When you’re looking to improve sales and build your brand, it’s important to think like your customer. Assumptions are deadly when building a customer experience strategy. This is where a lot of companies fail when trying to sell or position a brand. They build their customer experience journey based on assumptions made about what their customers want from their brand rather than on factual evidence.
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes
You will hear this phrase many times throughout this course. To truly understand and become mindful of what your customer expects at every step of their journey with you, it is essential to experience the touchpoint journey from their point of view.
Touchpoints moments happen throughout the entire journey process. The purpose behind Touchpoint mapping is to collect feedback to identify customer ‘pain points’ or areas that need improvement along the way. For example: if you find yourself losing customers as quickly as you ‘close’ them, there’s probably a disconnect or gap in the onboarding, delivery, or servicing processes currently in place. The customer’s expectations were not met, and they cut their losses by going to the competition.
Initially, the touchpoint mapping process will uncover the gaps or areas needing improvement. Ultimately though, the process will morph into a tool for anticipating trend changes in customer expectations and opportunities for building brand value.
Identifying your Customer TouchPoints
As explained earlier, touchpoints occur throughout the entire customer journey process. Your job is to map out all of the different ways your customer will come into contact with your brand, and how you will respond to their needs at every touchpoint.
- BEFORE – How did they find out about you? Were they first introduced to your brand through a simple Google search, a billboard advertisement, or through a referral from a friend.
Are you ranking favorably on Google? Does the messaging on your billboard capture their attention in the seconds needed, and does it instill the reaction you desire? Have you built-in incentive programs to reward referring partners? - DURING – HOW did they reach out? What channels did they interact with your brand, and what action did they take? When they make critical purchase decisions, whether the purchase is made in person, online, or through a third party are you meeting their needs?
How easy have you made it for the customer to gain the additional information they need to make an informed decision? Do they have to dig through your website to get to the information? - AFTER – What happens after the sale. The Customer Journey really kicks into gear at this point. A great deal of concentration goes into creating an experience up to the Point of Sale (POS) only to be dropped once they become a client. RAVING FANS happen during the customer experience process…after the sale.
Is there a buyer’s remorse? Does the customer feel slighted in any way once the sale is closed? For example, are they shifted to a different department and forgotten? Do they feel that they have to repeat their desires with each new representative? Or, do they feel confident having one point of contact managing the entire onboarding and delivery process?
Ultimately, patterns begin to emerge. You can anticipate the customer expectations at each touchpoint. Armed with this research data, you can address expectations at each touchpoint. Better yet, you begin to predict when the customer’s needs start to change and can address them before they become ‘pain points.’
Closely monitoring channels and touchpoints provides a solid basis for creating a Customer Journey that leads to building a tribe of RAVING FANS.
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