Your customers’ journeys from awareness to advocacy may be measured by how much they buy and how much they spend, but they’re defined by the many interactions they have with your brand along the way. These interactions, which we refer to as “touchpoints,” represent the various ways in which customers engage with your company as they learn about a product or service and make a decision to buy it, stick with it, and talk about it.
Savvy business people like yourself know that a smooth sailing customer journey entices customers to buy a product, purchase it again, and recommend it to their friends and colleagues. On the flipside, friction can discourage action, depress sales, and lead to churn. To optimize your customer journey for a better customer experience, focus on what you can control — the touchpoints. Here’s how to get started.
Understanding the five stages of the customer journey
Before you can fine tune the details, you should first outline your customer journey map in broad strokes. Although the particulars of a customer journey can and will look different for every customer, product, or service, there are generally five phases of the overall customer journey.
Awareness
This encompasses the ways in which customers become aware of your brand — including via advertising, organic social media, word of mouth, and more.
Consideration
This phase is when prospects research your product or service, ask questions, seek information, and consider alternatives.
Purchase / Conversion
The purchase or conversion phase entails all of the interactions customers have once they convert. That could be going through the process of opening a new bank account, downloading an app, or completing a transaction.
Post-Purchase / Conversion
The post-purchase phase encompasses interactions and experiences customers have with a brand after the initial purchase or conversion, including seeking out customer support, providing customer feedback, renewing a subscription or plan, and more.
Loyalty and advocacy
This phase is reached when customers renew a membership or plan, review a company’s products or services, or recommend the brand to others through direct or indirect feedback.
Customer touchpoints and the journey map
If the five phases of the customer journey are the geographical boundaries on your map, then the touchpoints are the points of interest. Note that these touchpoints can entail things you do and don’t want your customers to experience, and some touchpoints may or may not be directly under your control. The point of conducting a modern customer journey analysis is to identify where and how you can reduce friction.
To start, outline the universe of experiences your customers might have with your brand. You can break these down into online and offline interactions. Here are some examples to consider.
Online touchpoints
- Surveys
- Websites or landing pages
- App stores
- Apps
- SMS and messaging apps
- Social media
- First- and third-party reviews
- Digital customer support channels (livechat, chatbots, etc.)
- IoT devices
- Digital ads
Offline touchpoints
- Phone or IVR interactions
- Contact center phone calls
- Storefront or in-person interactions
- Events or conferences
- Direct mail
- Offline advertising
Building the customer journey map
There are many different customer journeys you can map, but the trick is outlining the most relevant ones. For example, you may have some customers entering your funnel through social media ads, while others come directly to your website after seeing an offline commercial. Others may read a review on a third-party site, while some may find you through a search engine.
Optimizing touchpoints starts by organizing these interactions along a specific journey and aligning them to the appropriate journey phase. From there, you can build a framework to understand friction, drop off, and churn. Many customer experience teams will organize these touchpoints by categories, such as pre-conversion, conversion, and post-conversion or post-purchase, but you can tailor your customer journey map to your specific industry or niche.
Common challenges across customer touchpoints
There are a few common — yet difficult to spot — hurdles in customer journeys that can cause undue friction. Here are some to look out for as you conduct your analysis.
Inconsistent messaging
Minor inconsistencies are forgivable, but overt deviations can lead to customer frustration and even harm your brand reputation. It could be as simple as your company’s chatbot or call center providing a different answer to a question than what’s listed on your website or as complex as deprecated materials being circulated by an out-of-sync sales team.
Siloed touchpoints
Similarly, experiences that are siloed and disconnected from others can confuse or misdirect customers. If the experience at a kiosk or event booth for your brand differs from that of your company’s website, demo call, or product page, your customers can feel misdirected or deceived. Likewise, if they have a great experience with a salesperson but the support experience is less than desirable, it can lead to churn and negative reviews.
Unnecessarily complex buying journeys
In some industries, when a customer is ready to buy, they’re ready to buy. Unnecessary extra login screens or form fills, or, in more complex environments, extra meetings or line items in a contract, can cause significant friction and a breakdown of a conversion altogether.
Five strategies to optimize customer touchpoints
Here are key strategies and tools you can use to enhance and maximize the effectiveness of each touchpoint.
Build cohesive, omnichannel experiences
Disjointed and siloed touchpoints can cause a lot of friction. Ensuring consistency between online and offline experiences, by optimizing experiences across channels and ensuring a connected tech stack, can go a long way.
Personalize messaging, interactions, content, products, and services for the individual customer where possible to increase customer loyalty and share of wallet.
Implement real-time feedback monitoring
Instead of viewing each journey as a snapshot in time, monitoring customer feedback in real time enables you to dynamically improve the customer experience as it’s unfolding in the moment.
Get proactive with customer behavior analysis
Analyzing customer behaviors and customer signals can help you stay ahead of problems. If customer feedback and reviews suggest there’s an issue, ongoing analysis can help you solve it before it gets out of hand.
Leverage a customer experience management platform
Finally, consider investing in a customer experience management platform for a better overall experience across your customer journey.
Build better experiences with Medallia
Streamlining every interaction with your brand is possible, with the right tools to optimize your customer journey touchpoints.
Medallia offers a suite of advanced solutions for managing digital, in-person, and phone-based customer interactions, enabling teams to provide better experiences, reduce the burden on the contact center, and strengthen customer retention and satisfaction rates.
To learn how your organization can benefit from Medallia’s customer experience management platform, speak with a Medallia expert today.
