If you’ve ever taken a road trip before, you know how important it is to be proactive and nail down key stops along the way.
Whether it be to fill up your tank or stretch your legs, being aware of these key stops and how to navigate them can make the entire road trip experience much more seamless and lessen the likelihood of friction or unhelpful detours.
Identifying customer touchpoints is much like this; mapping every moment of contact with a customer within their journey for a simple and effective purchase experience. Using these touchpoints, businesses can modify the journey and ensure all customers arrive at the last leg of their journey with greater satisfaction.
So buckle up, we’re digging deeper into customer touchpoints and how you can identify your own.
What are Customer Touchpoints?
A customer touchpoint is a moment of contact between a customer and business, both online and offline. It can be a moment that the customer sees an ad, visits your Facebook page, clicks on your website, enters your physical store, or fills out a customer survey.
When you collect multiple customer touchpoints and map them out accordingly, you create a customer journey. This can help you better understand the flow of customer interaction and ensure the experience is consistent.
However, if you look at each touchpoint individually you can get a lot more insight. For instance, you can see customer-preferred channels, understand popular times of day, insight into employee performance and so much more. By utilizing these touchpoints you can drive engagement and connect with customers in their preferred way.
How To Identify Customer Touchpoints
Understanding touchpoints and where they live within your journey is key to providing a seamless customer experience. Here, we tackle how to identify your specific customer touchpoints in order to run your business more effectively.
Think Like Your Customer
Mapping out customer touchpoints can be tricky to nail down from a business perspective. However, if you put yourself in your customer’s shoes, things get a little easier.
Before you start writing down touchpoints, imagine you’re a customer (as we’re sure you have been in the past), and think of your journey with a business from start to finish. For instance, last week when you purchased your coffee, “How did you hear about the coffee shop?”, “Did you browse what kind of coffee you wanted on their app or website?” “How did you purchase the coffee?”, “Were there any steps in between including in-person conversations?”.
Taking the view of the customers can help you get a realistic view of the experience and unlock key touchpoints you may have missed from a business state of mind.
Note Important Points Of Contact
As you start to take yourself through each moment you connect with a customer, start to write them down, along with the sales funnel stage. Knowing the funnel can help map the moments out in a journey later on.
As an example, a table like the one below can be leveraged to help you visualize the type of touchpoints your offer.
| Touchpoint | Sales Funnel Stage |
| Word of Mouth | Awareness |
| Organic Social Media | Awareness |
| Advertisement | Awareness |
| Website | Consideration/Purchase |
| In-Person Visit | Consideration |
| Reviews | Consideration |
| Point of Sale | Purchase |
| Electronic Receipt Emailed | Purchase |
| Support Center | Loyalty |
| Customer Survey | Loyalty |
Add Context
After you’ve collected all of your customer touchpoints and written them down, it’s time to get a little more granular so you can understand what to improve or modify moving forward.
Let’s use “Advertisement” from the above table as an example.
In that same table write down exactly where the advertisement is displayed, how many channels you’re using, how many people have clicked on the advertisement, which channel is most effective, and so on. If your Facebook Ads are driving hundreds of people to your website, think of ways you can take that presence even further. If your surveys are lacking because you’re not sending them consistently, maybe it’s time to explore how you can automate the process.
By doing this exercise, you can easily understand how successful each touchpoint is, which ones need improvement, and of course, which ones are missing.
Reference Customer Feedback For Any Forgotten Touchpoints
Lastly, as your session on understanding touchpoints comes to a close, remember to reference any recent feedback or conversations. Where do your customers usually reach out from, what do they have to say about your current experience, and have there been any requests made about particular touchpoints? Customer feedback can be super helpful in identifying key touchpoints worth engaging on.
Measuring the Success of Your Customer Experience
After you’ve done the work, researched, talked to customers, and adjusted the touchpoints within your experience, it’s time to let your customer journey take its course and measure your progress.
Send Feedback Surveys
Feedback surveys are a great way to get input from your customers on the progress you’ve made with your journey.
When sending surveys, don’t just wait until the experience is over, make a point to ask questions at each critical touchpoint in their journey. Think, after they’ve talked to an employee or while they’re browsing your website. Having them rate the experience at multiple moments can help identify where issues arise or when you excel at your experience.
A pro tip, try and incorporate key performance indicator questions such as CES, CSAT, and NPS – these can help you map out and measure which questions exactly are helping your business.
Measure Communication
Another way to measure how effective your new touchpoints are is to measure the amount of communication you get from your customers and the sentiment expressed in those conversations.
Let’s say customers are reaching out via Twitter DM, a new touchpoint you’ve added to your business to assist with your support center. Since adopting it, if you receive 50 DM’s within the first few days, you can see that it’s a successful channel.
What’s more, if you’re utilizing a customer experience solution like Loop, you can see sentiment attached to the conversation – to gauge how they’re receiving the specific touchpoint and the service.
