What are Customer Touchpoints and what you need to know about them?
Nowadays, every brand prioritizes its customers' experience over other parameters. Because it has become clear that devising your marketing strategies, while keeping the customers' needs in mind, will lead to increased customer retention.
Because SaaS revenue models are mostly based on recurring subscription incomes, providing your customers with a better experience is more necessary than ever; if you don't want them to roll over into competitors.
This article will show how increasing customer touchpoints with superior customer experience can immensely boost your recurring wealth.
What Are Customer Journey Touchpoints?
Customer touch-points are the points of contact when a customer comes across your brand, starts to interact with it and then shapes a perception towards your brand.
These interactions can take place within the website, with customer success teams or through your different social platforms.
Furthermore, the number of customers' touch points is also directly correlated to the amount of customers' engagement with your brand and product.
How To Identify Your Customer Journey Touchpoints?
There are several ways to find reliable customers' journey touchpoints. Few are obvious like your websites, social media and blogs. But, others need thorough research and data analysis.
For this, create a weighting system to prioritize your top-performing touchpoints, like the search engines that bring the highest traffic to your site.
Know your customers' feedback by conducting surveys and leveraging in-app analytics. Ask users direct questions such as - How they found out about the brand and your product.
This will help you pinpoint those unseen touchpoints that you overlooked or need to include in the strategy.
Types Of Customer Journey Touchpoints
Different kinds of customer touchpoints affect the customer journey differently and more diversely. And, it's imperative to individually understand them.
Present state touchpoint
Start with examining your customer's current needs and satisfaction—study their behavior towards your product by analyzing data and surveys.
Then, observe the recent trends in your product usage like the most used features and highest product adoption. Also consider the fact that your users might expect some new additional features.
This will help you figure out the different locations which require prompted adaptations to get maximum customer engagement.
For example: you have two versions of the product— one to use from the browser and another to download and use directly from your desktop - But you notice that people who have downloaded your desktop app are still using the browser version.
This behavior should trigger a notification and an appropriate response.
The present state touchpoint helps you to know the reason for any changes in customers’ emotions or behavior—which you can use to build the product and its dynamics.
Future state touchpoint
The future state touchpoint works on the conceptualisation and visualization of customers' ideal journey. It involves studying customer goals and then aligning different touch-points with them.
The prime focus is on igniting your customer experience and finding any gaps between your ideation and their expectation.
However, you can only implement it after finishing the present customer touch-point mapping. Because let’s be real, one can think of the future only after that person is certain about its present state.
Future state touchpoint helps you uncover any critical points for your new products and the penetration of marketing campaigns.
Day in the life touchpoint
A day in the life touchpoint covers all the daily activities of your customer including the time they’re not interacting with the product. It goes beyond optimizing the current touchpoints and puts extra efforts into uncovering new touch-points around the customer's day to day life.
Furthermore, it customizes all touchpoints by integrating hyper-personalized customer stats in its strategy. Then figuring out customers' needs and their perceptions about the product and brand.
To start with strategy we would recommend you to grab a notepad and ask users about their thoughts and impressions for interacting with the touchpoints..
With such a strategy, you may easily gather valuable input about your customer's decision making - why they choose you over your competitors or how you can improve the UX per touchpoint.
A competitors journey mapping
Competing with other brands with the same target audience is inevitable. But studying the mapping strategies of those competitors can help your business too.
The major sharks in the SaaS industry can bring some unique data that can help you devise your mapping while achieving the end goal.
Being an impersonator will not help you, but their marketing solutions can still give hints about your problems. You can compare your mapping plans with them to eliminate any glitch in your strategy.
This can help you point out spots where you need to take actions to improve the customer experience.
Service Blueprints
Service blueprints are another critical aspect of touchpoint mapping, and add a second layer to your customer journey.
Because it focuses on the organization’s journey rather than the customer journey. This includes everything about the company's detailed background processes and services at every stage.
The customer support team is an example of service Blueprints that work in the background, ensuring a better customer experience.
Prerequisites before you create your customer journey touchpoint map
Now that you have strategies to build your customer map, it's time to execute them.
So, here are the things to know before you create your own customer journey touchpoints map.
Get clear with your goals
Having a clear goal keeps you in the right direction and helps navigate effectively while deploying strategies around your customer touchpoints maps.
Hold a meeting with your sales team to get a considerable amount of insight and decide the relevant targets for your business.
To do that—get a clear idea about the current state of your business and see which mapping technique fits better.
Make different customer journey maps that align your goals with customers needs, and choose the best to deploy.
Create primary and secondary persona
The second step that comes after setting goals is to create a separate customer avatar for all customer segments.
Analyze the user's data from interviews, surveys, social platforms or in-app analytics.
It tailors the right set of solutions for the right set of problems according to the users.
Having a primary persona is a must for a successful branding that defines a product's USP. However, having a common persona that addresses the major group of customers is also essential to work proactively.
Collect relevant data and insights
The more data and insights, the better. Expand your resources for data gathering. Then, optimize your data to make your UX top notch at all touch points. So users don’t have to face any lagging issues while interacting with your company.
Also, instruct your customer support team and sales team to make most out of the suggestions and feedback. Then align them according to the customer requirements.
Keep your data updated
To stay updated—ask your customers about their opinions and experiences regarding your new product features.
- How can you make this even better?
- Does it help with customers’ needs?
- How is this upgrade better or lacking than previous?
After collecting the data you need to come up with a solid conclusion, point out faults that need to be improved and narrow the gap between "what it is right now" and "what it should be".
Study your KPI's before and after the new releases. Examining the flow of UX and improving it should be a major goal.
Avoid Rigidity
Treating your customer journey mapping as a one-time process can be the greatest lapse in your whole business strategy.
Remember, you can never achieve a perfect score in any strategy. So, avoid rigidity by revisiting your business ideas from time to time.
Try to figure out which strategies or segments are not working. And, come up with a better alternative to fill the gap. Then, accordingly, start your plan with a new outlook and advanced techniques.
Conclusion
You’ve put so much effort and hardwork in making every domain of your business pitch perfect. Starting from creating buyer personas, devising strategies to make everything work, and so on.
Similarly you need to measure customer touch points for your business. It is crucial to know what interests someone to have a look at your product and eventually also if someone is not interested in the product.
By knowing this you can level up your efforts in that domain - which will lead to more conversion and increase in product adoption.
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