What Are Customer Touchpoints? Phases, Importance + How to Identify Them

It's an every company's duty to provide customers, whether regular or potential, with a better experience that will boost their views on their products and services. Not every day you will get your products sold and get good reviews, but with a better understanding of touchpoints at every step of your customer's journey, your brand will remain relevant to them.

This article introduces us to customer touchpoints, their importance, and all you need to know about them. Let's get right into it;

What are customer touchpoints?

Customer touchpoints are any points of interaction a customer has with a business, i.e., through their websites, social media, physical stores, and more. These interactions will help improve a customer's brand perception of your business and also boost relationships. 

Through customer touchpoints, businesses can get insights and improve their products and services to give them a better experience and convert them into loyal customers.

Why is optimizing touchpoints online beneficial for businesses

Optimizing your touchpoint online will give you many benefits that you will get to experience growth and increase your customer satisfaction. But first, let's see why online optimization is essential;

1. Cost saving

By optimizing touchpoints online, you will be cutting costs on materials and efforts needed to be put in place for your products and services to be sold. You don't necessarily have to do shipping costs, mailing, or hiring extra workers for your brand to be seen.

2. Improved analytics

One thing about optimizing your touchpoint online is that you can track your business's analytics. You will know how many customers interact with your products and services and gain more useful customer insights to help you make informed decisions on your product's development and marketing.

3. Builds trust

Both regular and potential customers can gain the trust of businesses since they can see and get a better understanding of the services a company is offering them. Their services will be transparent enough to make them make rational decisions by purchasing their products from online reviews and ratings seen.

4. Visibility

By optimizing customer touchpoints online, you will be offering your customers pop-up ads of your products while scrolling through your site. This will allow you to showcase what you have in order for them to make a purchase.

What is the importance of customer touchpoints?

Businesses have a lot more to gain when it comes to customer touchpoints. Once they have identified and strategized what to do, creating a relationship between them and their customers would be easy. With us are some of the benefits they have as follows;

1. Understand your customer's needs

Through customer touchpoints, businesses can develop ideal products and services that are relevant to their customers. This is because they can get valuable insights from their customers and make good use of them by improving on areas they need to do so.

2. Improve customer experience

Through touchpoints, businesses can give customers an experience they would live to tell. This is because businesses will work towards bettering their reputation and providing the best they can for their customers to return and buy from them.

3. Increased loyalty

Customers will remain loyal to a brand they are sure of and highly believe in. If you give them a better experience while shopping with you and do follow-ups afterward, they will highly recommend your business to their friends and expand your followers.

4. Enhances brand reputation

With a good reputation, reviews, and ratings, a business can bring an enhanced reputation that customers will want to interact with. The effort put in a business to save its reputation can be seen through its customers and how well their experience are while interacting with them.

How to identify customer touchpoints

As a business, you should always ensure your customers are satisfied with what you give them. You need to know what your customer touchpoints are and work on them. Here are some of the ways how you can identify them;

1. Analyze customer feedback

Take time to review and analyze what your customers are saying about your products and services. You can achieve that by reviewing their feedback, conducting online and offline surveys, and handling complaints to identify touchpoints.

2. Examine customer journey maps

Investigate and review customer journey maps to know how much they know about your business, their interactions, and their experiences with the services at each journey step. You can use these insights to help you develop an enjoyable customer experience for them.

3. Review and monitor

Monitor and review your websites and social media channels to know how customers engage with your products and services. Know what action each customer takes while on your site and identify problem areas to rebuild the touchpoints so that you can offer your customers nothing but a better experience.

4. Categorize your touchpoints

Categorize customer touchpoints at each point, from before purchase while purchasing to their post-purchase journey with you. You can categorize them to understand better how customers' engages and what areas need a tweak to give them the best you can.

What are the 5 customer touchpoints?

Use your brand to woo customers into liking what you have for them. With are some of the 5 listed customer touchpoints you can use for your business purposes;

1. Advertising; You can use advertisements to get what you are selling to reach potential customers that you are targeting through your products.
2. Website; Use your website to showcase the products and services you are offering them. This will fasten the time they take to reach you, and at the same time, what you have to offer them will be clearly visible for their views and purchases.
3. Customer service; You can achieve this by placing a team to deal with customers' questions about your products and services. They would be in charge of attending to their queries.
4. Social media; Use social media to engage directly with customers and interact with encouraging them to purchase your products. They would give out their views and feedback too.
5. Retail shop; This is a physical store where customers can walk in and buy products they would like.

What are the 3 phases of customer touchpoint?

When it comes to customer touchpoints, we have a number of phases that should come to your mind every time. Here are the phases you should know about as follows;

1. Pre-purchase

This is a phase whereby businesses create awareness for their products and service to make sales. They could use various tactics such as advertising, marketing, and customer service activities to boost sales and increase customers.

2. Purchase

At this point, a company's activities relate to its customers buying their products and services. This can be seen through website visits, using payment processors, and an actual orders of products.

3. Postpurchase

This last phase includes activities after a customer purchases, such as product returns and loyalty programs. Customers can assess their satisfaction with the products and services received from a business and give feedback.

Techniques on how to use customer touchpoints in your business

If you want the easiest way to use customer touchpoints in your business, look no further than right here. We have listed a few techniques you can use as follows;

1. Leverage social media

Social media is one of the quickest ways to engage with customers and build relationships. If you need to promote your business products and services, this should be your number one platform to go to.

2. Develop an email marketing strategy

Initiate an email marketing strategy to keep in touch with your customers. This will help you upstate them on products and services you want to promote and also boost your interactions on a personalized level.

3. Create customer loyalty programs

Loyalty rewards help keeps customers encourage to continue buying from you. You can offer discounts and incentives to your most loyal customers as a gesture that you appreciate them.

4. Utilize customer surveys

Use insights from customers' touchpoint surveys to bring what customers need and improve on what needs improvement. You can conduct surveys online or even one-on-one to get insights into what they think about your products and services. This will help better their experience and help build meaningful relationships.

5. Host events

Host events such as meet and greets, product launches, and more that will help connect you with customers. You can invite them and let them give their honest view of your products and have fun at the same time.

Conclusion

In business, customer touchpoints are critical and not a matter to brush off. Giving customers a better experience at each step of their journey while doing business with them is very important, and that can be seen through the effort placed to achieve that. Use touchpoints to create a memorable experience and improved decisions that will highly target customers' needs at the right time.

‍