In the context of customer experience, a touchpoint is any moment when potential customers receive an impression of a business. A customer touchpoint could be a TV commercial, a post in social media channels, an interaction with a store employee, or a call with customer service, to name a few. Every touchpoint is part of a customer journey that shapes potential customer opinion of a company and will influence the likelihood they will do business with an organization.
Each touchpoint is important and needs to be well-considered and designed. This includes even the smallest details, such as product packaging and the voice that greets customers in an IVR or voice portal when they call customer service. Customer touchpoints need to be consistently on-brand and of high quality, as the customer contact point affects whether new customers will make a purchase and existing customers will stay with the brand. The more loyal customers a company has, the more clients it can attract.
Consistency in customer touchpoints is very important. Consumers are judging each interaction and they will take their business elsewhere if they think a company is neglecting any part of their experience.
With touchpoint analysis or mapping, contact points can help companies understand customer experience and increase customer satisfaction. Customer experiences that make them feel more comfortable and contribute to brand loyalty can be more accurately identified.
Meaningful customer touchpoints occur every minute in a contact center, but with so many people involved these are probably the most difficult customer touchpoints to control. Organizations can more easily control the quality and consistency of the entry points, however, such as the design of the interactive voice response (IVR) menu and the performance of the online chat user interface.
Once the touchpoint is handed off to an agent, the organization has to rely on the agent's capabilities. This confidence is supported by having the right elements in place that shape the customer experience like high-quality hiring practices, agent training, supervision, monitoring, and easy-to-use, intuitive agent interfaces. Limiting the number of interfaces an agent needs to use during a customer interaction will usually help improve the customer experience, as it streamlines the process and enables the agent to concentrate on the customer, not the tool.
