TOUCHPOINT MANAGEMENT

Touchpoint definition: A touchpoint is any time a potential customer or customer comes in contact
with your brand–before, during, or after they purchase something from you.

Identifying your touchpoints is the first step toward creating a customer journey map, and making
sure your customers are satisfied every step of the way.

Here’s how to take all of your touchpoints into account so you don’t miss an opportunity to listen to
your customers and make improvements that will keep them happy.

Why are customer touchpoints important?

Once identified, your customer touchpoints will serve as a guide for improved customer satisfaction
across the entire customer journey.

The benefits of knowing your customers’ touchpoints include:

• Less stress for customer service: improving customer satisfaction rates at each touchpoint
will improve resolution rates on first contact.
• Better customer experience: ensure customers have a seamless, frictionless experience
across all channels
• Repeat business: a great customer experience will affect their decision to purchase from the
same company again
• Build loyalty: increased customer satisfaction allows you to build a loyal customer base

Customer touchpoint examples

Identify your customer touchpoints by making a list of all the places and times your customers might
come into contact with your brand. We’ve put together a list of touchpoints here, but it can vary a
lot depending on your business.
Before purchase

How did your customer find you? These are the initial customer touchpoints—before they even visit
your business in person or online.

Online ads

Start off strong by ensuring that online advertising links lead to content that is directly relevant to
the ads. If your advertisement features a sale, ensure that the link leads customers to a page that
describes or shows the sale items in detail.

While you want customers to spend time exploring your website, this is not the time to lead them to
a sign-up form or home page. Create a better customer experience (CX) with a landing page with
relevant content.

Social media

You don’t need to be on every social media platform, but make sure you have a profile on channels
your customers use. Keep your pages active with content that is interesting and useful. Always
respond to customer comments—this engagement is why you are on socials in the first place—and
start forming relationships with potential customers.

Referrals

Referral programs, made available to existing customers, offer incentives for both the referrer and
the new customer. This makes both happy and increases the potential for future purchases and
more referrals.

Website

When potential customers visit your website, they should be able to find the information they want
quickly and easily. Navigation should be intuitive and simple. Product pages should have clear
images and descriptions that accurately represent your offerings. Consider adding videos if your
product or service is difficult to describe. Remember, if website visitors can’t find the information
they’re looking for, they’ll look elsewhere. Find out how your customers feel about your website
with a feedback survey.

During purchase

At the point of sale (POS), what did your customers do? Was the experience everything they
needed?

Customer reviews

According to a Power Reviews study, 97% of consumers consult product reviews when making
purchase decisions. It’s important to keep in mind that your customers are looking for these reviews,
so use them in your social media posts, web pages, and marketing materials.

Point of sale

At the point of sale (POS), a sales representative or web page will provide all of the necessary
information—including what needs your product will fulfill. This is the final touchpoint before a
purchase is completed.
After purchase

Touchpoints continue after a sale is complete. Don’t forget to pay attention to these important
points in the customer journey.

Feedback surveys

This is your opportunity to learn details about the customer experience. What was difficult? What
was easy? Use a customer service feedback survey to find out where you need to implement training
or make improvements.

Email lists

If your customer has signed up to receive emails about new offers and products, use the opportunity
to upsell or cross-sell your products.

Community management

Keep watching your social media channels. When people comment and share your posts, ensure
that your community manager is responding and keeping the conversation active and positive.

Remember: This list is a good place to start, but it’s not one-size-fits-all. And each of these
touchpoints can have a lot of underlying pieces. For example, “advertising” could include
touchpoints across many channels, and a physical store includes touchpoints like signage to help
people find the store, the parking lot, and the many different interactions that go on inside the
store.

How to identify customer touchpoints

What are your customers' touchpoints? They are different for every business, so you’ll have to
determine what they are by analyzing your customer interactions.

