10 Tricks to Optimize Common Customer Experience Touchpoints

one are the days when customers were only interested in getting their products. Now, in order to survive, you are to provide nothing less than perfect customer service as well.

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In the era of digital evolution, businesses are expected to re-evaluate the way they communicate with customers.

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Enterprises should ensure that the customer’s journey with the brand is par excellence. Because “A happy customer is a repeat customer”. 

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So, what can the brands do to ensure a perfect customer experience?

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One way is to optimize the common customer experience touchpoints. In this article, we’ll be discussing how and what you can do about optimizing customer touchpoints. Let’s get started. 

How to Identify Customer Service Touchpoints? 

Few customer touchpoints are obvious. These are the points at which you interact with your customers. For example, if your customer interacts with the sales or the support team, your touchpoints would be product demos, support conversations, live product tutorials, sales calls.

Besides these obvious touchpoints, there are others that you need to identify. Here’s how you can do it:

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1. Search Through Data

You can conduct research or navigate through data to do so. For example, you can use Google Analytics to see the different channels that generate the maximum traffic to your site. Visit your Acquisition Overview report for all the information.

You can get to any specific channel to see the details about where most of your customers come from.

• Filter your organic report by ‘source’ and you’ll get to know the search engines that send the most traffic to your website. If you filter by ‘landing page’ you’ll get to know the pages that visitors visit the most.
• You can also try filtering by ‘social’ as it’ll show you the social platforms that are sending the most traffic to your website.
• Try filtering by ‘referral’ as well to know the other websites linked to yours that are sending the traffic.

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2. Ask Customers

You can directly ask customers how they have known about your company. This is another way to identify the common customer touchpoints. 

• Try sending a survey questionnaire to all your customers via email or
• Conduct in-store surveys to know the details regarding touchpoints. Also, you can conduct direct interviews, but that may be time-consuming.

This way you will know the touchpoints that do not show up in the records or data like referrals from friends, ads in newspapers or magazines.

Why Does Optimizing Customer-Service Touchpoints Even Matter? 

When it comes to understanding the importance of optimizing customer-service touchpoints, the simple reason is to offer potential customers something extra.

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By identifying and optimizing the customer touchpoints you can,

• Make their entire experience better and more pleasant. You can assist them from the beginning of the journey till the very end.
• Generate more leads, increase conversion rate & hence, drive sales and appointments. 
• Boost your profits

Overall, by optimizing your customer touchpoints you can ensure taking your customer experience management to the level of perfection.

Now that we’ve given you the reason why you should optimize your customer touchpoints, we can proceed towards knowing the common touchpoints and the tricks to optimize them

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What are the Key Touchpoints in your Customer’s Journey?

Understanding the buying journey of a customer is important before you start exploring the key touchpoints. Try to understand the shopping process. Once you go through the customer’s journey, you’ll clearly identify the touchpoints.

Now, touchpoints can vary from one company to another. But they include any point of interaction of the brand with a customer. Be it before the sale, during the sale, or even after-sales. 

Here, we have listed few common customer touchpoints within a company:

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‘Before Sale’ Touchpoints

• Social media platforms
• Email marketing
• Word of mouth (referrals)

‘During an Online Sale’ Touchpoints

• Customer support service
• Product page
• Shopping cart and checkout page

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‘Post Online Sale’ Touchpoints

• Follow up emails
• Status tracking emails
• Delivery confirmation emails

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Let us now look at the 10 Tricks to Optimize Customer Experience Touchpoints 

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1. Implement AI Chatbots

Help customers help themselves. Reports suggest that 79% of consumers prefer live chats due to the instant responses and 41% of consumers prefer live chats over contacting the customer support teams. Moreover, live chats have achieved the highest consumer satisfaction rate of 92%.

So, make it easy for customers to find the answers to their queries by themselves. Employ Live chats or AI virtual assistants to your website so that customers find it easy to resolve their queries, without having to contact the customer support team. 

