When was the last time you talked to a customer?
Do you remember asking them about their experiences?
How many interactive customer touchpoints does your brand have?
It all comes down to knowing about the experiences you leave with your customers.
The customer experience (CX) is currently the main differentiator for 66% of businesses. This makes sense since 86% of consumers will spend more for a positive experience. In addition, the average consumer journey now involves 20-500+ touchpoints.
At every point of customer interaction, meticulous attention to detail is necessary for creating great customer experiences. Customer touchpoints are all the various ways that consumers interact with a good or service, from the time they first learn about it until they discard it.
Customer touchpoints are the critical moments customers have with a company, product, or service. They are the points of contact that a customer has with a brand, and can range from a simple website visit to a physical store.
Touchpoints provide a unique opportunity for companies to interact with their customers, build relationships, and create an overall positive customer experience. When done correctly, customer touchpoints can be powerful tools to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, generate more sales, and create a lasting impression.
In organizations where their management does not go through the practice of experiencing their own brands as their customers do, most businesses need help to improve their customer touchpoints. Every good or service needs to develop a map of the customer touchpoints that shows customers' paths while interacting with their brand.
Here are some of the touchpoints crucial for improving your customer journey and hence customer experience:
1. Customer touchpoints before purchase
2. Customer touchpoints during a purchase
3. Customer touchpoints after a purchase
Marketing and advertising activities are frequently encountered by consumers before making purchases. Marketing and sales teams use these touch points to communicate with customers and persuade them to buy a product or service from a company. Here are some pre-purchase touch point examples:
68% of customers assert that they have used a product more after training, and 56% use more product features than they would when untrained.
It has a very seismic effect on your entire business: how you educate people about your product and how they should utilize it. The options are all written instructions, infographics, interactive lessons, tests, case studies, instructional videos, product tours, in-store sessions, and instructor-led training.
It's essential to comprehend the steps a customer takes when utilizing your product when you provide customer education. These broadly fall into the following categories: learning more about your product and thinking whether to buy it, purchasing it, getting started with it, remaining interested, purchasing more from you, or advocating and being loyal to your brand.
85% of buyers consider product information and pictures necessary when deciding which brand or shop to buy from.
Effective product pages encourage visitors to become buyers. Moreover, they assist in giving your customers the data they require to make an informed decision. Scannable, succinct, and objective product descriptions work best.
Furthermore, never sacrifice image quality, as doing so could hurt your business's revenue. Consumers won't proceed with the purchase if the image is of poor quality or poorly depicts the item.
Also, ensure you add shipping details and return policy to your product pages. Including these brief descriptions on the product page may stop customers from leaving the page to read your shipping details, as the vital information is already covered.
79% of people feel that user-generated content on social media substantially affects their buying decisions.
Social media offers you a convenient opportunity to get to know your customers better, grasp their problems, and know how your company has impacted them. So, be authentic while participating on your brand's social media platforms by offering pertinent information and tools.
Moreover, your organization should humanize its culture, mission, and values through social media initiatives. For example, to give your brand a human touch that customers might not otherwise experience, your brand's social media page can occasionally feature humor or personal interest tales.
82% of marketers are active in using content marketing.
The way that our customers experience our advertising is directly correlated with psychological aspects, including thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. So, consider your target audience's mindset before introducing your product in the advertisement.
For example, a travel advertisement can consider using the title "You may be on a sandy beach tomorrow..." instead of "Discounted travel vacations!"
Therefore, advertising can be properly and narrowly targeted. Even for small companies, it may be pretty beneficial.
More specifically, online advertisements allow you to track specific sales or other conversions back to individual clicks, letting you know exactly how many people saw and clicked on your advertisement.
The customer experience as a whole includes the product experience. It focuses on the entire customer journey that occurs within the actual product. It covers a customer's initial login and their last exit from an application.
The "four walls" of a digital product's digital environment encompass everything that happens there. A customer-centric approach to product development and the adoption of design thinking is consistent with emphasizing the product experience.
From the customer's point of view, the product is what they encounter and how they encounter it. If it doesn't perform in the manner that people desire, then expectations have not been met. Therefore, there can be unfavorable effects.
95% of marketers feel that in-person events can help attain business objectives.
