Creating the best possible customer experience requires you to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You need to understand how customers interact with your brand and the series of touchpoints throughout the entire journey.
But how do you do that?
Touchpoint mapping, where you visualize all of a customer’s interactions from start to finish, is hands down one of the best ways to see things on a granular level.
The Importance of Touchpoint Mapping
The customer journey is often a lengthy process with a lot of twists and turns along the way. Numbers vary, but many studies say that it takes around eight customer touchpoints on average before there’s a conversion.
That said, there are some cases where that number can be much higher, with some companies having as many as 50 customer touchpoints before a sale!
Regardless of the exact number, the point is that there are several steps in the process.
To increase the odds of converting as many leads as possible, you need to streamline the customer journey and ensure each potential customer moves seamlessly from first finding out about your brand to purchasing to having a positive post-purchase experience.
That’s where touchpoint mapping comes in. It’s designed to visualize each individual touchpoint throughout the customer journey so you can put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
With touchpoint mapping, you have a holistic view of what the customer experience is like so you can:
- Get actionable data with a customer touchpoint map
- Identify specific journey touchpoints
- Determine customer preferences
- Spot strengths and weaknesses in a customer touchpoint map
- Reduce or eliminate customer experience friction points
- Improve the overall customer journey
- Create greater customer satisfaction
- Increase customer retention
Because of these rich benefits, we can’t stress the importance of using touchpoint mapping if you aren’t already. If you’re ready to get started or just need some ideas on how to enhance your current touchpoint mapping process, read on.
See 7 Interesting Real Life Customer Journey Map Examples here.
Understanding Customer Journey Maps
Customer journey maps offer a bird’s-eye view of the sequence of steps customers take as they move through the sales cycle. Here’s an example of what that may look like.
Source: Debutify
Understanding customer journey maps is incredibly helpful because it gives you an overarching view of what happens from start to finish so you can gain objective insights into customer behavior and pinpoint any potential roadblocks that could get in the way of conversions and customer success.
Collecting Feedback from Users at Different Stages
Going straight to the horse’s mouth is one of the best ways to see things from your customer’s point of view.
That’s why we suggest gathering feedback from actual users at different stages through surveys, feedback forms, interviews, and focus groups.
This should help connect the dots and provide a level of valuable insight that’s difficult to get otherwise.
Optimizing Overall Experience by Addressing Specific Issues
One of the quickest ways to disrupt the customer journey is having major friction points.
If, for example, you discover that multiple customers are experiencing onboarding issues after testing the free trial version of your product, that would be a specific area you would want to address.
Otherwise, you would likely see a dip in the number of free users that upgrade to the paid version.
However, once you know precisely what’s hurting the customer experience with a digital touchpoint map, you’re in a position to improve it and get things back on track.
Implementing Effective Touchpoint Mapping Strategies
Although each brand’s exact approach will vary slightly, there are six core touchpoint mapping strategies we recommend across the board.
1) Audit Existing Customer Interactions
First, start by analyzing the current interactions the average customer has on their journey.
In the awareness stage this could include:
- Finding your content in search results
- Finding you through a paid ad
- Hearing about you through word-of-mouth
In the consideration stage this could include:
- Visiting one of your social media accounts
- Checking out your blog content
- Subscribing to your email newsletter
In the purchase stage this could include:
- Reading product reviews
- Looking at pricing information
- Making a transaction Downloading your mobile app
In the retention stage this could include:
- Contacting customer service
- Joining a brand community group
- Following you on social media
In the advocacy stage this could include:
- Joining a loyalty program
- Taking a customer survey
2) Create Chronological Visualizations
Again, the visual element is vital to touchpoint mapping. Once you’ve audited existing customer interactions, you’ll want to lay them out chronologically so they look something like this.
3) Optimize Relevant Aspects
Next, look for any areas of weakness where there could be issues that may be lowering customer engagement, your conversion rate, customer retention, or customer loyalty.
If, for instance, you notice that the number of leads that are checking out your free trial product after a demo is lower than you’d like, your demo is likely an area that could use improvement.
4) Update Regularly
For most businesses, the customer journey is dynamic and ever-changing. Therefore, journey mapping isn’t something you should do just once and forget about.
Rather, it’s a part of customer experience management that should be regularly updated as your business and customers evolve, so that you always have an accurate understanding of customer behavior.
5) Utilize Customer Feedback
Earlier, we talked about the importance of collecting customer feedback like surveys and interviews at different stages to fully understand the customer journey. Now is the time to implement that feedback to put the pieces together.
6) Conduct Market Research
Finally, conducting market research is a great way to stay on top of trends in customer journey mapping, while also seeing what techniques your competitors are using.
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Digital Marketing & SaaS Contexts for Touchpoint Mapping
Because the majority of digital marketing and SaaS customer journey touchpoints happen online, these lend themselves perfectly to customer touchpoint mapping.
Website activity, for example, where prospects first land on a website, check out pricing pages, and request a demo are often critical online touchpoints in the customer journey.