With Conversational AI like live chats, WhatsApp for Business being in trend, businesses should focus on enhancing customer experience using these AI tools. An added benefit is that customers get 24/7 live support.

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2. Optimize Company Website

Optimizing the home page of your website and the product landing pages is important to ensure a great customer experience.

Here are few tips for website optimization:

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Clearly describe your products/services

The first step towards this is to describe your products and services as clearly as possible.

There are several brands that do not make the effort to explain their products and services, assuming that the visitors are already aware. This often results in the visitors having to undertake additional digging to understand the product/ service. Consequently, the customer experience becomes poor.

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Embed links

If you think that the description won’t really fit into the confines of the landing page, then make sure to embed a video link or a link to a detailed blog post where customers will be able to find the descriptions for the product. 

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Mention Price

Ensure that you maintain price transparency. Even if you do not list the actual price, leave a hint as to what the price range of your product can be. This way consumers will understand if they can afford the product or not.

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Avoid using jargons

Finally, avoid using jargon while developing the content for your website. Make sure that the content is straightforward, clear, simple, and precise.

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3. Company Blog

Why do companies need blogs? 

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Blogs essentially act as a source of information for several visitors. It is a bet for the long run. While few blogs may result in immediate conversions, others will introduce the brand to visitors. 

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What Pointers to Follow when Writing Blogs?

• Remember that blogs are a source of information for the different types of visitors – current customers or prospects. 
• Ensure that your blog content is informative and helpful in the long run. You never know when a visitor may convert into a customer. It may even be 3 years down the line.
• Keep in mind that every blog content may not be a sales pitch. Publish content just to inform customers about something that they need to know for the development of their business. 
• Make sure you aim at providing information, introducing your brand, and building trust with the audience alongside conversions. 

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4. Manage Social Media

With social media platforms giving you a global reach, just imagine what would you miss out on, if you lack presence? There are several social media platforms and you’ll find numerous articles that focus on being present across all of these platforms. 

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Now, what might you be losing if you aren’t on TikTok? Your answer to this may be nothing at all. TikTok may not at all drive sales for your brand.

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How Can We Manage This Touchpoint?

• Focus on a few social media sites. Following several online articles, do not waste your time juggling too many social media accounts.
• Identify the sites your target audience is most active on. It may be LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. 
• Wherever you find your audience to be the most active, maintain your presence in those platforms. 
• Build a profile where you can engage customers and remain active to ensure a perfect customer experience and increased customer retention rate.

Customers may reach out to your brand via different social media sites. So, make sure you engage customers right away. You can also employ AI chatbots across multiple platforms to increase customer engagement.

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5. Manage Emails

Marketing emails are a great way to keep in touch with customers as well as prospects. But this customer touchpoint is prone to risk- the risk of going wrong.

Though emails are an amazing way to interact or keep in touch with consumers, that never means spamming their inboxes with your marketing emails. 

This is the area of caution. 

You surely wouldn’t want your customers to get irritated by repeated emails. 

So, how can you avoid going wrong?

• One way to avoid making consumers feel like you are spamming their inbox is to let them choose what information they want to hear from you.
• Try to segment the email list considering the type of emails you send. Few customers may be interested in your product updates while others may want your newsletters. So, listing the emails accordingly let’s your customers and subscribers choose what information they are interested in.

• Also, remember to test multiple email platforms to ensure that your customers can view it from their browser. Enable the ‘view in browser’ mode to make it easily accessible.

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6. Optimize Paid Ads

To provide customers with a seamless service, make sure that you optimize your paid ads.

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But, how? 

• Link your paid ad to a page that provides the content details. 
• Make sure that when a visitor clicks on the paid ad, it directly opens to a page related to the ad content. For example, if you are advertising for sale, then we suggest linking the ad to a page that details what products are on sale.  Similarly, if you’re advertising a shoe, make sure you link a page that opens up to more details of the product.

This way you make the customer's journey with your brand easy and effortless. 

Failing to provide such seamless movement, often leaves customers and prospects to hunt through your website to find out the product details. 

