Defining Touchpoints in Service Design

Services are, by nature, intangible. That intangibility is often what separates them from physical products. Still, every service needs some form of tangible expression—artifacts, interactions, environments—that make the experience feel real. Touchpoints are one of the main ways a service becomes tangible.

Exactly what counts as a touchpoint depends on the literature you read. Definitions vary across service design, marketing, branding, and CRM. This article reviews those definitions, highlights where they overlap, and explores how touchpoints are used in service design practice today.

Introduction

A common definition is that touchpoints are the moments of contact between a customer and a service provider—specific places and times where a customer’s need is addressed ¹. Another interpretation is that touchpoints are the elements that make a service experienceable and help build the service’s brand ².

Both definitions highlight very different aspects of touchpoints, and this variety reflects a broader issue: the term has no universally accepted meaning. This creates problems for both research and practice. When designers reference “touchpoints” without a clear shared definition, misunderstandings are easy, and design approaches may become too narrow or inconsistent.

Touchpoints are considered one of the central aspects of service design because they highlight key differences between products and services ^{3 1 4}. Yet despite their centrality, the concept remains abstract. This article examines how touchpoints are defined in different literatures, then focuses on how service design tools use the concept in practice.

Origin of the Word

The term touchpoint appears in several disciplines, and its exact origin in service design is unclear. Early uses can be found in branding and trade publications in the early 1990s, where it referred to moments of contact between a customer and a company (Howard 2007). These early definitions resemble the ones used in service design today, though they weren’t identical.

Before “touchpoint” entered service design, similar concepts already existed:

• Service evidence — the physical elements of a service ⁵
• Service encounter — the interactions between customer and provider ⁶

Other related terms include moment of truth, contact point, point of contact, and customer contact ^{3 7}.

Touchpoints vs. channels

In CRM literature, “touchpoints” and “touch-points” appear frequently, but the field often talks more about multi-channel delivery ^{3 8}. The important distinction is:

• A channel is broad (e.g., “Twitter”, “in-store”, “email”).
• A touchpoint is the specific expression of that channel (e.g., a company’s Twitter account, a store kiosk).

Chris Risdon explains this clearly:

“A single touchpoint — a customer getting their rental car — but a concert of channels: physical retail space, video with remote agent, touchscreen kiosk interface.” ¹

Other uses

Clatworthy notes that the term “emotional touchpoint” is also used in medical research, where it serves as a tool for gathering patient experience data ³. Although the domain differs, the idea—highlighting emotionally significant moments in a journey—aligns closely with service design.

Across all these fields, the term is used in slightly different ways, which helps explain why no unified definition exists.

Touchpoints in Service Design Literature

Instead of trying to create a cross-disciplinary definition, a more useful approach is to focus on how service design research itself treats touchpoints. This helps reveal the practical and conceptual challenges caused by inconsistent definitions.

AT-ONE and Cross-disciplinary Process

The AT-ONE project is a service design research initiative aimed at supporting cross-functional teams in the early stages of service development ³. Touchpoints are so central to the project that the “T” in AT-ONE stands for them.

The project includes touchpoint workshops and a card-based tool with three main functions:

A. Team building

1. Build shared understanding of touchpoints
2. Strengthen cross-disciplinary collaboration

B. Analysis and mapping

1. Identify all touchpoints in a customer journey
2. Highlight critical touchpoints
3. Understand each touchpoint’s constraints and possibilities
4. Identify ownership and responsibilities

C. Idea generation

1. Explore new touchpoint ideas or redesign existing ones

A challenge noted in the research is that touchpoints are often referenced through examples rather than definitions. For instance, an iPad is listed as a touchpoint in the card set. But an iPad alone does not constitute a touchpoint unless it’s tied to a service interaction. This ambiguity illustrates how difficult it is to define touchpoints without context.

Sequencing and Mapping Through Touchpoints

Stickdorn and Schneider’s This Is Service Design Thinking distinguishes between touchpoints and interactions, which together form “service moments” ⁹. Touchpoints can occur between:

• human and human
• human and machine
• machine and machine

The last category is not intuitive from a customer perspective, but machine-to-machine interaction can shape the service experience. For example, a health app may send data to a medical provider behind the scenes. The customer might not realize this is a touchpoint, but it still influences the service.

Stickdorn argues that touchpoints are essential for:

Sequencing

Touchpoints structure the phases of a customer journey. They provide the backbone for tools such as service blueprints, journey maps, and service experience blueprints (SEBs) ^{10 11}.

Evidencing

Touchpoints make invisible service processes tangible. This helps customers understand what’s happening behind the scenes and strengthens the perceived value of the service.

These ideas align with the work of Bitner, Clatworthy, Patricio, Risdon, Shostack, and others, who all highlight the role of touchpoints in making services concrete and comprehensible.

Conclusion

There is no single, definitive definition of “touchpoint” in service design. Given the field’s multidisciplinary origins, this isn’t surprising. As service design matures, the terminology will likely settle into more widely shared meanings.

Even without a universal definition, certain characteristics repeatedly appear across the literature:

• Materiality and tangibility — Touchpoints often involve physical or digital artifacts that make the service real.
• Interactivity — Touchpoints involve actions or exchanges.
• Context-dependence — Their meaning depends on the situation and channel.
• Sequencing — They structure the customer journey.
• Evidencing — They reveal otherwise invisible aspects of the service.

Touchpoints may never have a perfectly clean definition, and perhaps they don’t need one. What matters is understanding how they function in service experiences and using them deliberately to create coherent, meaningful journeys.

References

Footnotes

1. Risdon, C. (2013). Unsucking the touchpoint. Adaptive Path. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Hogan, S., Almquist, E., & Glynn, S. E. (2005). Brand-building: finding the touchpoints that count. Journal of Business Strategy, 26(2), 11–18. ↩

3. Clatworthy, S. (2011). Service innovation through touch-points: Development of an innovation toolkit for the first stages of new service development. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Secomandi, F., & Snelders, D. (2011). The object of service design. Design Issues, 27(3), 20–34. ↩

5. Shostack, G. L. (1977). Breaking free from product marketing. The Journal of Marketing, 73–80. ↩

6. Bitner, M. J., Booms, B. H., & Tetreault, M. S. (1990). The service encounter: diagnosing favorable and unfavorable incidents. The Journal of Marketing, 71–84. ↩

7. Söderlund, M., & Julander, C. R. (2009). Physical attractiveness of the service worker in the moment of truth and its effects on customer satisfaction. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 16(3), 216–226. ↩

8. Howard, J. (2007). On the origin of touchpoints. http://designforservice.wordpress.com/2007/11/07/on-the-origin-of-touchpoints/ ↩

9. Stickdorn, M., & Schneider, J. (2011). This is Service Design Thinking. Wiley. ↩

10. Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L., & Morgan, F. N. (2008). Service blueprinting: A practical technique for service innovation. California Management Review, 50(3), 66. ↩

11. Patrício, L., Fisk, R. P., & Constantine, L. (2011). Multilevel service design: from customer value constellation to service experience blueprinting. Journal of Service Research. ↩