Picture your last job environment—every meeting with your supervisor or manager, every session with HR, and your interactions with colleagues. Did these exchanges contribute to your departure in any way? If you’re like most people, they probably did.
In the same way, customer service touchpoints determine whether customers continuously choose your brand. Any interaction between your customers and brand should be seamless to promote customer satisfaction. Implement a great customer service strategy, and you’ll have no problem maintaining customer loyalty.
This article will explore key customer service touchpoints and how you can improve interactions for optimal client retention.
What is a customer journey map?
What factors influence your customers’ loyalty? What are their needs and perceptions of your brand at every interaction stage? What could you do better to improve the customer experience?
These are all questions a customer journey map can answer. It’s a visual representation of the kind of customer experience you provide, and it’s a must-have for businesses that want to improve their retention.
Why? Because 80% of modern customers put as much weight on the experience a brand provides as they do on the quality of its products and services.
To create your customer touchpoint map, you first need to define your objectives. Knowing which insights you want to gain from the customer journey will guide you throughout the creation process. After that, you’ll need to:
- Identify your customer persona: Who is your ideal customer? What are their needs, preferences, goals, and pain points?
- Outline the buying process: This includes everything from brand awareness to the post-purchase phase.
- Identify all customer touchpoints: List all business-customer points of contact, both in-person and online. Examples include sales pitches, product catalogs, social media posts, landing pages, and so on.
- Understand customer emotions: How do they feel—happy, frustrated, angry—at different stages of the customer journey?
- Identify critical moments of truth: These are the points that highly influence customer perceptions of your brand—positively or negatively.
- Create and use your map: Use all the insights gathered to develop a visual representation of the customer journey. Then, identify potential opportunities for improvement to enhance the customer experience.
Exploring the concept of customer service touchpoints
Customer service touchpoints are essentially points of contact between your customers and your business. They can either improve customer satisfaction and win you some long-term clients or do the opposite.
Customer service touchpoints can fall into various categories, including:
- Digital: Typically, active and responsive digital channels like social media can boost customer satisfaction and, ultimately, retention.
- Human: These are interactions between people in your company and your customers. The friendlier and more helpful you and your employees are, the better your customer experience.
- Physical: These are points of contact between your customers and your business’s physical environment—everything from product packaging to offline ads. The more they boost convenience, the higher the chances of customer retention.
The impact of effective customer touchpoints
Did you know that it only takes three poor experiences (or less!) for 86% of customers to abandon a brand they were loyal to? This means you don’t have a lot of room for mistakes.
How do you maintain customer loyalty in the long term? By effectively managing your customer touchpoints. Doing so can promote positive customer relationships and business outcomes. Let’s take a deeper look at the roles of effective customer touchpoints.
Improving customer loyalty and satisfaction
Why do you continuously buy products from your favorite brand? Chances are, it provides positive experiences at every step, making you feel like a valued customer.
Positive interactions at each phase, be it physical, human, or digital, can enhance customer satisfaction, fostering loyalty and encouraging repeat business. Further, it can encourage referrals from existing customers, increasing your market base.
Skeptical? Just look at Apple—the company had a net promoter score (likelihood of loyal customers recommending the brand) of 72 in 2022.
The brand achieved this score not only because of its high-quality products but also its customer-centric approach to all business processes. Apple prioritizes positive experiences at all customer touchpoints, as evident from its social media accounts, website, customer service teams, and even product packaging.
Enhancing brand perception
Consumers don’t shy away from sharing their experiences, especially with the prevalence of social media. Depending on customers’ experiences at different stages of their journey, word of mouth can either make or break you.
To ensure the former, maintain consistent, positive customer service experiences. They can contribute to a stronger brand image and a better overall reputation in the market. Again, just look at Apple.
Increasing revenue and growth opportunities
Effective touchpoints can lead to increased sales, cross-selling opportunities, and positive word-of-mouth referrals. In fact, when a customer service interaction delivers value, there’s an 82% chance of repeat business and a 97% chance that the customer will recommend the brand to others.
How to identify your customer service touchpoints
Identifying customer service touchpoints can be a bit challenging at first, especially if you’re new to customer service. But it’s pretty straightforward when you know what to do, as you’ll see below. Follow these tips for accurate identification:
Map your customer journey
Mapping your customer journey, as outlined earlier, will provide a picture of your customer service touchpoints. Typically, the customer journey follows distinct stages, including:
- Awareness: In this stage, customers discover they have a need or problem.
- Consideration: Here, they start comparing brands to identify the best solution.
- Decision: Customers settle on a solution and are ready to purchase a product or service.
- Post-purchase: They decide whether to stay loyal to a company and recommend it to friends, family, and colleagues or look for another option.
Understanding the customer’s perspective and experience at each stage will help you determine how best to offer support.
For example, in the awareness stage, customers may not know which solutions can alleviate their pain points. You can help by providing educational content that addresses their needs and shows how your solution can help.
Use customer feedback surveys and data
You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on consultants to determine what customers like and dislike. Your customers are your greatest knowledge base—they’re often willing to offer feedback for free if you just ask.
Use customer surveys, social media listening, analytics tools, and feedback from your customer support team to gather actionable insights into customer needs and wants. Also, pay attention to support tickets and customer reviews online to identify critical touchpoints.
