Insights from Dennis – #2 Three relevant customer experience touchpoints
Three relevant touchpoints within the customer experience
Every one of us has purchased a product, used a service, contacted support with questions or dissatisfaction, or complained about, exchanged or even returned an item.
Along the customer journey, i.e. the journey that a (potential) customer goes through before, during and after purchasing a product or service, there are very many touchpoints. At each of these points, the customer forms an opinion based on the experiences he or she has with a product or company.
This opinion can be positive, negative or neutral. It can also change along the journey and the particular phase he is in. Also, every customer journey starts and progresses differently.
That’s why it’s important for companies to always present themselves in a positive way along every part of the journey and to support the customer in the best possible way. But how do you even know if a customer is satisfied or dissatisfied?
By asking them about the relevant touchpoints. But which touchpoints are actually relevant? And when should you first make contact with your (potential) customer? Should it be during the attention phase or not until the retention phase?
Dennis deals with these questions in the video and presents three, in his opinion, relevant touchpoints.
Touchpoint 1 – Identifying needs before the purchase
Every customer and also every prospective customer goes through a series of touchpoints with the company during the initiation phase. This usually starts completely outside our sphere of influence, when it takes place via word of mouth, or inside our sphere of influence, when we start with out-of-home campaigns, TV campaigns or similar. At these points, it is often not yet possible to obtain direct feedback or to measure the experience.
Only when the user or the prospect comes to your website do you have the opportunity to interact with them.
At this point, you don’t have user or email data, which is why Dennis recommends anchoring the first touchpoint on the website. A good way to do this is to include a survey on the website that opens via a pop-up or modal.
The survey itself is about identifying the customer’s needs. The following exemplary questions can already be used to get to know the prospective customer and his intentions in more detail: What brought you to our website? What are you interested in? What exactly are you looking for? Do you like the content you see?
In addition, this is also a good start to measure the effectiveness of marketing measures, to check the quality of your own website and to adjust it if necessary.
Touchpoint 2 – After the purchase
According to Dennis’ recommendation, the second cash flow relevant touchpoint should be queried directly after the purchase. You should now have the contact details and other information about the customer so that you can interact with them more intensively. By this time, the customer has already gone through several steps within your company; from the quotation to the payment process to possible support requests.
So you have the opportunity to analyze the steps they went through along the customer journey and ask the new customer what went well and if there were any weaknesses or complications. This could reveal that there were some hurdles, for example, in the support request or in the payment process. These are subtleties that you would not otherwise find out about and which you can now work on more thanks to the tip.
What also comes in handy here: Ask your customers about their goals and what they want to use your product for. On the one hand, this gives you the opportunity to build stronger customer loyalty, and on the other hand, it gives you the opportunity to adapt your marketing measures and develop use cases.
Touchpoint 3 – After the customer’s termination
The third relevant touchpoint, from Dennis’ experience, should be analyzed directly after the termination. This is basically not a pleasant situation, as it is always very upsetting to lose a customer. But there are reasons for his cancellation. And asking about them offers you enormous added value, because it gives you the opportunity to improve or adapt your offer. With an NPS query, this can be implemented excellently.
As a further tip, Dennis recommends going one step further and asking your customers whether they have achieved their goals. This way, you learn a bit more about their needs and have the opportunity to identify potential disruptive factors for customer satisfaction.
For example, in the case of an online store, there is usually no cancellation. In this case, it’s interesting to ask the customer after a reasonable period of time why they don’t buy from you again. What is the reason for no follow-up purchase? Is it the price, the delivery conditions or something else entirely? Again, this will provide you with important starting points that you can use to improve your products or services.
Summary
With this video, you’ve learned how to gather valuable feedback at three different points in the customer journey to keep prospects and customers engaged and build a positive bond between them and your business.
Targeted surveys offer you the best opportunity to find out whether the individual steps within the customer journey, starting with the search for information and continuing through the purchase and all subsequent positions, are proceeding positively.
This gives you the chance to derive suitable measures, improve your processes and focus on what the customer wants. In this way, you will be able to retain customers in the long term, build up a sustainable business and participate successfully in the market.
Since every company and its structures are different, it may well be that other touchpoints prove useful for you. Use the touchpoints selected by Dennis as inspiration and simply adapt them to the relevant contact points of your business field.