One of the fantastic approaches to achieving an outstanding CX through events is through conducting company events. These events can increase brand recognition and foster a sense of familiarity and trust regarding brand touchpoints, whether physical, digital, or a combination of the two.
Events are more effective if you can determine why you're organizing them and what your strategic goals are with your team. Then, team members can connect with company values and strategies, experience a sense of ownership, and get on the same page even as an event is being planned.
81% of B2B marketers believe their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters.
An email newsletter includes important news, updates, and other material to help your readers learn more about your company, goods, or brand. It is a relatively less expensive tool used to increase business. Email newsletters are essential to advance your brand marketing.
Moreover, they can even act as another form of promotion by reserving coupons or discounts for subscribers, a clever way to monitor readership.
Touchpoints that occur during customer purchases often include customer service and sales activities. Consumers interact with these touch points while deciding the specific product or service they plan to purchase. These are some examples of touch points customers encounter while they make purchasing decisions:
It takes just 50 milliseconds for website visitors to make an opinion of a website.
Customers with a positive shopping experience on your website will return or shop there frequently. Therefore, your website should be simple to use, with a clear layout that makes it simple to access information, book appointments, and find products and services.
83% of website visitors want websites to load in less than 3 seconds.
A few more seconds it takes for your website to launch could have disastrous financial consequences. So, it would be best to speed up the webpage loading.
Also, remember that design is the queen, and content is the king! Combine both in the best ways possible to improve the website user experience for your customers.
Over 70% of buying decisions are made on the shelf, as product packaging is the first thing a customer sees.
Product packaging plays an integral part in distinguishing a brand from the competition.
So, there must be an exceptional quality to opening your new goods. Packaging should exude quality and good taste. Apple, for instance, has been known to use inventive packaging techniques, such as plastic shopping bags with strings that double as backpacks.
Moreover, your product's packaging should reflect the style of print and television advertisements to maintain uniformity.
For instance, when customers leave the store, Apple computer packaging with carry handles acts as moving billboards. Specialness is also communicated by how the boxes open and the contents are arranged within.
Customers now make the majority of purchasing decisions by trying goods out for themselves in the era of free trials and freemium business models. They can connect with products in a physical way that is difficult, if possible, to recreate through product sampling.
Offering product samples to prospective consumers is quite advantageous since it promotes exposure and gives the customers a taste of your goods that will leave them wanting more. Moreover, it enables customers to leave with a sense of assurance and delight with their purchase.
In 2026, it is expected that the market for voice recognition technology will reach about $30 billion. The figure shows that voice-activated systems continue to gain popularity.
To improve consumer engagement and interactions with your company, think about implementing voice-activated technology into your customer experience strategy.
For example, a voice ordering mechanism is part of Domino's ongoing efforts to improve the online consumer experience. The smart technology enables users to order Domino's meals using the speech recognition technology created by Nuance.
Globally, 1.7 billion mobile augmented reality (AR) user devices are anticipated by 2024. AR deepens consumers' connection to the product or service. Customers are more likely to feel linked if they interact (virtually) with the good or service and if this interaction is pleasant.
Moreover, AR helps develop emotions. For example, how does it feel to win a video game based on your preferred brand? Or to try on a garment from your preferred brand in a made-up fitting room that accurately replicates the actual thing and has it fit you well? Sales will rise if those feelings are good since they will strengthen consumers' bonds with the brand.
46% of customers will abandon a brand if customer representatives are not knowledgeable.
CX is directly impacted by agent experience as it can affect how well-trained an agent is to serve customers. Businesses that concentrate on enhancing the agent experience frequently report customer satisfaction and loyalty increases.
So, ensure training and paying your staff well, especially customer service agents. Make sure customers don't have to wait for long to acquire information.
Moreover, tweak your company's hiring criteria and training procedures to have an efficient workforce that is collectively cooler, sharper, more patient, collaborative, and problem/solution oriented.
32% of customers believe they will engage with in-store experiential moments.
The stores' regular cleanliness, the upbeat lighting, and the homogeneous building materials and designs all help to create a comfortable and optimistic atmosphere. For example, keeping bags and receipt printers hidden underneath the display tables' surface can make your stores clear of clutter.
