A Complete Guide to Identifying and Optimizing Customer Experience Touchpoints

Customer touchpoints are particular places in the buyer journey where potential, as well as existing customers, interact with your brand. Now, these touchpoints might involve direct interactions like getting a product demonstration from your sales team or indirect interactions like reading a blog published on your website.

Every customer touchpoint directly affects your overall customer experience and the way your audience perceives your brand. A bad experience at one touchpoint can quickly downgrade the user’s perception of various good experiences at other touchpoints in the past.

How to Identify Customer Touchpoints?

A few of your customer touchpoints should be apparent. For example, if you have a sales or support team that interacts with your customers directly, those interactions – support chat, product tutorials, sales calls, live demos, etc. – are all customer touchpoints.

However, to discover other touchpoints, research and data are required. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to find out the channels that are sending traffic to your site. For that, you have to view your Acquisition Overview report. Moreover, it also lets you examine any particular channels closely to find out where your audience is coming from exactly. For example:

• If you filter your “Organic” report by “Source,” it will show you a list of search engines that send traffic to your site, and if you filter by “Landing Page,” it’ll show you the list of web pages that the visitors see mostly.
• If you go to All Traffic > Channels > Social, it will show you the list of social media platforms that send traffic to your website.
• If you filter by “Referral,” you will be able to see the list of other sites that have linked to your site and are sending traffic.

Exploring all your acquisition reports will help you get a clearer idea of your external customer touchpoints.

Another great idea to find your customer touchpoints is simply asking your customers and prospects about how they got to know your brand. This is an excellent way to discover those of your touchpoints that couldn’t be revealed in your data, like getting referred by a friend or seeing your business’s advert in a magazine.

Conducting customer interviews is also an excellent way to ask your customers directly. If not, you can invite all your existing customers to take part in your survey to collect data, or you can also add this question to your signup form to obtain data when a potential customer signs up for a free trial or purchases a product.

Optimizing 11 Common Customer Experience Touchpoints

Here are the eleven most common touchpoints along with tips to optimize the customer experience at each of them.

1. Website

When optimizing your site’s homepage and product landing pages, you must strive to explain your products/services in the most precise way possible. It will improve the customer experience.

A lot of landing pages are built in a manner that presumes the site visitor knows the product already, and this compels them to explore your site in an attempt to identify what your product does. This builds a horrible customer experience and drives the prospects away to other websites searching for solutions.

If you face troubles in describing your product within the boundaries of your chosen landing page design, then you can consider embedding videos or adding links to blog posts or help docs to allow the visitors to access more in-depth details about your product without having to navigate away.

Another crucial thing to remember is to maintain transparency with your product pricing to make your website clear. However, if you feel you cannot provide the exact price of your offering on the website due to any reason, make sure to write a little bit of information that gives the prospects a hint of whether or not they can afford it.

Last but not least, making your website clear also means avoiding using any slangs, jargon, idioms, or any such phrases that your audience may not be familiar with. You can utilize some online tools to detect the use of such terms in your copy that may create confusion in your audience’s minds.

2. Blog

When writing blogs for your company’s website, you need to remember that it will draw many different types of audiences who are simply looking for information online and not just the ones looking to buy a product/service that you are offering.

Existing customers and visitors who might become your customers tomorrow, a week, a month, or years later, are all going to read your blog posts, so in order to offer a great customer experience to them, an ideal thing to do here is to provide a high-quality, original, unique, valuable, and feasible content.

Don’t make every blog a sales pitch. Posting useful content consistently that helps your readers learn what they came looking for, adds value in their day-to-day life, or enhances their ability to do something better will create an invaluable likeness for your company even if it does not lead to a conversion instantly.

While your blog posts can indeed generate instant conversions, typically, your long-form content serves as a long-term gamble. When you publish high-quality, comprehensive content about any topic online, that specific piece of content will automatically gain a lot of traction and will introduce your brand to every reader and establish trust with that group of audience.

Maybe the particular group of an audience does not require your product or service at the moment, but they might a few months or perhaps even years later. And if through your blog, you have been able to build a lot of trust with that audience successfully during the past months or years, the first product they consider will be yours.

3. Social Media

Many marketing blogs online will advise you to have an account on every social media platform: Imagine the volume of sales you may be losing out right now by not posting stories on Snapchat!

But the truth is that it is always better to focus on a couple of channels – specifically speaking, the ones where your target audience spends the majority of their time online and where you can maintain your presence actively.

Prospects might approach you with queries on social media sites that you do not check regularly or keep an eye on closely. Not getting your response might make the user feel ignored, and this isn’t good. Bear in mind that social media platforms are built to be “social,” and if you can’t engage with your audience on a particular platform, it’s better if you don’t create an account on it in the first place.

4. Email

Emails and newsletters are an excellent means to stay connected with your audience, but at the same time, it is also a customer touchpoint that you can easily get wrong. While you can publish as many blogs and social media posts as you want, sending too many emails will eventually irritate your subscribers.

The best way to prevent your audience from feeling like they are being spammed by you is to allow them to choose what they want to hear from you.

Try dividing your email subscriber list into various groups based on the types of emails you send out. Maybe some subscribers only want to receive your newsletters, while others just want to receive updates about your new blog posts or products. Once you have successfully segmented your email list, let the subscribers decide and tell the types of email(s) they would like to receive from you.

Another crucial thing to do is ensure that the receivers are able to read the emails you send them. For that, you should test your emails in multiple email readers and make sure to incorporate a “View in Browser” link in your emails so that users can still access the email even if their email reader fails to load it properly.

