What a Customer Touchpoint Is (and Why Customer Experience Leaders Should Care)
Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CSP
Customer Experience Speaker, Trainer, Podcast Host, and CEO
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Your relationship with customers is built one step at a time. Every interaction they have with your organization leaves an impression — and you want it to be a good one!
‘Touchpoints’ have been a hot topic for marketing, sales, and customer experience teams for decades. And for good reason! Each customer journey touchpoint is an opportunity to reinforce your brand value and engage customers in meaningful ways.
With the rapid spread of artificial intelligence, your team even has the power to automate many touchpoints and experiences (with a few notable pitfalls if you’re not careful).
But, what exactly is a touchpoint? And why do they matter for customer experience teams?
What is a Touchpoint?
A touchpoint is any contact or interaction a customer has with your organization. Touchpoints span the entire customer journey, including before they become a customer and well after their first purchase.
Social media posts, brand websites, customer review websites, demo request forms, QR codes, email marketing messages, sales team outreach (SMS or phone calls), and every direct or indirect brand interaction are touchpoints. But that’s only scratching the surface.
Customer Experience Touchpoints Are More Than Transactional Moments
In terms of customer experience, touchpoints are more than just transactional moments. They’re critical interactions within the customer journey that help define key moments in the process that can build or erode customer trust.
Each touchpoint is an opportunity to show who you are to customers. In the best case, every touchpoint will evoke positive emotions and deeply fulfill your customer’s need at that specific point in their journey.
But customer touchpoints are often misunderstood for what they really are, or go unappreciated from the customer’s perspective.
And therein lies the problem.
“Customer Journey Touchpoint” is NOT Just Business Jargon
The concept of customer touchpoints is more than just business jargon!
Touchpoints are meaningful only if and when the company understands them. Without understanding, sure, the term touchpoint may as well be meaningless business jargon.
Understanding your customers’ current situations, and what drives them toward loyalty or defection, is one of the first steps in delivering a superior customer experience. Understanding the actual touchpoints your customers have with your organization is a basic part of that understanding.
Channels are Not Touchpoints.
Channels are a way for you to understand where customers come from and how they interact with you, the company. Touchpoints are more precise and specific.
For example, Online could be a channel. Online chat could be a touchpoint.
What Most Organizations Get Wrong About Customer Journey Touchpoints
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When defining their customer touchpoints, most organizations list things like:
The challenge with viewing touchpoints this way is this approach often assumes the customer:
In short, an examination of touchpoints is often entirely company-focused. (Sometimes, it is so company-focused the touchpoints are categorized by org chart: marketing; operations; billing, etc.)
Instead, I challenge you to take an inventory of customer touchpoints from the customer perspective.
A Fictitious Example of a Customer-Focused Touchpoint Inventory:
Of course, this is a simplified version of what it takes to identify meaningful touchpoints.
Other considerations should include who your customers actually are, what channels are most popular, and other data points.
How to Inventory Your CX Touchpoints
Taking a comprehensive and thorough inventory of your touchpoints can be extremely challenging. It can take months to categorize all the ways customers may interact with you.
But it’s worth it, and here’s why: If you organize your touchpoints (the customer perspective) against your channel strategy (your company perspective), you can have a clear vision of where your priorities should lie.
Use your Customer Experience Mission Statement and CX Success Statement to guide you. These resources will help you determine what to prioritize and how to optimize each experience so you fulfill your promises to customers at every interaction.
It becomes obvious that while your online channel is working pretty well, your in-store experience is suffering due to lack of care. Or that your automated and artificial intelligence-driven experiences may need some fine-tuning.
By creating a customer-centric vision for the future, you can continue to track what is working for your customers and what simply isn’t.
Identify Customer Touchpoints by Customer Journey Mapping
Experiences are evolving rapidly today, and it’s easy to be left behind. Understanding your customer touchpoints could help you stay ahead in meaningful ways.
So, how should you start making a plan to identify and optimize each touchpoint? Start by building your customer journey maps.
A customer journey map details the steps that distinct customer personas will take as they seek out your product or service. The mapping process will immerse you in the customer’s view and help you realize their needs. You’ll quickly see things from their perspective and find plenty of ways to either transform their experience or fine-tune an already acceptable experience into something memorable.
And remember: A map is a tool to get you to where you want to go. Set yourself up by focusing on your goals first. Focus on one area at a time and create action plans to execute. You can address the rest of the journey and the other touchpoints when you’re ready! This is about progress — not perfection.
This article, What a Customer Touchpoint Is (and Why Customer Experience Leaders Should Care), originally appeared on ExperienceInvestigators.com.
It's a good summary, thanks for penning this. But can we go a little further? A few empirically defensible points, based on common program errors: 1. NPS is not a touchpoint metric. Sure, there are corner cases here, but most likely your company isn't one of them. Calling it tNPS or something like that doesn't make it a good practice. NPS is supposed to correlate to financial metrics; touchpoints don't behave the same way. 2. Not all touchpoints are equal. Half the trick is figuring out how unequal they all are. 3. Thresholds for diminishing returns exist, and vary by touchpoint. The other half of the trick is figuring out thresholds. 4. Cano curves matter. If you don't know what they are, look them up. Can't understand touchpoints without understanding Cano curves, sorry. At the risk of being repetitious, your service touchpoints do not equal your customer experience, they equal your service experience. And it's likely to be a hygienic factor, not a delight factor. So hit the point of diminishing returns, then stop investing!
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6 个月Very well written. The prime objective is to provide an excellent customer experience and the channels that are being offered must be keeping the broad range of customers and customer focus , the internal ease of operations manager must be secondary. Training and educating customers must be the integral part. In the early years of IVRs and portals , the co-navigation and co-browsing has enabled the excellent customer experience. Such investments in the early stages pay higher dividends later.