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Anytime a customer interacts with your brand, we call it a customer touchpoint. These interactions span from initial awareness, let's say seeing an ad on LinkedIn, to post-purchase support.
Understanding and optimizing these touchpoints is critical for companies aiming to enhance customer experience (CX) and drive loyalty. Why? Because customer touchpoints serve as crucial moments that influence purchasing decisions, shape perceptions, and define the overall brand experience.
In this article, we’ll explore different customer touchpoints, provide examples, and discuss best practices to optimize your customer journey.
Customer touchpoints are the various interactions a consumer has with a brand throughout their purchasing journey. These touchpoints encompass every point of contact, whether physical, digital, or interpersonal, where customers engage with a company's products, services, or representatives.
These touchpoints are extremely important as they provide companies with a chance to deliver excellent experiences to their customers or make a so-called good impression.
Studies show that customers are prepared to abandon brands to which they are loyal after three or fewer instances of poor customer experience. Conversely, when they consistently have positive experiences with a brand, they spend 140% more money with those brands.
B2B customer journey touchpoints are the moments where businesses interact or connect with each other, such as through emails, sales meetings, or online platforms. These points of contact are crucial because they affect how businesses view and feel about each other, influencing decisions and relationships.
While some of the B2B and B2C customer touchpoints overlap, there are some differences. Take a look at them below:
Customer touchpoints will differ across companies and industries. For instance, for a marketing agency, touchpoints might include the website, social media channels, and email marketing. For a SaaS business, they could include product demos, webinars, customer support help desks, and knowledge base resources. These touchpoints can even be physical like trade shows and conferences.
Here are some other customer touchpoint examples:
However, not all touchpoints carry the same weight. Certain ones play a pivotal role in refining your customer experience. Let's unpack them below.
Your website often serves as the first point of contact between your business and potential customers. Make it count!
People make up their minds about a website in just 50 milliseconds. If it’s slow, the navigation is complicated, the subscription cancelation button is hidden, and there’s no way to contact your customer support team, you won’t make a great impression.
Poor user experience (UX) can drive most of your potential customers straight to your competitors. That’s why your website is the first customer touchpoint you should be looking to optimize.
Customer service is the heartbeat of customer satisfaction. Let’s be honest: customer service is something that can annoy your customers if not done right. Data demonstrates that 32% of customers will leave a brand just after one bad customer support experience.
Optimizing your customer service literally means improving every aspect of your operations, from training your staff to all the different channels your customers might reach out to. Ideally, you want to provide omnichannel customer support.
Customer surveys are invaluable in capturing the voice of the customer. They not only offer insights into what you’re doing right or wrong but also demonstrate that you value their opinion.
There are a dozen different ways to collect customer feedback, such as:
The key, though, is to time these surveys. You don’t want to overwhelm your customers or ask them to complete several surveys in a short period. Surveys should be concise and strategically timed to capture genuine feedback without causing survey fatigue.
Even if you perfect your customer support, a poor product or service delivery won’t save your day. The delivery of your product or service is the moment of truth in your customer’s journey. It’s when expectations meet reality or don’t.
This includes everything from the ease of purchase and delivery speed to the unboxing experience (in the case of physical products) and after-sales support. A seamless, positive experience at this stage can turn first-time buyers into lifelong customers.
Lastly, we have social media. Social media has emerged as a vital touchpoint for both pre- and post-purchase interactions. According to Statista:
These numbers indicate that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are more than just marketing channels. They are communities where brands can actively listen, engage, and provide support, thereby enhancing the customer experience and fostering loyalty.
Optimizing customer journey touchpoints, whether in B2B or B2C settings, involves several steps:
While you do all of this, there’s one thing that matters the most: instilling a customer-first culture within your organization. Without it, your efforts to improve the customer experience will be fruitless.
Optimizing customer touchpoints online means making every online interaction with customers as good as it can be, from websites to social media. For businesses, this is great because it can make customers happier, more likely to buy, and more likely to recommend the company to others, boosting sales and reputation.
Customer journey mapping is a process of drawing a map to show the steps a customer takes when interacting with a company, from first hearing about it to buying something or using a service. This helps businesses understand and improve the customer's experience by seeing things from their perspective.
The best way to measure customer touchpoints is to ask your customers directly through surveys and feedback forms. You should also look at conversion data from each of your customer touchpoints to identify improvement areas and optimize the customer journey further.
Modern customer journeys are more complex than ever. Likewise, customers are picky about whom they choose to purchase from and to whom they remain loyal.
As a business, your goal is to keep your customers happy regardless of the touchpoint. That’s why by optimizing five main customer touchpoints—your website, customer service, customer surveys, product and service delivery, and social media—you can significantly enhance customer engagement and satisfaction.
If you're in the SaaS space and find that your customer service touchpoint requires extra attention, you might want to consider Thena.
Thena is an intelligent B2B customer engagement platform designed for businesses that want to stay omnipresent for their customers while managing all customer support operations directly within Slack. Whether you provide customer support via Slack, email, or the web, Thena centralizes all customer support requests in Slack.
Schedule a free demo today to discover how Thena can help you achieve a 95% reduction in response time.
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