Think about your target customers and their needs

Use your market research to examine the types of consumers who are likely to purchase from you.
Decide what initial touchpoints would be appropriate for your customers. For example, if your target
market is expectant mothers, you might add promo codes and coupons to your social media
marketing and discount emails for new customers.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes

Because there are so many ways for customers to experience your brand, figuring out all of your
touchpoints may seem daunting at first. But you can make this task more manageable by stepping
out of your role–and into the customer’s shoes.

You’re the customer now. Make sure you have a pen and paper handy because you should take
notes while you’re in the customer mindset.

Ask yourself the following questions:

Where do you go (and how do you get there) when you:

• Have a problem that needs to be solved?

• Discover the product or business that will solve that problem?
• Make your purchase decision?
• Encounter the business after the purchase?
When you walk yourself through the customer’s journey step-by-step, all the pieces should become
pretty clear.

You could also accomplish this task by asking customers to walk you through their experience with
your brand, or putting the questions above into a survey.

Review how consumers engage with your business

What touchpoints are currently in place? What ones do customers use regularly? If you have an
online store and you use online advertising, social media, and email marketing, you may find that
social media yields the most sales on your website. This may then guide you to enhancing your social
media presence as a touchpoint. Find out where customers prefer to engage with your brand with a
content strategy survey.

Create and use customer journey maps and customer experience maps

Customer journey maps help examine the buying process for a particular customer segment
purchasing a specific product or service. You can map how a typical customer from the segment
identifies a problem, researches an answer, learns about your business, engages with your business,
makes a purchase, and finally interacts after the purchase.

Customer experience maps are useful in discovering why customers aren’t having a great
experience. Use them to visualize the customer journey and identify areas that need improvement.

Use both types of maps to determine touchpoints at each stage of the customer journey and what
you can do to ensure a successful experience throughout.

Categorize your customer touchpoints

Take the touchpoints you’ve identified on your customer journey map and categorize them as
before, during, and after purchase. This will help you identify what areas are working well and what
needs improvement.

You could also categorize touchpoints as products, interactions, messages (manuals, advertising,
etc.), and settings (where products are sold).

Or you can determine your own categories. Use what makes sense to you for your specific brand and
products to categorize touchpoints.

Leverage customer feedback

You’ll find that a Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey is invaluable in ensuring that your customers are
satisfied at each touchpoint. Add surveys throughout your touchpoints and take action on the
feedback.

Review frequently

Your customer touchpoint map is a living document and will need ongoing updates as you introduce
new marketing initiatives and purchasing paths. Continue to refine your touchpoints for the best CX.

How to leverage customer touchpoints

Knowing your touchpoints is only half the battle. To improve customer satisfaction, you need to
make sure each touchpoint leads to a good customer experience, and that the journey as a whole
delivers on customers’ expectations.
To see what’s working, you can run customer feedback surveys at each major touchpoint or set up
customer experience management software. But make sure not to lose sight of the big picture, and
always look at your entire customer journey.

Identify missed opportunities

Use surveys to evaluate customer experiences at different touchpoints through their journey. The
quantifiable data will provide you with areas you have not yet touched on in your marketing efforts.
Some of the smaller touchpoints that you haven’t addressed could become integral in providing
superior customer service.

Identify high-value touchpoints

Not every touchpoint you address in your marketing campaigns will have equal value. Analyze your
data for each touchpoint to identify the best-performing areas for marketing.

Provide a better customer experience

Analyze the feedback from your customers’ experiences with your brand from beginning to end. Set
priorities, address gaps in your customer journey, and fix problems at the root of issues you’ve
discovered. This will serve to improve customer satisfaction, experience, and build your brand’s
reputation as a customer-first company.

Gather feedback

The best way to find out how your customers are faring at each touchpoint is to ask them. Survey
panels of customers from each touchpoint to find out where the customer experience is lacking and
where you excel. Identify areas for improvement and take action on them. Ultimately, using
customer feedback can be used to increase customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

Build a loyal customer base

Improving the customer experience at each touchpoint will dramatically improve customer
satisfaction. This, in turn, will increase customer loyalty. And your loyal customers will use word-of-
mouth to advocate for your brand.