If your company has demo stores, it is simple to try and sample the devices. In fact, demos might be the single most successful marketing strategy for a product that is actually outstanding. Each store's demo staff member should support the demo strategy.
A consumer's first impression of your company can determine the course of the relationship for brick-and-mortar enterprises. For visitors, your area should be warm and inviting. Moreover, the locations of your stores should be easy to find and in areas of each city your target audience resides at or can visit.
30% of your clients expect live chat on your website. Customers can contact you directly through live chat on your contact page. A proactive chat feature on your features page demonstrates your ability to explain intricate functionality.
Before customers abandon their shopping cart, live chat on your checkout page can help resolve any last-minute questions.
By integrating your live chat service with a well-known messaging platform like WhatsApp or Messenger, your clients may ask you questions on your website and while elsewhere.
Self-checkout was used to handle 29% of transactions at food shops, up from 23% the year before.
Self-checkout continues to expand. Advanced tech, such as AI, can walk customers through the self-checkout procedure step by step. Self-checkout has gained popularity among supermarket buyers because of its quick turnaround times and minimal human involvement.
As a result, several retailers have started testing technologies that go one step further. For instance, customers who follow AI instructions can scan their groceries with a mobile device as they walk through the store, add the items to their cart, and when they are finished shopping, pay with their phone, entirely avoiding the checkout line.
According to 88% of customers, thorough product pages are essential for choosing a product. In addition, catalogs are a great way to present your product line, whether printed or online.
A product image and an alluring description provide the buyer with all the information they require to make a purchase. For example, you can reduce friction by including a CTA that adds the product to a shopping cart on the page.
eWallets (36%) are preferred by international online shoppers above credit cards (23%) and debit cards (12%).
Payment process dynamics are changing as digital and mobile technology advance into our daily lives, most noticeably in the B2C sector, where most eCommerce transactions take place with a click or a swipe. This idea is now also being used for B2B payments.
The pandemic accelerated the demand for frictionless digital transactions by making quick, safe, and secure online payments a prerequisite for doing business.
Because of this, the payment process is rapidly becoming a crucial aspect of the consumer experience. As a result, businesses must incorporate it into their total value proposition up front, or they risk losing a devoted consumer base.
Cross-sell and upsell emails sent after purchase had an open rate of 61.7%, a click-through rate of 9.7%, and a conversion from clicks of 9.16%.
Once a customer makes a purchase, their needs don't go away. Some clients end up needing more after using your goods. With a cross-sell email, you may recommend more products from your catalog based on what a visitor is looking at, has added to their basket, or has already bought.
These emails are among the finest ways to transform first-time purchasers into recurring customers and raise your average order value. You now have the chance to upsell or cross-sell customers on extra or premium things in your business.
From 2022 to 2028, the self-service kiosk market is projected to develop at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.5%.
Kiosks open up new ways to entice customers to make larger purchases. With free Point of Sale software, they aid in tailoring product offers and improving inventory control.
While self-checkout kiosks at supermarkets are ubiquitous, a basic iOS or Android tablet can also function as a mobile kiosk or be equipped in-store with complementary hardware.
For example, if your company has kiosks in stores, it is simple to try and sample the goods. Demos in such stores might be the single most successful marketing strategy for an outstanding product.
97% of those surveyed concur that they look for coupons when they purchase, and 92% say they do it frequently.
Consumers adore a good deal. With the option to set pricing cheaper than your competitors, you can prosper. Discounts are convincing. People will be more inclined to promote your company when you give them special rewards and discounts.
Many businesses, whether they operate an e-commerce site or social media account, provide customers limited period percentage discounts on full-priced items to promote spending and create creative methods to add value.
After a customer makes a purchase from a company, touchpoints can occur. These touch points provide vital insights about the customer experience for marketing and customer service teams. You can use this data to identify ways to improve the customer journey in the future. Here are some instances of post-purchase consumer touchpoints:
Almost nine out of ten (88%) customers worldwide go through reviews when coming across a local business. Reviews and ratings have grown in importance as a component of the purchase process. Consumers today rely on ratings and reviews while making purchases. Even if the product review is unpleasant, learn how to handle it.
