There are numerous ways that customers engage with your business. Each one is a chance for you to nurture their interactions towards a sale, referred to as customer touchpoints.

Optimizing your customer touchpoints can lead to stronger brand loyalty, more revenue, and improved sales.

A customer touchpoint is any interaction a customer has with a business, from first learnings to repeat sales. The second a customer begins looking for services and products, there is an opportunity for them to interact with your brand.

Your customer journey is composed of a set of touchpoints. Your customers travel through such touchpoints that result in them buying. They then travel along more touchpoints as they’re nurtured for repeat purchases and, later on, brand loyalty.

Thanks to digital innovation, there are numerous options for engagement channels and customer touchpoints. Nonetheless, that also makes it more challenging. After all, you might forget a touchpoint. You might also be absent from a big potential platform.

If you ignore vital touchpoints, you might end up losing your customers, their loyalty, as well as possible income at the end of the day.

Why is Consumer Touch Points Important?

Did you know that fifty-four percent of customers like to purchase from businesses that offer diversity, equity, and inclusion in their workplaces and communities? That suggests that how you engage with customers affects your brand reputation and overall bottom line. That involves the quality of customer support.

Learning your customer touchpoints is essential for the following reasons:

• Touchpoints offer great data – You can measure the success of your touch points along the way, providing you insight into what your customers are seeking.

• Establish brand loyalty – Customers have numerous touch points between finding your business and becoming loyal customers. Good experiences at each touchpoint support brand loyalty over time.

• Producing more sales – You can nurture more customers toward a sale if you get your touch points right. Imagine this. Each touch point is a conversion opportunity.

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Customer Touch Points Examples

Remember that the customer journey looks diverse for each business. Thus, your customer touchpoints might not be the same as your competitors. Also, it comes down to how you advertise your business.

A single customer will never experience all of these touchpoints, but they’ll engage with your brand through many of those methods.

Here are the best examples of customer touch points that might apply to your business.

Pre-purchase stage

1. Blogs and articles

Publishing articles and blogs not just helps with search engine optimization, but you can also share the information on your social media platforms. Remember that well-written content establishes your brand as an authority and improves customer confidence in your business.

2. Online advertising

Customers are often exposed to ads on Google. On the other hand, they may also see banner ads or pop-up ads for your brand on other websites.

3. Social media

Big companies invest in SEO to make sure they rank well on search engines, especially for keywords that are relevant to their services or products. Each time a customer clicks a link to your Google page, your SEO is working.

4. Chat bots

Chat bots and self-service systems are becoming more typical. They are a traffic opportunity to deliver a positive experience for your customers. That’s why you need to ensure your self-service options are of the utmost quality.

5. Google My Business or local directory

With more and more customers looking for services and products nearby, especially on mobile search, it pays to make sure your Google My Business profile is properly set up. That and other industry directors provide you with an excellent opportunity to connect with a new audience.

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Purchase stage

6. Online payment processing

Do you encounter a lot of abandoned shopping carts in your online store? There may be an issue with your online payment processing. Ensure you provide your customers with enough payment options to make checkout straightforward, lowering the number of missed sales.

7. Phone contact

Is your business taking purchases or bookings over the phone? That is another customer touchpoint that can either drive folks mad or turn them into satisfied returning customers.

8. Product reviews

This can also be included in the pre-purchase section as customers look for your business using reviews. However, it can also be in the purchase state as people using your online store may still be considering two products as they are about to purchase.

It can also fall into the post-purchase stage, as you can motivate satisfied customers to leave a positive review. What we’re trying to say is that reviews are essential!

9. Point of sale

Whether it is in-store or online, the point of sale experience must be a positive one. Also, friendly customer service plays an important role here, but so does the technology you employ.

Post-purpose stage

10. Newsletter

Another great option is to get customers’ agreement to send them marketing emails—such as a weekly newsletter with valuable tips or insights. That way, aside from updating your customers on the industry trends and news, your can highlight your special or seasonal offers. How cool is that?

But it’s important that you verify email address. After all, real customers begin with real emails, and the use of email validation is the most efficient way to guarantee the collection of high-quality data.

11. Customer loyalty programs

Running a customer loyalty program offers you numerous touch points over an extended time. Whether it is marketing special offers or giving customers loyalty benefits, loyalty programs make it simple to reward your loyal brand fans.

12. Community management

Consider your business as an online community, especially on social media. Customers always love engaging with your brand organically. They might also share their experiences and tag you or might even ask for a resolution for a complaint.

Dealing with this online community with fast responses goes a long way in establishing brand loyalty.

13. Customer support

In the world of business, you will be fortunate if you never have post-sale concerns, returns, or complaints. It is part of running a business, and the way you deal with customer support could have an effect on whether customers go elsewhere or return in the future.

14. Billing

Getting an invoice is another crucial touchpoint for all your customers. It is crucial to make sure the process is as smooth as possible for your customers. You can achieve that by presenting them numerous payment methods.

15. Customer feedback

Keep in mind that successful companies utilize feedback as a means of improving their services and providing what customers want.

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Conclusion

Customer touchpoints influence your bottom line. It is vital that you put a lot of thought into your touchpoint strategy. Pleasing your existing and potential customers throughout the entire customer journey can have a positive effect on your bottom line and revenue.

Now that you have a good overview of how customer touchpoints can possibly impact your bottom line, you can now proceed with designing and optimizing your customer journey map.

Eventually, your customer experience strategy will be a well-oiled machine that continuously pulls in sustainable revenue for your online business.

By clearly knowing all your customer touchpoints, you can also work on optimizing each of them and boost your chances of a sale.

As companies around the globe enter the brave new world of customer experience management, they are introduced to a dizzying array of new concepts including the term ‘touchpoint’. While there is no shortage to the number of definitions for this term, the practical matter is that the devil’s in the details.