Improve the customer experience with touchpoints

Your customers’ experience with your brand begins before their first interaction. Identify
touchpoints before, during, and after each sale, and use these to create a customer touchpoint map.
Get feedback from your customers at each touchpoint to improve customer satisfaction, experience,
and retention.

Start getting feedback from customer touchpoints today with SurveyMonkey. We look forward to
helping you get started.
This is how you perform a customer touchpoint analysis

The term touchpoint is used to describe any point of direct or indirect interaction between the
customer and your company. Customers interact with a brand through many different touchpoints.
To begin with, we will take a look at direct interaction, as this can be mapped with an economic cost-
benefit ratio.

Every day, on average, a customer is in contact with thousands of marketing messages and
advertisements. Many of them are not even recognized as advertising. We consider the content your
customers interact with as touch points.

In order to achieve meaningful results, improving the customer experience is a continuous

management process that requires both time and commitment across functional silos.

The needs and expectations of your customers change over time. So it stands to reason that the way
your company responds to them will also remain flexible.

Managing touchpoints allows you to step more firmly into your customers’ shoes and make big steps
in the customer experience with small improvements to the buying process.

This is how your analysis for touchpoint management can look like at a glance. You can find the steps
in detail below the graphic:

• Determine the status quo of your service in relation to the customer

• Analyze value drivers of your customers
• Develop and implement optimization plan
• Measure effects

Examples of touchpoint categories

Step 1: Determine the status quo of your performance in relation to the customer

Customer touchpoint projects should start with an audit of the current customer knowledge and
mapping of customer interactions. This way you will understand where a lot of data is available and
where it still looks a bit thin.

The crucial point here is not only to capture the relevant information on customer needs and
expectations in the individual lifecycle phases during the assessment. Miss on an objective and data-
based scale, to what extent each interaction contributes to the brand value of the company or could
even have a counterproductive effect.

Typical questions at this stage: Are you delivering a relevant and consistent customer experience?
How do your interactions differ from those of your competitors?

Step 2: Analyze value drivers of your customers

In the second step, we analyze which current or potential points of the customer journey are most
important for your customers. We are also interested in what dimension can further increase the
value of a customer interaction.

The greatest value for customers is represented by the touchpoints that potentially evoke strong
emotions. You should give special importance to these points in the overlap with the influence on
your brand.

If you know the value drivers, ideally broken down by customer segments, you will be able to
approach optimization systematically in the following steps.

Typical questions in this phase: What do my customers value in the experience? Which experiences
improve my relationship with my customers? How do these experiences differ by customer
segment?

Step 3: Develop and implement an optimization plan

The process of developing and deploying a plan for optimizing the customer experience at
touchpoints typically requires cross-functional teams to work together.

Shape all stakeholders, in your organization as well as customers of course, into advocates for action
and optimization. How to do this: prioritize the order of optimization measures in an agile way that
results in some quick wins at the beginning, i.e. quickly visible successes. This way, customer
touchpoint management will not only be a wishful thinking, but will enrich both marketing and your
product development.

Typical questions in this phase: What are the needs and wants of our most profitable customer
segments? What impact can we achieve in the short term? In the long term? How will we align the
organization to improve the customer experience?

Step 4: Measure the impact

The primary goal with touchpoint analysis should be to increase the actual value for the customer.
By capturing KPIs such as Customer Lifetime Value, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and others, you and
your team can infer a change in the various touchpoints over time related to loyalty, brand value and
profitability of specific customer segments.
Variation in these metrics is more likely to occur over the medium to long term. Therefore, by all
means, monitor a somewhat longer period of time. What is a longer period? Can you define it or give
an example?

Conclusion: Take the customer's point of view

Every company, whether it is starting with small steps or radically changing its corporate culture to
become more customer-centric, should consider the analysis and management of customer touch
points as a tool to increase the value of the company.

Metaphorically speaking, touchpoint analysis is comparable to a company taking an honest and

direct look in a mirror. The face you will see there is not always the one you thought your customers
would see. This example also shows the greatest potential value that this approach can bring to your
company.