A customer's experience with your business's goods or services is reflected in a customer review. Reviews can be obtained on websites like Facebook, Yelp, Amazon, and Google Reviews. Customers utilize customer reviews to learn how your product functions and whether it is pricey during the buying process.
On every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can hope to earn an average return of $40. Every consumer will anticipate receiving an order confirmation email following a purchase, just like they do with most transactional communications.
Before a customer makes a purchase, you can advertise your bestsellers and suggested products. With these emails, you can be sure that interested customers will see them by including them. But don't include too many, or you risk confusing the customer.
Businesses use thank-you emails to express their gratitude and appreciation to customers to foster longer-lasting customer relationships. In fact, sending thank you messages is a technique to build an online relationship similar to the in-person interactions your customers have with physical brands.
Marketers who personalize their emails to make them more pertinent can see a 139% rise in click-through rates. Remarkably, thank you emails humanize the relationship between your company and your customers by encouraging consumer participation, which fosters strong brand loyalty.
By the end of 2028, the global market for customer loyalty management is anticipated to reach $24 billion.
By keeping customers from switching to the competition, loyalty programs successfully retain them. In addition, by providing incentives to spend more and buy more frequently, these programs can help increase a customer's lifetime value.
Brands and customers benefit equally from effective customer loyalty programs. They increase the company's recurring revenue and please customers with benefits and rewards. This results in a better customer experience, which can result in more profits.
Email surveys typically receive a response rate of 24.8%.
Customer satisfaction and engagement surveys can help your business boost profitability and growth by measuring consumer views of your products and services and their level of trust and commitment to your company.
In the battle to earn the hearts and loyalty of your target market, customer satisfaction surveys are a vital and valuable weapon. With the help of their feedback, you can enhance your offerings in terms of both product quality and customer service, which will increase sales and cultivate a more devoted following.
Following the initial monthly renewal, the median subscription rates for iOS and Android apps appear to rise, with these apps keeping a more significant percentage of their paid customers.
Renewals are essential to the success of a subscription-based business's revenue strategy. For your firm to continue to develop steadily, you need clients to renew their memberships. It would be best if you minimize friction in your rejuvenation process.
When all, it ought to be simple for a current customer to continue being a customer after their contract expires.
Employee referral is a customer touchpoint where existing employees of a firm recommend the goods or services of the company to their friends, relatives, or acquaintances. As staff referrals are frequently more reliable and are more likely to become devoted clients, this touchpoint can be a useful source of new customers for a business.
The employee referral touchpoint should be treated like any other touchpoint, tracked and measured to understand the conversion rate and customer satisfaction, and given the necessary training and authority to refer new customers.
According to 75% of consumers, refunds are the most complicated element of making an internet purchase.
Returns can be a point of retention if the proper procedures and tools are in place. So, give customers alternatives that will make beginning their return simple and painless, whether through your website, a physical location, or assistance from your customer support staff.
In today's digital-first era, an online self-service returns page is essential for a seamless consumer experience. In addition, there are numerous methods customer care representatives can assist clients with returns, including live chat, over the phone, and email.
Customers should receive status updates when a return is initiated, just as you do after a purchase is placed (email confirmations, text notifications, etc.).
Customers are more likely to remain loyal to companies that address their issues, according to 83% of consumers.
Whether you gain or lose relationships with busy shoppers frequently depends on how you respond to customer complaints. This is particularly true online, where retailers frequently turn on agents from remote contact centers to handle issues.
So, despite the lack of face-to-face interactions, customer service experts must be skilled in soothing and appeasing disgruntled clients.
Beyond the essential benefits and qualities that all your competitors provide, people frequently stick with goods and services for other reasons. Mastering touchpoints increases the likelihood that customers would upgrade their purchases and spend more money overall.
The takeaway from all of this is that businesses must experience their brands through their consumers' eyes to identify how they can improve the product or service experience and make it better, more enjoyable, more human, and more effective to win their loyalty and love.
Each firm needs to create a thorough customer touchpoint or journey map that includes every stop along the path, including those made before, during, and after the purchase. Then, to surprise and delight customers, they should consider ways to differentiate beyond the apparent.
Read More: Customer Journey Analytics