With 60% of consumers turning to social media to discover and learn about brands and products, this often factors heavily into the consideration phase of the customer journey.
Also, email communication can serve as a customer touchpoint in multiple stages of the customer journey. In particular, the consideration stage, where leads are learning about a product and being nurtured, as well as the retention and advocacy stages where they’re kept in the loop to build further rapport can be critical touchpoints.
Offline Touchpoints: Call Centers
And don’t think all touchpoints have to be digital. There are also offline touchpoints that can be key parts of the customer journey.
One of the best examples is a contact center where existing customers get personalized customer support when questions or issues arise post-purchase.
Say, for instance, someone encountered an issue during customer onboarding and wasn’t able to resolve it by using an online troubleshooting guide.
Their experience when contacting a help center could be a make-or-break moment. If the experience was positive and they were able to find a swift resolution, that would likely pave the way for longer customer retention and deeper loyalty.
On the other hand, if it was a negative experience, this could potentially lead to premature turnover.
Analytics and Data-Driven Decisions in Touchpoint Mapping
Piecing together the typical path taken in the customer journey will take you a long way. But to truly see the whole picture in the customer experience, it takes concrete data.
Gathering this data requires a two-pronged approach, typically starting with customer journey analytics. With Woopra, for instance, you can accurately see where dropoff happens along every step of the customer journey.
So if a higher-than-ideal number of new customers were leaving after using a core product feature, that would likely indicate a problem with the feature that would need to be quickly addressed.
By generating quantitative data like this and analyzing the right customer journey metrics, you can approach your decision-making with confidence and make changes to optimize every step of the customer journey and create the best possible customer experience.
Gaining Insights from Users
Additionally, qualitative data directly from actual users (surveys, customer feedback forms, interviews, etc.), can provide the extra insight needed to iron out the kinks.
It’s especially powerful when you combine insights from users with data generated through customer journey analytics because the full story should emerge.
For example, if a large number of customers were dropping off after using a core product feature, you could gain insights from users to identify what the exact problem is.
In turn, you should be able to quickly remedy the situation to 1) minimize further turnover and 2) create a far better experience for future customers.
Benefits of Optimizing Customer Journeys through Touchpoint Mapping
Fine-tuning the customer journey through touchpoint mapping offers a myriad of advantages. But here are four of the biggest.
Increase in Customer Satisfaction Rates
Whenever you dramatically reduce friction points on your customer journey map and make each customer interaction more satisfying, collective satisfaction rates should increase.
Customers can move seamlessly from pre-purchase touchpoints to post-sales customer support without any major hiccups. And when you keep making iterative improvements to customer touch points over time, the positive impact can be significant.
Higher Sales Volumes & Improved Retention Efforts
By eliminating obstacles that impede the customer experience, this should ultimately translate into more sales and better retention. After all, how can a lead not be persuaded to make a purchase and hang around longer if their journey touchpoints check all the right boxes?
Lower Service Costs & Streamlined Processes
Being proactive about customer touchpoint issues allows you to swiftly address minor issues before they escalate.
It also ensures your team members place their attention on the most pressing problems, which means you’re better able to focus resources on the areas that matter most.
In turn, this often leads to lower customer service costs, as well as a better employee experience. Looking long-term, it can also aid in creating a more efficient customer service blueprint.
Faster Revenue Growth & Enhanced Brand Loyalty Programs
When you reduce or eliminate problems and inefficiencies, you make more conversions, experience less customer turnover, and can often increase your customer lifetime value. This, in turn, can accelerate revenue growth.
And when there’s a consistently positive user experience where customer expectations are met or exceeded, this should organically boost your customer loyalty to bring in even more customers.
FAQs in Relation to Touchpoint Mapping
What is touchpoint mapping?
Building a customer journey touchpoint map is the process of creating a visual representation of customer touchpoints in the buying process to better understand customer behavior and serve each customer's needs.
What is the difference between a journey map and a touchpoint map?
A customer journey map is more big-picture oriented where it looks at the overall steps of someone first learning about your brand to becoming a customer to post-purchase activities. And a customer touchpoint map focuses more on each specific customer interaction.
What are the four major types of touchpoints?
- Awareness - This is the earliest customer journey stage where prospects first learn about your brand and get their bearings with the products you offer
- Consideration - Where they research your brand and compare it with competitors and look at particular products
- Purchase - The point at which they officially buy your product or service
- Post-purchase - Any after-sales interaction, which can include customer support and follow-up communication (retention and advocacy can be lumped together into the post-purchase stage)
What are the five essential steps in creating an effective touchpoint map?
- Analyze each current customer interaction in the sales process
- Create a chronological visualization of each interaction
- Optimize the customer experience by addressing specific pain points
- Consistently update the touchpoint map to continually refine the process
- Gather customer feedback to tie everything together in journey mapping
Conclusion
By understanding how customers interact with your brand from start to finish, you can improve in virtually every area to create a more satisfying customer experience.
And as we’ve learned, this comes with a plethora of benefits, including increased conversions, deeper rapport, improved retention, stronger brand loyalty, and much more.
