How to Optimize Customer Experience Touchpoints

How to Optimize Customer Experience Touchpoints (And Keep Them Running Smoothly)

Every touchpoint between the customer and the brand impacts the customer experience. Whether it’s something as simple as scrolling past your ad or as involved as contacting your customer service team, each and every customer touchpoint is important.

So, it’s vital to optimize your touchpoints and keep them running smoothly. But how?

Here, we’ll take you through all the key aspects of customer experience touchpoints and how to optimize them, from customer journey mapping to experience automation.

Significance of optimizing and maintaining customer touchpoints

Think of customer experience touchpoints as conversations within your brand/customer relationship. Each physical or digital interaction, even if it's small or brief, is an interaction that can influence your relationship for better or worse.

If a customer sees a post they don’t like, finds your customer services frustrating, can’t make your app work, or your website glitches out during their visit, they may tap out of their customer journey. After all, we live in the age of convenience. If a customer can’t get on with a brand, they don’t have to. There are plenty of alternatives.

On the other hand, if your customer finds your brand the best, most convenient, most intuitive option to interact with, they will stick with you through thick and thin. Especially if they feel like your brand ‘gets’ them and offers them exactly what they’re looking for at every turn.

When you get customer experience touchpoints right, you’ll build a strong, supportive, and loyal customer community that will expand organically and help shape your brand into something strong, robust, and scalable.

All in all, it’s important to optimize your customer experience touchpoints. And not just optimize them but monitor them closely on an ongoing basis and upgrade them whenever needed.

We’ll take you through the steps you should follow to identify, optimize, and maintain your essential customer experience touchpoints.

How to optimize customer experience touchpoints

Follow these steps to optimize touchpoints for your customer and build both satisfaction and brand loyalty:

Develop a customer journey map

You can’t optimize customer experience touchpoints if you don’t know where they are. So, one of your first steps should be to develop a customer journey map, including all the points at which a customer might connect with your brand.

A typical customer journey map for ecommerce, including touchpoints, might look something like this:

It’s important to note that no customer has exactly the same journey. Journeys will differ considerably depending on things like the customer’s age, needs, the platforms they use, and more.

You may find that you need to develop several different customer journey maps for different audiences. Remember, the closer you can understand the individual customer journey, the better you will be able to optimize their touchpoints. So don’t be disheartened by the prospect of researching and mapping out multiple customer journeys.

Analyze customer interactions and behavioral data

All your systems and platforms, from your social media pages to your website, contain a wealth of customer data that you can use to better understand your audience.

For example, your website analytics can show you which pages your customers visit the most, how long they stay there, the times of day they visit, and more. You can then use this information to improve pages with less traffic and optimize your content for times and pages with the most traffic.

By gaining permission to use things like your customers’ email addresses and phone numbers, you can gain even more behavioral data, which you can use to gain deep insights into your audiences.

Gather customer feedback and conduct sentiment analysis

One of the best ways to understand what your customers want is to ask them. Customer feedback and sentiment analysis are great ways to learn how your customers are experiencing brand touchpoints and how you can improve things for them.

This can be particularly useful when it comes to more specific products where customers might want advice. For example, when it comes to Sage’s accounts payable systems, they make it easy for customers to ask for more information and advice. This helps customers to feel confident in their purchase and gives a wealth of data about what queries their customers have.

When it comes to sentiment analysis, you can do it overtly or through engagement analysis. For example, you can set your social media platforms to pick up on certain positive or negative keywords. Monitoring the frequency of these keywords in customer comments can provide valuable sentiment analysis data.

As well as conducting regular scheduled sentiment analysis surveys, you can also run permanent automated versions in the background. For example, AI-based sentiment analysis platforms can conduct ongoing, automatic sentiment analysis and alert you in real time when there’s a spate of negative reviews or a certain post suddenly gets a host of positive feedback.

Ensure usability and accessibility in relevant touchpoints

Usability and accessibility are key for customer experience at all touchpoints. If your customers find your software, systems, or staff inaccessible, hard to talk to, or frustrating to use, you will lose their interest, their custom, and even their respect.

So, make sure that every touchpoint is geared toward a positive customer experience. For example, you could:

• Make sure that you optimize your app for all devices and platforms.

• Remove any unnecessary steps from your systems and processes (for example, one-click login rather than making the customer re-enter their details every time).

• Store customer preferences and make sure that they are adhered to at each and every touchpoint.

• Keep your software up to date so that everything runs properly and nothing is clunky.

• Train customer service personnel in the very best ways to help your customers.

Personalize and customize experiences as applicable

Personalization makes the customer feel like they are heard, understood, and appreciated. Something as simple as addressing the customer by their first name can bring a sense of connection that helps to strengthen the bond between customer and brand.

It’s also a powerful way to keep your customers engaged and create a unique experience. Take Netflix, for example, they’re the pinnacle of personalization, as they use data to personalize each individual’s experience, so they are shown the best content for them. This provides the user with a better product, where they know their wants are being catered to.

So, where you can, personalize the customer experience as far as possible. This isn’t always possible, but you can certainly personalize touchpoints like email marketing, customer notifications, and even the recommendations that your website and targeted ads show to your customer.

Ensure consistent branding and messaging

From the inside, a company looks like a plethora of teams and departments, all working on different aspects of the business and the customer experience. But from the outside—from the customer’s point of view—a company is a single brand. They don’t see an interaction as indicative of a particular team within that brand; they see it as indicative of the brand as a whole.

Consistent branding and messaging will make your customer’s experience of your brand feel like talking to a person that they know and recognize. If their experience is less consistent, they may feel confused and struggle to form a relationship with your brand.

So, work on things like recognizable branding, a unique brand tone of voice, a brand persona, and so on.

Establish applicable key performance indicators (KPIs)

How do you know if your customer touchpoints are optimized? By setting KPIs.

When establishing KPIs for this, ask yourself the following questions:

• What would success look like? Greater engagement? A higher conversion rate?

• What, precisely, would represent an improvement on the current situation?

• How can you gather the right data to measure your KPIs?

• What timescale do you want to achieve your goals within?

Keep track of emerging technologies and industry trends

New technologies and trends are constantly emerging. These can both help and hinder your customer connection efforts. New trends can give customers greater (or different) expectations which may mean you have to optimize your touchpoints all over again. But new technology can help you to meet those expectations.

For example, solutions like Sage order management software are revolutionizing the order process. They enable brands to effortlessly track inventory and orders, reducing the likelihood of stockouts, so you provide a positive customer experience.

Also, look out for new AI solutions like Zendesk’s Content Clues, which highlights when your content needs updating, so you can make sure your customers are always getting the answers they need.

These are just a couple of examples of the benefits of new technologies. But, the best thing to do is keep updated and assess what will really add value to your business–making it more efficient and making sure you’re providing the best customer experience.

Optimize customer touchpoints to build relationships and loyalty

A brand/customer relationship is like any relationship: it lives or dies on the quality of its interactions.

By making sure that every interaction your customer has with your brand, you can build lasting, loyal customer relationships that will help scale your brand and bring custom for years to come.

Using Channel Talk, you can combine customer data and insights with real-time customer service to give customers the personalized, helpful, and relevant services that they need–even during the holidays! Optimize every live-chat touchpoint with Channel Talk, and make sure that every single customer clicks out happy.