Customer satisfaction is crucial when starting a business because it affects how well it does in a competitive market. As soon as a customer contacts you, you must make an effort to solve their issues. Building a worthwhile relationship that can change your business is beneficial. To understand your customer's journey, you must first comprehend the customer journey touchpoints. The majority of customer interactions take place there. Therefore, it's critical to comprehend the key touchpoints where customers interact with your business so that you can decide how to enhance them.
Any customer interactions with your business, such as through an online website or a digital payment system, are considered touchpoints. Therefore, it's essential to first research customer behavior related to your brand. You'll gain knowledge of the touchpoints to improve and refine in order to enhance customer interactions with your business. You must create a self-sustaining and effective customer journey-mapping strategy for your brand. Building brand loyalty and improving customer experience is possible by identifying and mapping digital customer touchpoints. You can better understand customers and their needs when you map out their journey across multiple channels and connect them.
In this blog, we'll explain what customer journey touchpoints are and the key buying stages for mapping customer touchpoints. Then, we'll wrap up with 14 ways how to optimize customer journey touchpoints.
Customer tourney touchpoints are interactions between businesses and customers that occur throughout the customer's journey. These circumstances have a big impact on brand perception and customer experience. It significantly affects how customers view your products and services. Various digital or customer relationship management (CRM) touchpoints are included in the touchpoints.
The first and most important step in making a map is to identify the touchpoints in your customer journey. Businesses can manage customer expectations accordingly and identify the touchpoints at various stages to deliver a great experience.
Here are a few crucial stages of the customer journey map that you can start looking at touchpoints for if you've decided that your company is prepared to better manage your customer interactions.
Whether through online search engines, your company website, social media content, or other channels, this stage is all about grabbing your customers' attention. Since you are not yet at the point of sale, the goal of this campaign is simply to raise awareness of you among potential customers, rather than acquiring new ones. Only if you market your brand will customers engage with your business. It's a chance to spread as much information as you can and give customers a chance to get familiar with your business.
The end goal of this stage is to transform your business from just “a company that exists” into one that’s interesting and appealing in the eyes of your audience, and you should design your customer journey touchpoints in this stage with that in mind.
The following pre-purchase stage of the customer journey is the period between a prospect learning about you and actually completing the purchase or sign-up process. When a customer is sold on your brand and has made up their mind to make a purchase, this is referred to as the evaluation stage mapping. They start analyzing your products or services with that goal in mind before making a decision to buy.
In this stage, touchpoints should be created to persuade someone to become a new customer. You could advertise product catalogs, evaluations, customer reviews, etc. Again, your sales teams and sales representatives can get involved in this by serving as consultants for your potential customers and assisting them throughout their journey.
It doesn't necessarily mean that your work is done just because you have a new customer. Now is your chance to convert a one-time customer into a brand advocate. To accomplish this, you must be aware of your post-purchase touchpoints.
A great place to start is by sending your customer a message three to five days after the sale. In addition to expressing gratitude for their purchase, you can provide them with a link to your brand customer service department or support page. No matter how difficult the questions are, your customer service agents can handle them with simplicity if you have a good contact center platform. Furthermore, you can invite them to join your loyalty programs or make product recommendations for their next purchase.
Create a customer journey touchpoint map template using these steps. You might end up with more than one variation for the various customer types. The customer journeys will differ if you operate both a physical store and an online store.
Here are some simple ways how to optimize customer journey touchpoints:
The most common way for customers to contact your business is through your website. A well-designed website can encourage visitors to stay longer and keep them more interested in what your business has to offer. The main goal when creating a website is to make a good first impression on your customers. The proper elements and components must be present on your website in order to draw in customers and capture their attention from the start.
This strategy is especially crucial if you operate an online store, as your website is probably the most crucial point of contact for attracting new customers and generating sales. Your website should be simple to navigate. Customers shouldn't have to waste time trying to figure out how to add items to their shopping carts or complete the checkout process once they're ready to make a purchase.
B2B and retail businesses primarily use chatbots to provide automated support and sales assistance. Through the use of AI bots, companies can better serve the needs of their customers.
Customers can receive assistance immediately thanks to chatbots. Simple questions they report receive prompt answers. Customers get a positive impression of your brand's responsiveness. Live omnichannel platform offers a chatbot that speaks your language and understands dialects and street talk. It also recognizes context and follows up questions while handling multi-line messages, offensive language handling, and if needed, seamless transfer to a human agent is also available.
One of the most significant channels for interacting with businesses is live chat. Customers prefer live chat over-reactive channels because it offers prompt sales and support help. According to the Invesp report, live chat has the highest customer satisfaction level at 73%.
Customers are very satisfied when you respond to their concerns in real time, which lowers the bounce rate and boosts sales conversions. Additionally, customers that use live chat spend 60% more per purchase.
However, not all of your customers will be visiting your website constantly. Being present where your customers congregate is essential if you want to offer proactive customer service.
