How to identify and improve your customer touchpoints

Every business wants to improve the customer experience (CX). But, unless you consider your buyers at every touchpoint, you may be falling short.

The customer experience is a direct result of several interactions across their journey. Everything counts, from initial contact with your website to the ease of buying a product to how helpful your post-purchase support is.

Here’s how to identify and improve your customer journey touchpoints and create a winning customer experience.

Customer touchpoints are your brand’s points of customer contact from start to finish. For example, customers may find your business:

Identifying your touchpoints is the first step toward creating a customer journey map and ensuring your customers feel satisfied before, during, and after they purchase something from you. And with deep knowledge of your touchpoints, you can make better business decisions for your customers and your customer-facing teams.

Touchpoint definition: A touchpoint is any time a potential customer or customer comes in contact with your brand–before, during, or after they purchase something from you.

Once you identify them, your customer touchpoints will serve as a guide for improving customer satisfaction across your entire customer journey. 

The benefits of knowing your customer touchpoints include:

Understanding your customer journey touchpoints will help you frame every interaction with your business positively.

Identify your customer touchpoints by listing all the places and times your customers might come into contact with your brand. We’ve compiled a list of customer touchpoints here, which will vary depending on your business.

Pre-purchase touchpoints are the initial avenues a customer could use to find you. These points of contact happen before a customer visits your business in person or online. 

Here are the most common pre-purchase touchpoints:

You don’t need to be on every social media platform, but make sure you have a profile on channels your customers use. Keep your pages active with content that is interesting and useful. Always respond to customer comments—this engagement is why you are on social media—and start forming relationships with potential customers.

Referral programs offer incentives for both the referrer (an existing customer) and the new customer. This strategy makes both groups happy and increases the potential for future purchases and more referrals.

Ensure that your online advertising links lead to content that’s directly relevant to the ads. If your advertisement features a sale, ensure that the link leads customers to a page that describes or shows the sale items in detail. While you want customers to spend time exploring your website, this is not the time to lead them to a sign-up form or home page. Create a better customer experience with a landing page with relevant content.

Was your customers’ purchase experience everything they needed and expected? The only way to know is to examine your purchase touchpoints, when customers are either getting ready to make a purchase or enmeshed in the process.

At the point of sale (POS), a sales representative or web page should provide all the necessary information—including what needs your product will fulfill. This touchpoint is the final one before a customer completes a purchase.

Is your payment process streamlined and intuitive? Does it feel secure? Does it include all relevant payment information, like whether you accept PayPal? A great payment experience will leave the customer without any doubts.

Customers sometimes need that little extra push to hit the purchase button. When interacting with sales representatives, can your agents give your customers all the information they need?

Post-purchase touchpoints are any interactions that happen after a customer purchases your product or service. This period extends indefinitely and includes both repeat purchasers and one-time buyers. 

The most common post-purchase touchpoints are:

If a customer encounters a problem, your customer support team is likely the first place they’ll go. A customer support team that effectively remedies issues and rapidly provides guidance can help increase customer satisfaction.

First impressions matter. When your package arrives at your customer’s door, you need to give them an experience that they’ll remember. Creating better packaging or interactive unboxing experiences can help generate free word-of-mouth marketing and satisfy your customers.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that a purchase is the finish line. On the contrary, your relationship with a customer has only just begun. Purchase experience feedback is invaluable for getting more information about the customer experience and whether people are enjoying your products.

And if a customer gets in touch with your customer support team about your product, it’s a great idea to use a customer service feedback survey to learn more about that interaction and how you can improve.

What are your customer touchpoints? They’re different for every business, so you’ll have to determine what yours are by analyzing your customer interactions.

Here’s how to identify customer touchpoints and make sure you’re laying the groundwork for the best interactions.

Use your market research to examine the types of consumers who are likely to purchase from you. Decide what initial touchpoints would be appropriate for your customers. 

For example, if your target market is expectant mothers, you might add promo codes and coupons to your social media marketing and discount emails for new customers that center on the new parent experience.

Because there are so many ways for customers to experience your brand, figuring out all your touchpoints may initially seem daunting. But you can make this task more manageable by stepping out of your role–and into the customer’s shoes. 

You’re the customer now. Ensure you have a pen and paper handy because you should take notes while in the customer mindset. 

Ask yourself where you go (and how) when you: 

You could also accomplish this task by asking customers to walk you through their experience with your brand or putting these customer journey questions into a survey.

What touchpoints are currently in place? Which ones are resonating with customers? If you have an online store and use online advertising, social media, and email marketing, you may find that social media yields the most sales on your website. 

Your internal statistics may guide you to enhancing your social media presence as a touchpoint. Find out where customers prefer to engage with your brand with a content strategy survey.

