What is customer touchpoint?
Customer touchpoints are the points at which customers have interactions with your business. These touchpoints significantly impact your customer experience and the perception of that your customers have of your business.
Touchpoints are usually plotted on a customer journey map to help your team understand what the customer experience will be like. This will include interactions that take place before, during, and after the actual purchase.
These touchpoints would generally comprise your marketing and support channels, but could also include word of mouth.
Here are a few example of customer touchpoints, segregated by whether these interactions take place before, during, or after the actual purchase.
1. Before the purchase
Touchpoints at this stage would include social media posts, advertisements (on whichever channel), reviews and ratings, word of mouth, marketing content, etc.
2. During the purchase
These touchpoints would include your store (offline or online), product catalogs, the point of sale, conversations with the sales team, your website, etc.
3. After the purchase
These touchpoints are billing, follow ups, transactional emails, support interactions, your knowledge base, your chatbot, thank you cards, digital business cards, upsell/cross-sell emails, onboarding sessions, loyalty programs, subscription renewal interactions, etc.
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Why are customer touchpoints important?
Customer touchpoints help you enhance your customer experience. They help you connect with your customers and strengthen your relationship with them.
It’s important to be present and active over multiple touchpoints as your customers do not spend all their time on one channel. A customer could initiate a conversation over social media and wish to continue it over webchat.
In addition to engaging with your customers over multiple touchpoints, you also need to carry conversational context across the channels, creating an omnichannel experience. Engati helps you do this by stitching conversations together across channels so that your agents always have context about past interactions, irrespective of the channel, and your customers do not get frustrated by having to repeat themselves.
However, not all your customer touchpoints will be beneficial to you. Some may even cause unnecessary friction. Your need to identify and define which touchpoints will help you create the experience that you wish to deliver to your customers. Try to eliminate the ones that cause the most friction. This needs to be planned and implemented strategically.
What is customer touchpoint mapping?
Touchpoint mapping refers to identifying every single touchpoint that your customers have with your brand throughout the customer journey. It involves outlining all the instances where your customers will come in contact with your brand, experience it, or interact with it.
Touchpoint mapping helps you understand how the customer journey flows and what your customer experience looks like throughout the customer journey. It aids you in identifying areas for improvement and then taking action and making improvements.