One of the key channels for customers to contact businesses is undoubtedly social media. Platforms like Facebook, Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter are now the go-to places for millions of people to find information and get answers to their questions.
Through advertisements and engaged users, social media platforms are a great way to expand your audience and accomplish business goals. Additionally, they support businesses' efforts to build strong customer relationships, raise brand awareness, boost user engagement, and increase leads and sales.
Live platform offers you to utilize the power of social for multichannel messaging for sales, marketing, and support. Automatically capture new leads from social media while enabling seamless support for your customers.
Virtual or physical events are crucial touchpoints to increase brand recognition, demonstrate thought leadership and influence within the industry, and boost revenue.
Event marketing has a significant impact on brands. Attendees of a brand's event are more likely to value the brand more and view it favorably than competitors.
Important customer journey touchpoints that introduce potential customers to your brand include display ads, social media ads, and video ads.
Advertisements assist companies in generating leads and effectively reaching their target market.
Customer reviews have a significant impact on user decisions and have the power to make or break a visitor's desire to use your product.
Positive reviews improve your brand's credibility and help you win over users' trust. They support engagement with your brand from users and serve as a resource for potential customers.
Ensure that all of the data and customer interactions are collected in one location. It also makes it simple for you as a manager to keep track of overall performance. Not only will this save your agents a lot of hassle when they need to look something up about a customer.
Once more, having an omnichannel contact center platform is helpful in this situation because all of those interactions are taking place—and being recorded—in the same location. That’s why we have built Live a full omnichannel platform that helps companies worldwide grow their profitability. How do we organize the data? By optimizing and automatizing their internal and external communication and processes, enabling their customers to engage actively with their brand.
The majority of B2B, B2C, or eCommerce businesses use email as one of their main customer support channels. According to Descriptive Advertising report, customers who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers.
It is a gift if a customer provides you with their email address and consents to your contact with them via email. Save it for later. When necessary, follow up with them, let them know when something genuinely interesting happens, only request a referral when the time is right, and, if at all possible, personalize your emails. Customer interactions via email have a significant impact on a variety of factors, including lifetime value, repeat purchase rates, and how your brand is discussed both privately and publicly.
Loyalty ought to be recognized and rewarded. It is one of the crucial customer touchpoints that you should be aware of. With the help of these initiatives, you can make customers into loyal supporters of your business. Therefore, rewarding loyal customers ought to be a key component of your customer loyalty programs. If a customer buys from you frequently or brings in new business, they should unquestionably receive something in return.
People will be more likely to post positive reviews about your company if you provide them with special rewards and discounts.
After a purchase, feedback surveys are sent to customers to evaluate their satisfaction with your product or service. Customer satisfaction surveys give you the information you need to satisfy customers and gain their support. According to Apptentive research, 51% of customers expect companies to ask for their feedback across all channels. However, that number is even higher 64%, for customers who prefer to leave in-app feedback.
Make sure new customers have the best experience possible right away when they are onboarded. One of the most undervalued opportunities to interact with customers is during the onboarding process. A positive onboarding experience can make customers more tolerant of errors that may occur in the future.
If you have a dedicated team to assist new customers with their onboarding, great—just make sure they can easily be contacted via various channels.
You must continuously monitor the trends and actions of your customers as they relate to your brand. It provides the necessary information that is essential for the growth of your business.
For instance, online search engines like Google frequently review their systems to fit user experiences. The majority of people enjoy using their smart devices to conduct online searches while traveling. It forces Google to approve content that complies with such usability standards. You can use these recommendations to improve the experiences and customer journeys.
It's critical to keep track of how your customers react to the touchpoints mentioned in your plan. Make sure your brand is outperforming the competition. Google monitoring dashboards are excellent examples of how to follow customers as they interact with your brand. It examines information gathered from all of your customers' activities.
Additionally, you can filter out the customer journey touchpoints that are ineffective for your marketing campaign and brand interaction. Therefore, pay attention to how customers interact with your business throughout their entire journey.
To fully understand customers' preferences and expectations, a thorough customer journey touchpoint analysis across all three stages—before, during, and after purchase—is essential. It assists you in mapping customer journeys and effectively utilizes them so that you can provide a consistent support experience.
All of these interactions, including those on social media, over the phone, and in live chats, can be crucial to your brand customer journey. With the right tools, you can identify your company's weaknesses and potential areas for improvement in addition to your customers' needs.
Your customer relationships will need to change if you want to adapt to the fast changes in the world. Make use of touchpoint mapping to enhance your business procedures continuously. This will put you in a position to provide excellent customer service, whatever the future may bring.
Live is an omnichannel platform that will assist you in connecting with and engaging customers across all the journey touchpoints. Don't hesitate to get in touch with us today if you want to learn more about how the Live product family can help you support and improve your customer experience strategy.
Learn more about how the Live product family can help you support and improve your customer experience strategy.
