Delivering positive customer service experiences at every touchpoint of the customer’s journey is vital to building a brand and rising over the competition. For exceeding customers’ expectations, brands must understand the customer’s perspectives, requirements, and expectations. This can be done by mapping the customer journey touchpoints and continuously fine-tuning them.
What are customer journey touchpoints?
Customer journey touchpoints are phases that a customer goes through before coming to a buying decision. Throughout the decision-making process, the customer’s journey is shaped by these touchpoints.
At each phase, these touchpoints serve different purposes. Brands can mine these touchpoints through customer journey analytics and then optimize observed touchpoints to frame strategies and influence customers’ purchase decisions across the sales funnel.
Different customer journey touchpoints and ways to manage CX at these points
1. Awareness
This is the first stage where a customer knows about a brand. It begins when a potential customer becomes aware of the brand’s offerings through advertisements, word of mouth, or different media channels. At this step, the customer realizes a need for the solution.
While creating customer awareness campaigns, brands need to be accurate with their offerings and identify customers’ requirements as well as key pain areas.
Managing CX at the awareness stage
Website: The first step towards managing CX at the awareness stage is optimizing the brand’s website. When customers find any product or brand relevant to their requirements, they try checking out their business website.
Having a well-curated website with testimonials and clear CTAs will leave a good impression on customers, build trust, and increase their attention span. Poorly designed websites and improper information can distract customers and impact their interest.
Creating a visually appealing website with easy navigation to brand offerings is important. Apart from that, it’s necessary that the proper value of their offerings is conveyed through the website. Organizations must also focus on providing multiple engagement channels so that customers can reach out to the brand in case of any questions.
These engagement channels should provide omnichannel support through Live Chat, Call Support, Email, and Social Media Handles. An easy-to-navigate website with a clear brand message and easy to engage with significantly reduces the bounce rate and increases the conversion ratio.
Social Media Platforms: With the advent of social media platforms in the last one and a half decades, brands are required to revolutionize the way they engage with their customers. Improving social media engagement & optimizing it for performance grasps customers’ attention and builds their trust in the brand. Social media platforms are a preferred medium for brands to reach root-level potential customers and build a lasting impression.
Posting market-relevant and interactive content, addressing customers’ concerns received in the comments section, and encouraging engagement via online activities can help grow the audience.
Apart from that, brands must also share ‘How to Guides’, ‘User Testimonials’, and content around the problems they’re solving to generate interest among the customers.
Live Chat: When customers come across a brand or a product, they want to learn more about the possibilities with that brand. The proactive support provided by live chat can help customers make quick purchase decisions.
Apart from that, live chat can also act as a self-serve channel serving customers 24*7*365. Live chat can help customers find resolutions to common concerns, conduct surveys, and collect necessary customer information, while human agents focus on more strategic customer interactions.
Further, brands should optimize live chat by providing quick responses using canned templates and interactive resolutions to reap great benefits when it comes to converting and keeping customers engaged.
2. Consideration
This is the second stage of the customer’s buying journey with a brand. In the consideration stage, a customer intends to learn more about the brand’s solution through demos, whitepapers, and newsletters. Customers will do a thorough evaluation by learning about the possibilities, and use cases, as well as carry out detailed evaluations by understanding competitor offerings, price comparison, and overall offering comparison.
Engaging Customers at the Consideration Stage:
In order to effectively engage customers at the consideration stage, brands must prepare different types of content formats such as: Case Studies, Whitepapers, Videos of Use Cases, Research Reports, Comparison Charts, Instructional blogs, etc. These types of content formats come in handy in order to understand the specific use cases and understand the detailed capabilities of the offerings.
Brands must create different types of content to ensure that the customers have the complete information handy before making their purchasing decision.
Setting Communication Channels: When any offering interests a customer and they intend to purchase it, they might come up with a few questions prior to the purchase. Hence, fine-tuning all communication channels, providing Omnichannel support, and building an active team of customer service agents to proactively assist customers during the customer lifecycle journey is extremely necessary. Investing in interaction analytics can help improve agents’ performance and the overall quality of customer interactions.
Agents must be trained to actively listen and answer with competence.
3. Conversion
This is the last phase of the customer’s buying journey. At this stage, the customer completes the purchase and the brand succeeds in fulfilling the requirement.
Managing CX at the Conversion Stage
Unlock the Analytics
It is important for brands to unlock actionable customer analytics to identify the customer’s sentiments, emotions, and intentions while interacting with the brand representatives. With the help of these analytics, brands can further fine-tune their customer engagement process and improve overall customer satisfaction.
With the help of interaction analytics technology, brands can run through entire customer interactions and not only analyze the words spoken but also analyze the intention & hidden meaning behind those words.
Understand Customer Behaviors
In the last stage of the customer journey, it becomes critical to analyze customer behaviors. Focusing on customer behavior not only helps the organization provide better offers but also helps brands to understand customer needs beforehand and ensure customer satisfaction.
In the conversion stage, it is necessary for the brand representatives to be aware of common customer objections & effective rebuttals to overcome those objections. Furthermore, all these rebuttals & objections should be stored in a centralized location so as to ensure that the knowledge is shared across the organization.
Understanding the customer journey with a brand is incomplete without exploring journey touchpoints. Customer journey touchpoints are an easy way to listen to customers’ voices and get a sneak peek into their pain points, requirements, and expectations of a brand.
Managing customer experience at every touch point can be challenging, however with the right tools, a well-trained frontline team, and customer journey analytics in place, it can be made easy.
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