A touchpoint is commonly defined as any instance where a customer interacts with a brand, product or service. Using this broad definition, the ecosystem of potential touchpoints can be enormous.

For most customer experience programs, it’s common for an audit of touchpoints to reveal 500-1,000 or more discrete touchpoints.

Cataloging the entire portfolio of touchpoints in an organization can be a daunting endeavor. This challenge can become even greater when companies don’t know what they are looking for or how broad to cast the net. For example, if you were to ask a dozen people to identify the touchpoints in a typical Starbuck’s coffee shop, you’re likely to get at least a dozen different answers.

At one end of the spectrum, some might argue that there is only one touchpoint represented by the interaction with the barista at the point-of-sale. At the other end, others would argue that there are a myriad of touchpoints that include everything from the menu boards, the length of the line and the type of products on display in their display case, to name a few.

Both perspectives are correct. From a pure operational standpoint, the interaction at the point-of-sale is perhaps the most tangible and measurable touchpoint in the customer experience. This type of touchpoint can be categorized as a transactional touchpoint; it’s required to complete a customer’s order and receive payment.

Other touchpoints, such as the menu board or length of the line, can be categorized as influencing touchpoints; they aren’t directly necessary to complete the transaction, but are critical for setting the stage and ambiance for the customer experience. When well-designed, the transactional and influencing touchpoints work together in perfect balance to create a unique and branded customer experience.

Effectively designing, orchestrating and managing the customer experience ecosystem must begin with a clear and comprehensive inventory of all customer touchpoints. The inventory should include all touchpoints along the entire customer lifecycle from customer attraction, interaction and cultivation, across all channels and locations.

Each touchpoint should be a discrete interaction that does not overlap other touchpoints and is unique for each channel. For example, a touchpoint might be identified as ‘place order’ in a company. However, if this interaction can be accomplished in the retail, call center and online channels, each interaction should be identified as a separate and unique touchpoint (e.g., place order-retail, place order-call center, place order-web).

The attributes identified for each touchpoint may vary widely, but at a minimum should contain a title, a short description and unique identifiers to describe who, what, when and where that the touchpoint occurs. Other attributes should also be identified, if available, including performance attributes (frequency, volume, duration), importance attributes (relative customer & company importance) and appropriate quality attributes.

All of the touchpoint information should be consolidated into a single touchpoint repository that can be maintained, managed and analyzed based on the various attributes. Ideally, touchpoint performance information should be updated on a regular basis to show any changes over time. For example, the conversion rates of a web landing page should be measured and monitored to determine the relative performance of this touchpoint over time.

By creating a consolidated touchpoint repository, companies gain a better and more detailed understanding of the breadth, depth and complexity of their customer experience ecosystem. The repository can also serve as the primary source of customer experience insights to identify customer experience gaps, issues or improvement opportunities. Ideally, the touchpoint repository should be updated on a regular basis to keep the information current and relevant.

Touchpoints serve as the foundational building blocks that facilitate and enable the customer experience. Establishing a comprehensive and clear inventory of all customer touchpoints is a critical first step for any customer experience initiative. While the level of detail gathered for each touchpoint may vary, it’s important to start with even basic information rather than nothing at all.

About the Author

Robert Howard has over 20 years of experience delivering compelling online and offline customer experiences for companies in the retail, consumer packaged goods, and telecommunication industries. He has authored multiple articles and books including “The Customer Experience Fiasco” and “7 Steps to Customer Experience Domination.”

Mike Bindrup shares his experience with two very different service providers and reflects on the importance of customer touch points.

Last week my washing machine broke down right in the middle of a load, and I needed to call a repair service. I googled appliance repair and up came a list of a dozen companies in my area.

I clicked on the first one that looked promising and visited their website.

Their website was cleanly designed and effective. I was pleased to see that they listed that they worked on LG front-loading washing machines and I felt comfortable that they could solve my problem.

Wanting to get this fixed right away, I placed the call to them and got the following recorded message: “We are not accepting service calls right now” then it hung up on me. There was no “leave a message at the beep” or anything else.

It seemed as though they were out of business. I thought they should at least take down their website if they were not in business anymore.

I clicked on the next repair service that had a website. Now I use the term website loosely because it only had two pages.

One of the pages was a home page where they listed their services and contact info. It was very basic and not well designed. The other page contained a coupon that you could print to save $10 off your service. I liked that, so I printed the coupon and called the number listed on the site.

This time my experience was very different. I got an actual person on the line and was able to explain to her the problem with my washing machine.

She quickly took down my information and said that she had a technician in the field and he would call me back to schedule a time most convenient for me to have them to come and look at my washing machine.

Within 10 minutes, I received a call from an appliance technician who verified my address and set a time that evening for the service call. The service tech kept his word and arrived on time at my home for the service call.

What was the difference in these two service experiences? One of these businesses got my money because of positive experiences with their touch points.

A touch point is any point of direct interaction between a stakeholder and a business. In this case, I experienced 4 touch points: the website, the initial phone contact, the phone contact with the tech, and the actual service call with the tech. All of these were positive which makes me a happy customer.

How does your business touch your customers, potential customers, employees, vendors, etc? How do you treat you customers at these touch points?

Do you make them feel welcome, assured, and confident that they are doing business with an honorable and competent firm, or do you make it difficult for them to do business with you?

How you design your touch points makes all the difference in keeping customers happy and willing to refer other business to you. No amount of money you spend on your marketing efforts can help if your customer service touch points fail you.

By the way, the company that I called first is actually still in business. For how long is anyone’s guess.

About the Author

Michael Bindrup currently works as a Business Development Advisor for the UNLV Nevada Small Business Development Center in Las Vegas.