Touchdown! Mapping the Customer Journey with Touchpoints

Any effort to improve your understanding of your customers should be backed by the framework provided by a comprehensive customer journey map.

Improving the customer experience.

It’s a goal that’s just as lofty and exactly as vague as “lose weight sometime after the new year.”

It’s not enough to just want to improve your customer experience, it has to be a goal approached with knowledge and a holistic view of your customer’s entire journey with your company.

Identifying Touchpoints

Touchpoints are defined as any point of customer-to-brand contact. Being aware of your touchpoints is an essential part of delivering quality customer service, but many businesses trying to improve their customer service aren’t even aware of what their touchpoints are! Research by the Temkin Group revealed that 84 percent of companies planned to increase their focus on customer experience measurements and metrics in 2014; how much money was wasted on customer service improvement before the customer experience was fully understood?

Every time a touchpoint occurs for your customer, they walk away with a changed perception of your brand (for better or for worse). You can’t afford to ignore these critical moments of the customer journey — according to a survey via MarketWatch, 80 percent of customers have become frustrated from companies not having the context of their previous conversation.

Understanding your touchpoints means both being aware of when they occur and knowing how effective they are at meeting your customer needs. Social media and the interconnected nature of customer service has changed this formula somewhat; now, customers can engage brands and customer service through phone calls, texting, social media, or email. Contact centres need to be ready to track engagement on all of these channels; an integrated customer experience doesn’t take place on a single channel, it takes place on all channels.

Touchpoint Mapping

Touchpoint mapping is a process that charts each touchpoint on the customer experience, delivering performance metrics for each point of contact.

An effective touchpoint map will not only monitor each time a customer makes contact, but will also provide data on:

Call abandonment rates during phone contact
Average response time for social media queries
Keyword tracking for SMS customer service
How the customer feels during each specific touchpoint

This data may be:

Qualitative: explaining how actions are perceived and make customers feel through the use of themes or pre-existing character models (how do customers feel at this touchpoint?)

Quantitative: providing concrete numbers and statistics to assess the efficiency of a procedure (what percent of customers reach this touchpoint?)

This level of detail gives you the most comprehensive information on how to make specific improvements to your customer experience; a single bad touchpoint can ruin their entire journey, making it essential that your contact centre be conscious of how your agents interact with customers.

Charting the Customer Experience

The goal of mapping your touchpoints isn’t just to give your brand feedback; it’s also to provide the insight necessary to understand exactly what your customers want to achieve and how your brand can proactively help your customers meet those goals.

A customer experience (or customer journey) map will ideally give you information about every stage of the customer life cycle, using the information from your touchpoint mapping to inform its creation with quantitative and qualitative data. Its primary goal is to put you in the customer’s shoes and see how they perceive your service from their own point of view.

This can take many forms but often includes some variation of these four components:

Guiding principles: used to define your goals and inform your procedures throughout each phase of the life cycle.
Customer journey: a flowchart-esque framework that your customers travel through, providing touchpoints that can be measured.
Thoughts and feelings: how your customers perceive their customer journey and their specific feelings during each touchpoint.
Opportunities: gaps in the customer journey that could be improved with better customer service or marketing.

Putting Your Plan into Action

When your contact centre has mapped out each touchpoint of the customer experience, you may be surprised at the feedback you receive. Customer feedback and self-improvement practices are often unguided and unfocused; customer experience mapping gives you the concrete framework necessary to synthesize actionable ideas from feedback and create meaningful change in the contact centre.

However, you need to be careful not to lose the forest for the trees. Focusing too heavily on any one touchpoint can cause you to lose focus on the customer’s overall experience. Only when you keep the entire customer life cycle in mind will you be able to effect the meaningful change necessary for exceptional customer service.

Interested in more ways to use customer journey mapping to improve the quality of your customer service? Download our free white paper!