Editorial
The Gist
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Touchpoints over transactions. Traditional, siloed customer engagement produces a metric but will not reveal the full breadth and depth of engagement that a touchpoint will.
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Foundational to the customer journey. Touchpoints shift the focus to a holistic, insightful understanding of the customer journey, which will allow you to understand the reasons behind customers’ behaviors and needs.
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The customer journey’s enduring value. Companies that adopt a customer-centric mindset through touchpoints not only unify the customer journey, but also differentiate themselves by providing deeper, more meaningful customer relationships.
There are countless entry points for customers to engage your company. These can include digital, print, sales, back office and support, and any two ways are unlikely to be the same.
Too often, companies will view the customer experience through the lens of the observer, which is typically the person or department directly engaging the customer at that time. However, this common, narrow approach is shortsighted and ineffective because most companies are siloed and view engagement based on individual transactions.
What reinforces this transactional approach and makes it even more misleading is its heavy reliance on metrics. Metrics don’t always communicate the entire story of customer experience. We also believe and trust that if our performance metrics meet or exceed our benchmarks, then we are good. Everything is seemingly fine because our measured performance states so.
But are we fine? Is everything fine from your customers’ perspective? Are you aware of how your customers engage with your company along their customer journey?
What’s the alternative? The better way lies in touchpoints, which allow a significant shift in your customer engagement strategy. Touchpoints transform singular, metrics-driven transactions into personalized, meaningful engagement. Applied across your company, touchpoints allow you to see the breadth and depth of the customer journey across all interactions.
Here's why customer touchpoints are essential for creating customer value and unifying journeys across digital and human connections.
Table of Contents
- Customer Touchpoints Drive Actionable Insights
- Three Competitive Advantages of Effective Touchpoints
- Building Customer Touchpoints That Improve Engagement
- Optimizing Customer Touchpoints for Business Success
Customer Touchpoints Drive Actionable Insights
Transactional customer engagement is fundamentally basic. It focuses on the task at hand but nothing more. Because transactional engagement’s focus is finite or tactical, it therefore has no objective or ability to provide any lasting value or insight. Customer touchpoints, on the other hand, are very different. They have different definitions, purposes and values.
Here’s how touchpoints turn value into insight:
Why Touchpoints?
Touchpoints create ongoing engagement, with no definite end. Because of their nature, touchpoints are open-ended and almost conversational, and they help marketers uncover opportunities, needs and purposeful value. Touchpoints go beyond metrics and transform data points into meaningful insight. When aggregated and analyzed collectively, these touchpoints provide valuable insight into customer behavior and preferences, which you can use to capitalize on your strengths and improve your weaknesses.
Discovering Customer Insights
Touchpoints are conversational because they’re exploratory. They’re strategic, and they purposefully delve into the why more than the what. Uncovering customer needs and desires through touchpoints provides valuable information that can be used to identify deeper insights that go beyond basic engagement metrics. The best touchpoints uncover why and where customers are engaging with a brand, which allows brands to understand how customers move through their company.
The Power of Connecting
Customer touchpoints not only drive engagement but also offer insights into personalization and lasting partnerships. This helps marketers identify customer journeys and build deeper connections.
Think of it this way: When you have a conversation with a potential customer, the focus should be why the customer chooses to work with a company, what value a company should provide them and how a company needs to address the customer’s challenges as their business grows. Framing touchpoints this way guarantees a deeper and more comprehensive view of the customer journey.
Related Article: How to Understand What Your Customers Do and Why They Do It
Three Competitive Advantages of Effective Touchpoints
Touchpoints that drive purpose and insight allow you to better understand and unify the customer journey. When you achieve this state of customer engagement, you’ll also enjoy three key additional benefits that transition you and your brand into a market leader:
Increased Customer Lifetime Value
Acquiring new customers is more expensive than engaging existing customers routinely through meaningful touchpoints. By investing the time to truly understand your customers on a deep level, many will gladly become your brand ambassadors in return.
Stronger Customer Advocacy
A company that uses touchpoints to ask questions, explore deeper and connect in various ways is a strong advocate for its customers. A company that uses touchpoints to ask customers questions, understand their needs and build strong connections is a strong customer advocate. Showing genuine interest in your customers can transform a one-time buyer into a lifelong partner.
Enhanced Brand Reputation
In highly fragmented markets, premium brands are the ones that can problem solve and meet customers where they need to be met. Touchpoints create ongoing conversations that help companies identify key themes, which improves customer relationships and strengthens the brand.
Building Customer Touchpoints That Improve Engagement
Unifying your customer journeys across digital and human interactions requires both a strategic mindset and operational excellence. Only through a concerted, sustained, companywide effort will you see significant insight translate into the ideal end goal. These strategies can be implemented now to create meaningful touchpoints that unify the customer journey.
The Right Mindset
Every customer touchpoint is an engagement opportunity. Take a more proactive approach in seeking opportunities with your customers. Consider what’s working well and what’s not. Migrate beyond the metrics to uncover the insight and value of what the customer is communicating.
Documentation
Conversations through events such as tradeshows, customer advocacy programs, focus groups and town halls are great ways to increase your engagement. But it’s important to document and standardize this information for easy use. Make sure that these insights are clearly identified so that you can further study and identify trends throughout the customer journey.
No More Silos
Unifying the customer journey is everyone’s responsibility. Identify ways to routinely capture, consolidate, analyze and act on this information. Sharing this information routinely across departments helps uncover valuable insights to better understand the customer journey.
Don’t Forget Your Personas
Identifying the customer journey for every individual is expensive, and it may produce diminishing returns. However, you can focus on customer personas that represent the major customer segments you work with.
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Optimizing Customer Touchpoints for Business Success
Customer touchpoints will reshape your customer engagement strategy, create new value and establish a strong foundation for unifying your customer journeys. You can start transforming your customer mindset today by encouraging engaging conversations and developing a system to capture and share valuable insights. Follow the strategies above, and you’ll see new and impactful benefits in your customer relationships and brand advocacy.
Commit today to shifting your customer engagement strategy from transactional interactions to a focus on customer touchpoints. Your company can explore new ways of identifying and resolving customer needs across the customer journey, and this can transform your customer relationships into a sustainable competitive advantage.
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