A Christchurch company sat down to count every moment a customer touches their business. They were expecting a list. What they got was 58 of them.
Ask most owners the same question and you will hear five or six. Enquiry, quote, job, invoice, maybe a follow up call. That is the number you get when you count the moments you are proud of.
Fifty eight is what you get when you count the moments that actually happen. The truck driver. The after hours phone. The statement that goes out on the 20th. The photograph someone takes of a machine when it comes back on the deck at 4:45 on a Friday.
Here is what turns that from an interesting exercise into a genuine strategy. The company doing the counting hires out the same machines as its competitors. Same brands, same specifications, similar rates. On the product itself, there is nothing left to argue about.
When the product is identical, price is the only lever that requires no thinking
Accessman Group started in 1994 when a Christchurch electrician bought a single scissor lift and hired it out when he was not using it himself. The fleet is now well past 1,300 machines, according to the company's own materials, with branches, franchise operations and operator training attached. Darren Sandford came into the chief executive role after 22 years working across Australia, southern Africa and the Gulf, with stints at Hilti, Bobcat and a decade with Caterpillar in New Zealand, where he led the Gough Cat to Terra Cat rebrand.
On the Marketing 4 Business podcast he named his competitive problem without flinching. His business hires out the same gear as the competition. So the white space, the only place left to win, sits in the experience wrapped around it.
Now watch what most businesses do when they find themselves in exactly that position.
They discount. Not because discounting works, but because it is the only response that requires no design work at all. A ten per cent price drop can be approved in a meeting on a Tuesday. Rebuilding the way machines get checked back in takes a list, an owner, and six weeks of unglamorous follow through.
The second most common response is to put "exceptional service" on the website. That is a value, not a plan. Nobody has ever won a repeat customer with an adjective.
The alternative is to accept something uncomfortable: if your advantage cannot live in the product, it has to live in a set of specific, boring, nameable moments. And you cannot improve moments you have never written down.
A touch point is any contact, whether or not you think of it as customer facing
A customer touch point is any point of contact between a customer and your business, at any stage of the relationship. That includes your website and your Google listing, and it equally includes the quote, the delivery driver, the machine itself, the invoice, the overdue reminder, and the conversation about damage when the gear comes back.
The most expensive misconception in this whole area is that customer experience means a salesperson talking to a customer. It does not. The customer forms a view of your business at every one of those points, and the sales conversation is a thin slice of them.
Which means your best salesperson can run a flawless meeting, and the relationship can still be quietly damaged by an invoice with the wrong purchase order number on it, sent three weeks late, from a system nobody has properly looked at since 2019.
The leaks are in the seams, not the stages
Here is the pattern I keep seeing when businesses run this exercise, and it is worth more than the count itself.
The stages are all owned. Marketing owns awareness. Sales owns the quote. Operations owns delivery. Finance owns the invoice. Every stage has a name attached and a manager who reports on it.
The seams between those stages are owned by nobody. And the seams are where the customer's experience actually breaks.
Take the most mundane example from Darren's own operation. When a machine goes out and comes back, staff photograph it before and after. Manually. Which means the quality of that record depends entirely on who is holding the phone, in what light, in which yard, at the end of a long week.
Follow the chain from there. That touch point produces the evidence for damage conversations. Inconsistent evidence produces disputed charges. Disputed charges produce the phone call the customer will remember far more vividly than the six deliveries that went perfectly. And the staff member who could have spent five minutes asking how the job went spent it photographing a scissor lift instead.
One touch point. A revenue risk, an admin cost, and a wasted human moment, all from something that appears on nobody's marketing plan and sits in the gap between operations, finance and customer service.
So when you write your own list, do one extra thing. Put a name next to every touch point. Not a department. A person.
The ones with no name are your shortlist before you have scored anything at all. Done properly, this exercise produces a map of accountability, not just a map of experience, and the second one is far more useful than the first.
How to run the test in your own business
- Pick one journey. New customer hiring for the first time, or an existing customer placing a repeat order. One journey, not all of them.
- Write the stages. Most businesses land on five to ten. Awareness, enquiry, quote, delivery, use, return, invoice, follow up.
- List every touch point under each stage. Keep going well past the point where it starts to feel excessive. If you stop at 12, you have stopped too early.
- Put a person's name against each one. The unnamed ones go straight on the shortlist.
- Pick three. Not ten. Three to work on.
- Attach one number to each. Quote turnaround in hours. Disputed invoices per month. Minutes of yard time per machine return.
- Diary the re-run for six months. The map is a snapshot and it goes off.
Do this with the people who actually touch the customer, not with the leadership team in a room by themselves. The person who knows what happens at touch point 41 is the one answering the phone at 7am, and they will tell you in about four minutes if anyone bothers to ask.
Where AI belongs on the list, and where it does not
Once the list is in front of you, the automation opportunities stop being theoretical. Darren points straight at automated damage detection on returning machines: consistent records, fewer arguments, and yard staff freed up to have an actual conversation with the customer.
That is the right shape for AI in an operation. Take the repetitive, variable quality, low judgment work, make it consistent, then move the human time to where relationships get built.
He is equally clear about the limit. The thing that does not transfer is judgment. You can get a machine to produce the output. Someone still has to decide whether the output is any good.
There is a marketing version of the same point, which Scott Wilson makes in the same conversation. Ask an AI system a question and you get a fluent, agreeable answer, because agreeable is what it is built to be. What it does not have is conviction. Which is why his agency is putting more money into videographers rather than less, even though real people on camera cost far more than something synthetic.
If you are about to automate anything on your list, two touch points deserve protection: the first contact, and the recovery contact where something has already gone wrong. Those are the two where a customer most needs to feel that a person has taken responsibility, and they are the two most businesses hand over first.
Why this works particularly well here
New Zealand is small. In most sectors everyone knows everyone, referral does the heavy lifting, and you cannot outspend your way to an advantage the way a business in a market of 80 million can. What you can do is out-detail them, and a list of 58 moments is a list of 58 places to do it.
There is a cultural reason too, and it is more interesting. Darren describes research he came across mapping how different countries respond to leadership, with South Africa well down the command and control end, Australia nearer the middle, and New Zealand sitting out on its own at the collaborative end. Issue a flat directive to a Kiwi crew and the most likely response is a question about who you think you are.
For this exercise, that is an asset. Touch point mapping only works if the people doing the work tell you the truth about what happens at 7am. A workforce that expects to be consulted will hand you an accurate list. In a command culture, you get the list your manager thinks you want to see.
Three ways this goes wrong
You map every journey at once. Four journeys, 200 touch points, no decisions. One journey, 58 touch points, three projects. Pick one.
You do it without the front line. A leadership team can reliably name about 60 per cent of the touch points in their own business, and it is always the same 40 per cent missing: the administrative ones and the after hours ones.
You treat the count as the deliverable. The number is a diagnostic. If the exercise ends with a nicely formatted map and no owner, no measure and no date, you have run a workshop, not a project.
What to do this week
Book two hours. Get the people who answer the phone, drive the truck and send the invoices in the same room. Pick one journey and list every moment a customer touches your business until the list gets boring.
Then put a name next to each one, and see how many have nobody.
If the number surprises you, that is the point. Every one of those moments is either building your reputation or quietly eroding it, and most of them are currently nobody's job.
Darren Sandford's full conversation with Scott Wilson on strategy, customer experience and where AI actually earns its place is on the Marketing 4 Business podcast.
Want the full conversation? Listen to "Structure Follows Strategy: The Rule Most Business Owners Get Backwards" with Darren Sandford on the Marketing 4 Business podcast, available on your favourite podcast streaming service, or watch it now on YouTube.
