While this disconnection from each other in society is, in my opinion, not at all healthy, it creates an incredible opportunity for smaller companies to stand out to customers.  

So what are you doing to think through your customers’ engagement with your company? We’d love to hear a few ways you’re growing in this area!