Build Relationships by Choosing the Best Customer Experience Touchpoints

In layman’s terms, customer experience touchpoints are your brands’ points of contact from the start of the customer journey to the finish.

Customer experience touchpoints is where customers and business engage to exchange information, provide service, or handle transactions. This may be done via social media, direct messaging, in-store cashiers, email, website, call centres, etc. Every channel, whether it’s online or offline is an opportunity to improve your overall customer experience.

Therefore, it’s essential to select the best customer touchpoints. The balance between engaging and annoying customers is a fine line. Some might say to strive this balance is an art. Many brands don’t realize how this affects their business and contributes to changing their customer behaviours from positive to negative in an instant.

Understanding Customers Is the Key to Choosing the Best Customer Experience Touchpoints

The value of understanding your customers is sometimes underrated. If you know your customer’s preferences and needs, you will be able to choose the best touchpoints for each stage of the customer journey.

Did you know that people in UK check their phones once every 12 minutes? In contrast to 10 years ago, most people now say they need and expect a constant internet connection wherever they go, with 64% of adults describing it as an essential part of their life.

Knowing this makes it clear that companies should look at choosing mobile messaging as one of the main customer channels to increase customer experience and engagement. Investing in the right set of tools and marketing mediums is essential to increase repeat sales and create long-lasting, meaningful relationships with your customers.

Optimizing Customer Touchpoints

To create the best possible experience for your customers you have to identify the best touchpoints to suit customers’ needs and optimize them.

To identify these, every organization must develop a strong internal communication strategy. Finance, marketing, operations, legal, sales and customer service departments should report on the frequency, importance and reason why they are contacting customers and how. This would give businesses the information to build an appropriate customer journey.

There might be cases where communication can be reduced or transmitted on a different channel. At each customer point of contact, you must ask yourself what customers wants to achieve and how can you help them achieve this as smooth as possible.

Another way to improve touchpoints is to develop a sense of empathy. Customers want to know that you care, and you have their best interest in mind. Employing an empathetic tone of voice from the first interaction will prove to them that you are worthy of their trust and respect.

Tips!

1. Brainstorming ideas about how to improve a touchpoint can be helpful. For example, during a brainstorming session, someone might suggest that setting up a webchat feature for the company’s website might be a way to improve that touchpoint.
2. It’s advisable that you get your staff involved. They may have great ideas that can go a long way towards optimizing your customer journey.
3. Don’t forget to measure the success of your changes, make sure you figure out which KPI’s and other metrics will be affected by your updates.

Learn more about what analytics can do for your business: Monitor Performance with VoiceSage Analytics

How to Create Engaging Touchpoints with RMM

Many businesses fall into the trap of using touchpoints that customers don’t engage with. We clarified how mobile marketing is one of the most effective communication channels. Now we want to talk about the latest trends in SMS marketing and that is Rich Media Messaging (RMM).

RMM is the upgraded SMS and it’s the perfect solution to increase customer engagement. Here are a few of the rich media features RMM supports:

• Videos
• Images
• Gifs
• Downloadable Content
• Links
• QR Codes
• Scratch Cards

RMM allows businesses to create messages that suit their customers’ needs and it’s been proved to be an effective customer experience touchpoint. The flexibility of RMM makes it easy to create campaigns without the need of a developer or an IT expert. Anyone can use VoiceSage’s intuitive Campaign Builder to design and deliver important messages to customers.

See what you can achieve with Rich Media Messaging

Create a Successful Customer Journey Mapping

Having a successful customer journey in place is essential. It gives you invaluable insight into your customers’ pain points and helps you to see clearly the mistakes your business is making. To go about crafting your own customer journey you must first put yourself in the customers’ shoes.

Ask yourself questions such as:

• How did they find your business?
• How do they interact with your business?
• What channels do they prefer to be contacted by?
• Do you provide communications via the channels they prefer?
• What makes that customer keep coming back to your business?
• Could you do more to personalize your customer journey?

Start gathering honest feedback about your customer service by conducting surveys and reviews. Interactive SMS surveys give customers the opportunity to tell you how to improve and makes them feel like you care about their opinion. This is a great example of how to upgrade your customer journey.

One of the best examples of a successful customer journey comes from the UK’s largest integrated digital retailer and financial services provider, Shop Direct.

Shop Direct has always focused on improving customer experience but they struggled to get valuable customer assessments without launching major research projects. To rectify this Shop Direct invested in VoiceSage’s Rich Media Messaging solution. The results were significant with a measured increase in response and engagement. Our case study with Shop Direct gives you an insight into how RMM fitted perfectly into Shop Direct’s customer journey strategy.

Learn more about the best customer journey techniques: Digital Customer Journeys: How to Create and Optimise Them

Conclusion

In an ideal world, brands and customers have a mutually beneficial long-term relationship where everyone is satisfied. For this to happen, brands must be in constant communication with their customers.

Customer experience touchpoints must be chosen carefully and be regularly updated to keep up with consumer preferences. Listening to customers is vital to your success. Their feedback will aid your business and strengthen the relationship between you and your customers.

Invest in the right communication channels with VoiceSage: Contact Sales For Help