Have you worked on a childhood project of making a model car? If yes, you might come across a set of guidelines or instructions on how to utilize various elements to finish the project. While you may find different instruction manuals for different projects, all of them aim at the same goal, which is to explain the steps needed to proceed toward goal completion. Here, each interaction with a specific step of the project takes you closer to completing the same.
In business terminology related to customers, customer touch points are analogous to these interactions and work in a similar way. These points represent customer interactions with your brand. Group them in a certain order and it will paint a picture of customer experience with your business.
If you look at the related statistics, you will find that:
- Organizations having a positive customer experience mindset drive 4-8% higher revenue (Source).
- Companies that lead their counterparts in terms of customer experience outperform by around 80% (Source).
- From the customers’ point of view, 96% of buyers believe that customer service is crucial to stay loyal to a brand.
With delightful customer experience being at the center of everything, the question that comes up is –
How to ensure that every customer feels valued irrespective of the chosen touch point?
For this, it is important that you first understand what a customer touch point is and how to set it right.
Here, we will take you through the meaning of customer touch points and how you can unite them to streamline customer journeys.
What are Customer Touch Points?
Touch points are basically the interactions that happen between your business and target customers as a part of their purchase journey. These interactions ultimately influence your brand’s perception in the consumers’ minds and their experience of buying from you. A proper analysis of key customer touch points can help you capitalize on opportunities and optimize the customer journey.
When put together on a map in chronological order, these touch points demonstrate the experience of a typical customer with your business. This can also help your product, marketing, and support team to identify areas that cause friction in the buyer’s journey.
Importance of Customer Touch Points
When most businesses focus on delivering the best customer experience, they analyze various customer touch points that reflect their accountability. They work on ensuring that every customer is happy with the interactions they have while buying a product or asking for support services later.
Keep in mind that the siloed emphasis on individual touch points may make you miss the bigger picture of the end-to-end customer experience.
Customer journeys even include several interactions that happen before, during, or after sales. In fact, some journeys can even stretch long enough across multiple channels and last for a few days. If you can provide your customers with the best experience from the start to the end of their journey, you can expect greater customer satisfaction, better sales and retention, and strengthened employee coordination.
Customer Touch Points at Different Stages of a Buyer’s Journey
Before the purchase
| Customer touch point | Description |
| Digital advertising | It includes ads on different web pages or app screens that brands invest in to attract a specific target audience. |
| Social media | It covers various social channels that are taken into account to reach a large proportion of the target audience. These mediums can be used to promote products/services, strengthen customer relationships, and enhance brand reputation. |
| Digital marketing content | It refers to the content published by a company online for brand proportion, including videos, blog posts, and infographics. |
| Business events or conferences | This encompasses events or conferences attended or co-hosted by brands. Many brands also exhibit their products or services in such events to increase customer awareness. |
| Peer referral | This covers instances when individuals refer one or more brands to their relatives, family members, or friends as trustworthy. |
During the purchase
| Customer touch point | Description |
| Brand catalogs | Brand catalogs, either online or as a hard copy, is a medium to showcase the product line. |
| Interaction with sales teams | It is a direct point of contact for customers with a brand for in-person communication. It can happen in store or via call, email, or chat. |
| E-commerce websites or apps | Brand websites or apps help in acquiring customers from targeted region(s). |
| Product reviews | These are touch points during the purchase as well as pre-purchase instances. Many customers like to read reviews before or while buying a product online. |
| PoS or Point Of Sale | It is another touch point customers reach before buying from a brand offline. |
After the purchase
| Customer touch point | Description |
| Thank you letter or email | This is used as a follow-up interaction after a sale to build customer rapport. |
| Feedback surveys | These survey requests are usually sent after purchase to evaluate a customer’s experience with the service or product received. The information obtained through these surveys is quite useful for product improvements. |
| Emails for cross-selling or up-selling | These emails are sent to leverage the opportunities of selling more similar items or premium items in the same category. |
| Billing | It is often overlooked as a touch point as it seems to have no direct influence on the purchase decision of a customer. However, it is quite important as a negative billing experience can lead to instant customer churn. |
| Renewal of subscription | This is when customers need to renew their subscriptions for continued benefits. |
How to Utilize Various Touch Points as a Part of Your Business?
Knowing about the key customer touch points can give you a better idea of how to utilize them for business benefits. Clearly, not every touch point will make sense for your brand. For instance, if you are running a small business on your own, you might not have a sales team that your customers will run into.
Hence, it is important to unify various touch points with the help of an omnichannel business strategy. By connecting the dots over the customer touch point map, you will be in a better position to identify what works for your business.
Besides creating and implementing an omnichannel retail approach, keep the following things in mind:
Put yourself in a buyer’s shoes
Envisioning the steps that a prospect would take before making a purchase from your brand will help you find possible problems he/she may face. This is how you can match various customer actions to respective touch points to determine their journey.
For example, you can plan to delight your customers at every touch point with consistent buying journey free from any unexpected hassles. You can introduce the right technology to deliver secure payment experiences. From the marketing perspective, you can ensure consistent branding to enhance brand recall.
Know what’s feasible for your business
After having a good idea of the resources a buyer will need as a part of his journey, you need to decide which one is most suitable for your business based on its size and budget. For example, if you sell a hard-to-understand product but are handling a one-person business, you need a full-scale service platform with a ticketing facility and pre-built knowledge bases.
Establish tasks related to user interactions on different touch points
Once you have decided on the customer touch points, it is also important to translate them into action in the form of several related tasks. From setting up the content to help prospects in the awareness stage to adding products in your e-commerce website with the right information, everything is important for conversions.
Automate tasks related to customer touch points
Various touch point tasks such as sales and customer support interactions can be automated or at least driven by software that helps make things easier to handle. For example, you can invest in a CRM that helps the sales team track customer communication and automate follow-up scheduling for prospective buyers.
Simplify the payment side of your business
The higher the number of customer touch points, the higher the risk of losing a buyer. But if you can make these interaction points shoppable and align an integrated payment solution at each point, the risk of losing customers would fall. This calls for partnering with an omnichannel payments solution provider that has payment products for almost every buyer-worthy touch point.
FAQs
Are multiple customer touch points important for business growth?
A customer touch point is where your business interacts with the target customers. Identifying the right touch points can help you determine the right opportunities to improve the overall customer experience. Besides this, customer touch points also define your brand’s perception in the minds of the target audience.
What are the examples of customer touch points?
Customer touch points can include an online store, app, and physical store of your brand. Other than this, customers may also find out about your business via an ad, review and rating websites, etc.
Unite with Paytm for Business to Enhance the Customer Journey
The right selection of payment tools at different customer touch points simply means nothing is left to chance. Whether you run offline-only, online-only, or an omnichannel business, Paytm for Business has a wide range of products to simplify the related payment experience.