Customer journey mapping helps you examine the buying process for a particular customer segment purchasing a specific product or service. You can map how a typical customer from the segment identifies a problem, researches an answer, learns about your business, engages with your business, makes a purchase, and finally interacts after the purchase. 

Customer experience maps are useful in discovering why customers aren’t having a great experience. Use them to visualize the customer journey and identify areas that need improvement. 

Use both types of maps to determine touchpoints at each stage of the customer journey and what you can do to ensure a successful experience.

Take the touchpoints you’ve identified on your customer journey map and categorize them as before, during, and after purchase. This strategy will help you identify areas that are working well and need improvement. 

You could also categorize touchpoints as products, interactions, messages (manuals, advertising, etc.), and settings (where you sell products). 

Or you can determine your own categories. Use what makes sense for your specific brand and products to categorize touchpoints.

Your customer touchpoint map is a living document and will need ongoing updates as you introduce new marketing initiatives and purchasing paths. Continue to refine your touchpoints for the best CX.

Knowing your touchpoints is only half the battle. To improve customer satisfaction, you need to ensure each touchpoint leads to a good customer experience and that the journey as a whole delivers on customers’ expectations. 

You can run customer feedback surveys at each major touchpoint or set up customer experience management software to see what's working. But make sure not to lose sight of the big picture, and always look at your entire customer journey.

The best way to find out how your customers are faring at each touchpoint is to ask them. 

Use surveys to evaluate customer experiences at different touchpoints through their journey. The quantifiable data will provide you with areas you have not yet touched on in your marketing efforts. Some of the smaller touchpoints that you haven’t addressed could become integral in providing superior customer service.

Survey customers from each touchpoint to discover where the customer experience is lacking and where you excel. Identify areas for improvement and take action on them. Ultimately, using customer feedback increases customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

Remember that not every touchpoint you address in your marketing campaigns will have equal value. Analyze your data for each touchpoint to identify the best-performing areas for marketing.

You can also construct a Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program that monitors core customer experience metrics. Understanding the importance of the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS®), and Customer Effort Score (CES) can help build a comprehensive understanding of the customer experience you offer. 

Related reading: The ultimate guide to running a customer feedback program

Gathering customer feedback will help generate a list of areas where customers feel they could have had a better experience with your company. Maybe your customer support agents didn’t resolve a query. Maybe your product arrived late or in bad condition. Maybe some people think your website is difficult to navigate. Whatever the data tells you, this is where you should begin to remedy.

Decide on direct actionable goals based on customer feedback. Each of these surveys can become a powerful source of information. By understanding why certain issues arise in the customer experience, you can then take steps to fix the problem.

Take a look at the frustrations and challenges that most frequently appear in your customer feedback. It’s always a good idea to work on the area that receives the most complaints first. Remedying issues this way will holistically improve your brand over time and help you ensure that urgent issues are addressed quickly. Plus, when you demonstrate that your customers’ feedback matters, you’ll pave the way for higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value. 

Supported customers are happy customers. Across customer service and even email communications, make sure the way you’re communicating with customers is helpful and friendly. 

Another element of improving customer communication is personalization. According to SurveyMonkey research, 72% of consumers say personalization is important. And, they’re much more likely to recommend products from brands that personalize the customer experience.

Audit your customer communications to see where you may be missing opportunities for more personalization. Are you sending curated emails based on customers’ purchase history with your brand? Are your customer service reps addressing customers by name? Even small touches can go a long way toward boosting customer satisfaction.

The most effective way of addressing and improving customer satisfaction is to ensure your data is in one place. If you have several disconnected tools measuring different areas of the customer experience, things could fall through the cracks.

Integrate your CX data with your company’s chosen CRM to rapidly build a 360-degree view of your customer experience. Connecting your CRM to SurveyMonkey lets you trigger feedback surveys at key customer touchpoints. 

An integrated approach will help your business access deeper insights, gather more data, and lead with data-driven decision-making. 

Customer service reps are often one of your company's most important customer touchpoints. When a customer needs advice, or something goes wrong, your customer support reps will be their first point of contact.

Investing in employee training can help increase the quality of support your customers receive. Training can focus on soft skills like communication, while building up your team’s knowledge of internal documents and solutions. The better prepared your employees are, the better the customer interactions will be. 

It’s useful to integrate pre-, during-, and post-training surveys to give your employees the chance to give feedback on their training and development. Just like with customer experience surveys, getting feedback from your employees will help you see what’s working and how you can enhance their experience. 

Your customers’ experience with your brand begins before their first interaction. Identify touchpoints before, during, and after each sale, and use these to create a customer touchpoint map. Get customer feedback at each touchpoint to improve customer satisfaction, experience, and retention. 

Start getting feedback from customer touchpoints today with SurveyMonkey.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.