So, why not make the customer's journey hassle-free through optimizing the paid ads?!

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7. Customer Referrals

Referral programs are often a great option to know that your brand is being recommended by your current customers who are familiar with your product.

Affiliates or Referrals?

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There are many companies that go for affiliate programs that pay a small commission to people when a referral results in a sale. 

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Affiliate programs 

Affiliate programs are good for bringing in new prospects to the business but that may not mean that you are providing customers with a perfect experience.

People using your affiliate program may not at all be your customers. They may promote your product or service without even trying it. 

As a result, they may refer the brand to an audience that’s not really suitable or that’s not your target audience. Consequently, you may have to face upset customers and negative feedback of a poor customer experience.

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Referrals

Referrals ensure that the people recommending the product/service are familiar to the product and are referring it to the right audience. Hence, it serves as a great way to deliver customers a positive experience. 

So, when it comes to choosing one, we recommend referrals. 

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8. Optimize Self-Service Point of Sale

If customers want to make a purchase or trial, they do not need to interact with your sales team. So, make sure that you optimize the self-service customer experience for customers to help themselves. Here’s what you can do:

•  Mention your pricing clearly. Being transparent about your product or service price will save the surprise for customers at the time of making payments.
• Offer customers with multiple payment methods or modes to ensure that they can make the payment through their preferred way. So, provide multiple ways like debit cards, credit cards, digital wallets, cash, PayPal, etc.
• Keep multiple options for shipping as well. Few customers may prefer quick delivery and so they may like to avail priority shipping. Also, keep lower-cost options for customers who are cost-conscious.
•  Clearly mention your exchange/return and refund policies. Link the page of policies to a section of FAQs where you can detail the policies for better understanding.
• You can also employ 24/7 live chat support at your self-service point of sale, so that customers can easily resolve their queries if they have any during the process of making a purchase. 

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9. Manage Sales Calls & Demos

If you build a stereotypical sales team, you’ll end up being overly pushy because the team will only aim at making a sale.

A stereotypical sales team doesn’t make any positive contribution to customer experience. Instead, they often end up being forceful towards customers for making a purchase decision.

So how can you manage this touchpoint?

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Avoid being sales-focused

Don’t push customers to make a quick purchase decision within a limited frame of time. Instead, allow them to undertake their own research before they make a purchase.

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Build a helpful and empathetic sales team

If you build a sales team that’s empathetic and helpful and that focuses on helping customers buy the perfect product for them, you build a far better bond of trust with customers. You will be able to ensure a perfect experience with your brand. 

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10. Enhance Customer Support

To ensure a great customer experience, you have to offer great customer support as well. According to a study, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases from brands that offer amazing customer service.

Here’s a list of few practices that you can implement to ensure great customer support:

• Make contact easy – Don’t make customers hunt for your information throughout your website. Ensure seamless movement from one channel to another by adding sign-posts for contact and support service.
•  Offer self-service options- Use FAQs or AI Chatbots to make self-service easy. Your customers may not always want to contact the customer support team. So, make sure they can resolve their queries by themselves.
• Provide thorough and instant assistance- Don’t make customers wait for your response when they have a query. Instant responses are key to delivering a good customer experience. As customers appreciate a quick response, make sure you resolve their queries immediately and provide thorough support throughout their buying journey.

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Optimize your Customer touchpoints with Konverse

As you are now aware of the top tricks to optimize customer touchpoints, you probably might have guessed that Conversational AI like live chats, WhatsApp Business API (WhatsApp alone has over 2bn active users) are likely to be the first touchpoint for customer interaction making them so important to business growth.

So, if you’re looking for the perfect solution to take your business growth to the next level, then we suggest Konverse. Schedule a demo with us and explore the several options available for excellent business performance.

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Additional Readings

Strategies to drive customer retention with AI Chatbots

Drive More Sales with Conversational AI

Reasons why WhatsApp Chatbot is a must for eCommerce Industry