5. Paid Advertisements

When optimizing your paid advertisements to build a great customer experience, the best and most crucial thing to do is ensure that when a user clicks on one of your paid adverts, they are directed to a landing page relevant to the ad content.

For example, if you are promoting an ongoing sale on your website, your ad should direct the visitors to a landing page that either displays the products that are on sale or at least provides more information about the sale.

Never send the prospects to a page where they start doubting what they even clicked. Instead of making them dig through your site searching for what they saw in that ad, offer them a great experience by leading them to the most relevant page.

6. Referral Programs

A lot of brands offer affiliate programs in which they pay a small bonus or reward whenever a referral leads to a conversion or sale. While affiliate programs are undoubtedly effective in fetching new customers, they might not be the best way to make sure that you are offering a good customer experience.

Your affiliates don’t necessarily have to be your customers means they might promote your products or services without ever using them. They might aggressively advertise your offerings, misdescribe them, or direct the wrong types of audiences to your website. This can result in upset audiences, bad reviews, and an overall negative customer experience.

Therefore, when it comes to optimizing your customer experience, a referral program is usually a better option. They are different from affiliate programs and only available to your existing customers. It helps ensure that the people referring your products or services to others have used it themselves and are well aware of what it does.

To offer an even more positive customer experience with your referral program, offer a commission or reward to both the referral as well as the referred customer. This way, both of them get something. The existing customer is delighted because they got a bonus and the new customer is pleased because they got a bonus or discount on a product that they would have most probably bought anyway.

7. Sales Calls or Demos

A typical salesperson is not bothered about your customer experience; all they care about is making the sale at any cost. So if you really want your sales calls and demos to positively enhance the customer experience, do not create a typical sales team.

Don’t push the prospect too much to get them to schedule a call with your sales team. Don’t try to persuade prospects to get upgrades that they don’t really need only to enhance the value of the sale. Also, do not compel them to make a decision on your schedule; let them take their time to research your product entirely before they decide to purchase it.

If your sales team comprises individuals who are kind and understanding, who genuinely want to help the prospects in making the right decisions, even if that means buying a competitor’s product, you will be able to establish far more trust with them and make sure that the purchasing process is pleasant for the prospects.

However, remember that not everybody likes to talk to salespeople. For such prospects, posting pre-recorded product demos and offering a self-service free product trial will be beneficial in building a great customer experience.

8. Self-Service POS

If your prospects don’t need to talk to your salespeople to signup for a trial or buy a product, you can still optimize your self-service customer experience by doing these things:

• Ensure that the product pricing is clearly mentioned on your website so that the prospect doesn’t get surprised at the time of payment.
• Provide multiple payment options to your customers so that they can choose their preferred mode without any issues (such as credit card, debit card, UPI, PayPal, etc.).
• Offer multiple shipping options to your customers, free or inexpensive options for people who are money-conscious, and priority shipping options who want their package to be delivered as soon as possible.
• Make sure your billing, cancellation, or return policies are simple and straightforward. It would be best to include a “Frequently Asked Questions” section at the bottom of your product pricing page or add its link in your shopping cart so that the customer can access it easily.

You might also want to include Live Chat support at your self-service POS (point of sale) so that the customer can easily reach out to the support team in case they face any sort of problem on the website.

9. Customer Support

Great customer service forms a crucial part of your overall customer experience. A bad support experience can immediately downgrade a customer’s perception of your brand.

Here are a few best practices that you can employ to offer great customer service:

• Allow customers to contact your support team easily: Offer multiple support options to allow the customer to choose their preferred one and do not make them dig through your site to find the contact options.
• Offer self-service options: Posting product tutorials and answers to FAQs is an excellent way to offer 24/7 support and help people who prefer finding solutions by themselves.
• Provide quick and thorough support: Needless to say, but customers love quick responses that help them fix their issue then and there. But thorough support beats quick support at any given time. Never ever drop the quality of your support just to provide quick responses to your customers.

10. Renewals

If you have successfully offered a positive customer experience throughout the buyer journey, getting renewals is no big deal. But there are a few things that you can take care of to keep your customers happy at the time of renewals.

First of all, be sure to send an email or text message reminder to your customer prior to deducting the payment amount from their account, especially if you have customers taking up annual subscriptions where they can easily forget about it.

Next, allow the customers to modify their billing address easily. Ideally, they should be able to update their payment info within their account only without having to contact the support team.

11. Cancellations

Every business wants their customers to stay with them till eternity, and if that had been the case, it would be so nice. But that’s far from reality. There can be many reasons why a customer might need to cancel their accounts, whether due to financial issues or changing needs. Offering a great customer experience also involves allowing the customers to opt for cancellation whenever they want easily.

• Do not push the customers to contact your sales or support team for cancelation, especially if they have always opted for self-service throughout the buyer journey.
• Do not compel the customers to click on a “Yes, I am sure” button on multiple screens to complete the process.
• Do not make it hard for them to get a refund or make them do weird things like fill out a form and submit the hard copy, etc.

A customer canceling their account is not necessarily a customer lost forever. At times all they need is a change. They might return to your brand again.

Conclusion

If you successfully deliver a positive customer experience throughout the buyer journey, the customer will forever remember your brand positively and perceive it in a good light. Not only will they return to your brand whenever they need your product or service, but they will also recommend it to their peers, friends, and family. Keep this guide in mind and implement the measures discussed above to optimize your touchpoints and provide an incredible customer experience.