Defined as ‘an influential action or contact’, each touchpoint is a message that collectively forms part of your customer’s experience. But why are they important and how can you improve your customer journey?

What are Customer Touchpoints?

From start to finish, your customers will see and encounter your business brand both off and on line, from your logo to your advert, posters or window displays, your website or app, social media sites or on line reviews. Or it could be from a word of mouth recommendation, contact with yourself or your staff in person, on the telephone or online.

Identifying and improving the touchpoints along the way and getting feedback will help improve their experience. It’s a fantastic opportunity to improve your customer journey – and happy customers, or even prospects, will get you more leads and sales.

Remember each time a customer ‘touches’ your business they are forming an opinion or revising their opinion of your business. These touchpoints can be positive or negative and so can have a massive influence on the customer’s decision making process.

Understanding the Customer Journey

The easiest way to understand what your customer experiences is simply to put yourself in their shoes, take that journey, or get a trusted colleague or associate to do this for you.

When does the awareness start? At which stage to your customers find you? When a problem needs to be solved or after they have stared their research and are doing comparisons? What is their experience before, during and after the sales process?

Remember, you can lose customers at every stage if your website is out of date or difficult to navigate, if it takes too long to load or your pictures are poor.

Online review sites, peer reviews and recommendations are increasingly important, do you know who is saying what about you? Do you respond and try to solve any issues or thank people for good reviews?

Many customers do not complete purchases online because the buying process is too complicated or it takes too long to complete their details or even because postage costs are not clear.

Or you can turn customer off by bombarding them with sales emails after a successful purchase.

Take that journey step by step and make sure that your brand and business are seen in a favourable way so that the purchaser chooses you above your competitors.

If you are feeling brave, why not run short customer surveys to really find out what customers think at various points along the way? You could even offer a small incentive to draw people in, www.surveymonkey.co.uk is great for this.

You can also gain valuable information by undertaking a customer journey for one of your competitors, this is a great way of putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Be Consistent Across all Marketing Platforms

It is also important to ensure all your communication, messages and images are consistent so you create a cohesive brand and give the right impression. If you are in the B2B arena is your LinkedIn profile up to date? Are your blogs up to date or your social media posts – if not don’t bother! Concentrate on that type of communication that you prefer, do it well and create the best impression.

Today marketing is a real challenge because customers are savvy and fickle, they can access lots of comparable products and services and make decisions well before making any contact with you. Information about your business is out there, 24/7 across the world and you cannot control all of it.

However, if you take the time to understand, review and improve your customer touchpoints to provide a positive and make this a key part of your marketing strategy you will help drive new leads and sales to your business.

I hope you find this useful, if you want more marketing tips why not follow me on Facebook?