Conduct an audit
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and do a walkthrough of existing touchpoints to determine their effectiveness. Assess all customer-facing interactions, service delivery, and communication channels from the customer’s perspective.
If you were the client, would you be satisfied with your experience? If not, you need to find solutions as soon as possible. For example, if you realize that it takes days for your support team to resolve customer issues, you may need to expand your team or implement alternative solutions like chatbots.
Review industry best practices
Industry best practices can serve as a benchmark for your team, so assess how companies in your niche identify and manage customer service interactions. For example, if you’re in e-commerce, look at companies with a similar business model or product and see what they do to provide excellent customer experiences.
Customer experience conferences are a great way to learn more about what your peers are doing to enhance customer satisfaction at all points in their journey. These events can also help you gain insights from industry thought leaders.
Use the right technology and tools
Technology can make your work easier by helping you capture data across various stages and gain a more holistic view of the customer journey. It can also help you analyze customer feedback, highlighting efficient touchpoints as well as those that need improvements.
Based on your findings, you can choose tools that align with your needs. For example, say you identify meetings with your sales team as a critical customer touchpoint. You could invest in CRM software to help your sales reps track all client communication and identify potential issues early.
Similarly, if you identify online advertisements and purchases as key contact stages, you can leverage platforms like Bitly to enhance the customer experience. With Bitly, you can shorten and brand your links, improving customer trust and making it easy for customers to navigate to your product pages or find more info on your offerings.
You can also track your link performance through Bitly Analytics. Click data can show you your most and least popular touchpoints, letting you know what to improve for high-quality customer experiences.
Examples of customer touchpoints
There are numerous opportunities for customer service interactions for modern-day businesses. Here are some common touchpoint examples to give you an idea of the points of contact to focus on when improving your customer journey.
Pre-purchase
As the name implies, pre-purchase touchpoints occur before a customer makes a purchasing decision. They can influence customers’ perception of your business and determine whether they choose you over competitors. Common pre-purchase touchpoints include:
- Advertising: Customers may come across online and offline ads, generating interest in your brand and offerings.
- Social media channels: They facilitate two-way communication with customers. Maintaining an active presence and engaging with customers can enhance their experiences.
- Informational web content: Blog posts, videos, and other web content provide meaningful touchpoints that allow you to deliver value to your customers.
- Company website: This shares a little of everything, including your products and services, informational content, and your brand’s values.
Purchase phase
These touchpoints occur when customers are ready to make purchase decisions. The goal is to provide a smooth, secure, and supportive experience to facilitate conversions and improve your bottom line. Key touchpoints here include:
- Website navigation: If customers find it difficult to sort through your product pages or find key product information, they’re likely to give up and move on to a competitor.
- Checkout process: This is crucial, especially if you’re in e-commerce. A seamless checkout process leads to more purchases and fewer abandoned carts.
- Customer service interactions: Customers may need to contact support reps during purchase. Ensure your team is ready to answer questions and deal with issues regarding product availability, quantities, and so on.
- Payment options: This is vital, as it impacts purchasing convenience. Provide numerous payment options to facilitate an excellent customer experience.
Post-purchase
Post-purchase touchpoints can enhance the customer experience and foster long-term customer loyalty by highlighting your commitment to customer satisfaction. Key post-purchase touchpoints include:
- Follow-up emails: In addition to purchase confirmations, you can also reach out to customers with thank-you promotions, demo videos, invitations to follow your social media accounts, and more.
- Delivery notifications: Send out automated tracking and delivery notifications to keep customers up-to-date on their order status.
- Customer support: When customers have an issue with a product or service, excellent customer service can resolve frustrations quickly and turn a negative buying experience into a positive one.
- Satisfaction surveys: Customer satisfaction surveys can help you gauge CX metrics and determine what to improve for a better customer experience.
Service and support
Customer service touchpoints are crucial for resolving issues and maintaining customer trust. Like post-purchase touchpoints, they can help you secure loyal customers and gain referrals. Let’s look at a few examples:
- Help desks: A solution that doesn’t work as intended can quickly lead to frustration. Empowered, knowledgeable help desk agents are the key to turning around the customer experience.
- Live chat: Whether you use chatbots to triage customer requests or live agents to assist customers in real time, aim for efficient resolutions for a positive experience.
- Phone support: Most people don’t like calling customer service. However, delivering a pleasant and effective experience can make a great impression and lead to customer loyalty and referrals.
- FAQ sections: A detailed, comprehensive, and easy-to-find FAQ webpage can provide customers with convenient answers without having to contact customer service.
Improve your customer service touchpoints to exceed customer expectations
Quality customer service touchpoints help you attract new customers, retain existing ones, and gain referrals. When mapping out the customer journey, put yourself in your audience’s shoes to identify problem areas and optimize all your touchpoints, from brand awareness to post-purchase support.
With Bitly, you get real-time click data that can help you identify bottlenecks in your customer journey, allowing you to improve the customer experience. Bitly Analytics can help you optimize your customer service touchpoints and enhance customer interactions at every step.
Register for a Bitly plan today to deliver an unparalleled customer experience!