Your relationship with customers is built one step at a time. Every interaction they have with your organization leaves an impression — and you want it to be a good one!
‘Touchpoints’ have been a hot topic for marketing, sales, and customer experience teams for decades. And for good reason! Each customer journey touchpoint is an opportunity to reinforce your brand value and engage customers in meaningful ways.
With the rapid spread of artificial intelligence, your team even has the power to automate many touchpoints and experiences (with a few notable pitfalls if you’re not careful).
But, what exactly is a touchpoint? And why do they matter for customer experience teams?
A touchpoint is any contact or interaction a customer has with your organization. Touchpoints span the entire customer journey, including before they become a customer and well after their first purchase.
Social media posts, brand websites, customer review websites, demo request forms, QR codes, email marketing messages, sales team outreach (SMS or phone calls), and every direct or indirect brand interaction are touchpoints. But that’s only scratching the surface.
In terms of customer experience, touchpoints are more than just transactional moments. They’re critical interactions within the customer journey that help define key moments in the process that can build or erode customer trust.
Each touchpoint is an opportunity to show who you are to customers. In the best case, every touchpoint will evoke positive emotions and deeply fulfill your customer’s need at that specific point in their journey.
But customer touchpoints are often misunderstood for what they really are, or go unappreciated from the customer’s perspective.
And therein lies the problem.
Related Article: 3 Employee Experience Touchpoints That Impact Customer Experience
The concept of customer touchpoints is more than just business jargon!
Touchpoints are meaningful only if and when the company understands them. Without understanding, sure, the term touchpoint may as well be meaningless business jargon.
Understanding your customers’ current situations, and what drives them toward loyalty or defection , is one of the first steps in delivering a superior customer experience. Understanding the actual touchpoints your customers have with your organization is a basic part of that understanding.
Channels are a way for you to understand where customers come from and how they interact with you, the company. Touchpoints are more precise and specific.
For example, Online could be a channel. Online chat could be a touchpoint.
When defining their customer touchpoints, most organizations list things like:
The challenge with viewing touchpoints this way is this approach often assumes the customer:
In short, an examination of touchpoints is often entirely company-focused. (Sometimes, it is so company-focused the touchpoints are categorized by org chart: marketing; operations; billing, etc.)
A Fictitious Example of a Customer-Focused Touchpoint Inventory:
Of course this is a simplified version of what it takes to identify meaningful touchpoints.
Other considerations should include who your customers actually are, what channels are most popular, and other data points.
Related Article: How the Most Important Touchpoints Get Ignored, And How to Fix It.
Taking a comprehensive and thorough inventory of your touchpoints can be extremely challenging. It can take months to categorize all the ways customers may interact with you.
But it’s worth it, and here’s why: If you organize your touchpoints (the customer perspective) against your channel strategy (your company perspective), you can have a clear vision of where your priorities should lie.
Use your Customer Experience Mission Statement and CX Success Statement to guide you. These resources will help you determine what to prioritize and how to optimize each experience so you fulfill your promises to customers at every interaction.
Related Article: Touchpoint Mapping: Discovery, Enlightenment, and A-HA! Moments
It becomes obvious that while your online channel is working pretty well, your in-store experience is suffering due to lack of care. Or that your automated and artificial intelligence-driven experiences may need some fine-tuning.
By creating a customer-centric vision for the future, you can continue to track what is working for your customers and what simply isn’t.
Experiences are evolving rapidly today, and it’s easy to be left behind. Understanding your customer touchpoints could help you stay ahead in meaningful ways.
So, how should you start making a plan to identify and optimize each touchpoint? Start by building your customer journey maps.
A customer journey map details the steps that distinct customer personas will take as they seek out your product or service. The mapping process will immerse you in the customer’s view and help you realize their needs. You’ll quickly see things from their perspective and find plenty of ways to either transform their experience or fine-tune an already acceptable experience into something memorable.
And remember: A map is a tool to get you to where you want to go. Set yourself up by focusing on your goals first. Focus on one area at a time and create action plans to execute. You can address the rest of the journey and the other touchpoints when you’re ready! This is about progress — not perfection.
Jeannie is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker, and sought-after business coach who is trailblazing the movement from “Reactive Customer Service” to “Proactive Customer and Employee Experience.” More than 500,000 people have learned from her CX courses on LinkedIn Learning, and her insights have been featured in Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and NPR.
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