What Are Customer Touchpoints?

What are customer touchpoints?

1. Customer Touchpoints Are Your Customer Contact
2. Customer Touchpoints Are Easily Identified
3. Customer Touchpoints Manage Customer Expectations
4. Customer Touchpoints Can Be Used On A Business Roadmap

 

Have you ever heard of the term for points of customer contact? Alternatively, it’s called customer touchpoints. There are many reasons why you should care about these. It’s a strategy you can use to improve customer satisfaction and so much more. Having your touchpoints under control will change the way you handle customers for the better. This discipline has evolved over the years and continues to revolutionize customer contact and feedback. Here’s what you need to know about customer touchpoints.

 

Customer Touchpoints Are Your Customer Contact

Customer touchpoints are defined as your brand’s point of contact for your customers. Customers are able to find you through various means. For example, your website, social media, retail store, or customer service. These examples are just a few of your customer touchpoints. For a shorter version, touchpoints are customers’ way of making contact with your brand before they make a transaction. Having your touchpoints defined can help create a comprehensive customer journey map. This map is then used to improve your customer service and ensure that your customers are always satisfied.

 

Customer Touchpoints Are Easily Identified

It’s very easy to identify your touchpoints. With the right technology and a small team, you can strategize and identify touchpoints within hours. It’s even easy if you’re a sole business owner. The list of touchpoints you pick needs to be based on what you already have. Touchpoints are not a one size fits all. It may differ for some businesses and that’s because every business is unique. The three points you need to identify include the before purchase, during purchase, and the post-purchase.

If you’re worried about finding different touchpoints or if you have difficulties identifying them, try thinking from the point of view of your customers. Ask yourself how you would interact with your brand or store. When will you contact customer service? How will you discover the product? How will you make your final decision? These are just some of the questions you can try out. During this process, try your best to be creative in order to get the result you desire.

 

Customer Touchpoints Manage Customer Expectations

Customer touchpoints can help manage customer expectations. The results you grab from your research should cover the following interaction types:

• Appropriate
• Relevant
• Meaningful
• Endearing

For “appropriate”, you will need the interaction and cultural tone of the interaction to meet the needs of your customer. For “relevant”, it should be able to satisfy the utility requirements of different customers. “Meaningful” refers to what’s perceived as important or significant. Lastly, “endearing” talks about the bond created or if the touchpoint elicits a positive emotion.

Once again, these examples are not a one size fits all idea. It’s possible that you will have to conduct more research through surveys to get to the bottom of the customer touchpoint and expectations.

 

Customer Touchpoints Can Be Used On A Business Roadmap

Compile your data properly to create a roadmap. This roadmap will be the backbone of how you improve your service overall. The roadmap is a guide to your journey to becoming a better business overall. You can create this using simple software and even a pen and paper. Use what you identify and divide them accordingly.

You may encounter touchpoints that are out of your control. An example of this would be online customer feedback outside your brand and platform. Although you can’t exactly control these touchpoints, it’s still possible to improve and influence it. Online reputation management can be a strategy you can consider to help track negative feedback and comments. Online surveys are once again an effective tool as well if you prefer to use that. Using these tools can help optimize your direction to further improve your touchpoints. One thing to note about online feedback and touchpoints is you wouldn’t have negative press if your touchpoints are effective.

If you’re stuck on the negative data, it won’t help your brand at all. Although you shouldn’t ignore it either, putting more effort into improving touchpoints you can control will most likely curb these negative comments. Customers will begin to see the effort you’re making with these improvements and will less likely focus on the negativity.

 

Key Takeaway

These are some of the things you need to know about this amazing roadmap to success. It’s important that you focus on this aspect if you’re aiming to be better overall. As a business or brand, customer touchpoints are an amazing way to improve how you deal with your customers. Customer touchpoints are aspects of your business you can control to see how they interact and feel about your brand. Through simple research and online surveys, you can enjoy a myriad of improvements on your side and for your customers. Create a touchpoint roadmap today and start becoming the best business you can be.