Review your customer touchpoints and customer experience

Review your customer touchpoints and customer experience

When making significant changes to your business (or if you’ve never done it before!), reviewing your customer touchpoints and customer experience is a must. Many of our Beyond Business Group members have adapted to new ways of working and delivering their products and services during COVID. To help them, and all of you, to maintain brand equity, I developed this activity to map your customer journey, and plot and evaluate your touchpoints and customer experience.

What are customer touchpoints and customer experience?

Customer experience (CX) is about how customers feel about your business overall – it encompasses the emotional, physical and psychological connection customers have with a brand. It includes how people interact with your business, products or services across the entire customer life cycle – from the moment they hear about you, to receiving after-sales care, and everything in between. These are your customer touchpoints.

Customer touchpoints can be in person, phone, mail or via digital channels such as your website, social media or email. They also include your invoices and receipts. Customer touchpoints may even be outside of your control, such as reviews.

Customer journey – the sales funnel

The journey your potential customers go on from when they hear about your offering through to when they make a purchase and receive after-sales care can be represented by a sales funnel.

The 5 basic sales funnel stages are:

  1. Awareness
  2. Interest
  3. Decision
  4. Action (purchase!)
  5. Loyalty

Sales funnel

Mapping customer touchpoints and customer experience

Mapping customer touchpoints across the customer journey is a great way to detail customer experience, and ensure it is aligned with your brand. It can also help you keep your promotion and communication focused. With all the upheaval of recent months and adapting to a ‘new normal’, it is especially important.

Follow these steps to create a table or spreadsheet as per the example below.

  1. Chart the customer journey along the top (use the five sales funnel stages, or determine steps more specific to your business). You can add extra details to the customer journey, such as the average time spent in each stage, how customers are feeling or what they are doing, and the problems or pain points they are facing.
  2. Identify your customer touchpoints and add them down the left hand side.
  3. Plot the customer touchpoints along the appropriate stages of the customer journey.
  4. Note in each section how you can ensure your customer experience reflects your brand. Everything from how you answer the phone to invoicing should align with your branding. You can also note what information is required at each stage and key messages.

Example:

Note: you will likely have many more customer touchpoints than the example!

Evaluating your map

Review and evaluate the customer touchpoints and customer experience by asking yourself:

  • Is enough being done across the customer journey?
  • Are there gaps?
  • Are some areas too heavy?
  • What do you need to add or remove?
  • What could be improved?

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