What is a Touchpoint?
When speaking about customer experience, a touchpoint is any moment when a consumer receives an impression of a business. The touchpoint could be a TV commercial, an Instagram post, 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 a consumer's opinion of a company and will influence the likelihood they will do business with an organization.
Each touchpoint is important and needs to well-considered and designed. This includes even the smallest of details, such as product packaging and the voice that greets customers in an IVR or Voice Portal when they call customer service. Touchpoints need to be consistently on-brand and of a high quality. Ever been wowed by your experience in a store but went online and found that the business has a clunky website? You were probably disappointed and a little confused. This is why consistency of touchpoints is so important. Consumers are looking and judging and they will go somewhere else with their wallets if they think a business is lacking in any part of their experience.
Touchpoints in the contact center
Meaningful touchpoints occur every minute in a contact center, and because so many humans are involved, these are probably the most difficult touchpoints to control. Organizations can control the quality and consistency of the entry points, such as the design of the interactive voice response (IVR) menu and the performance of the online chat user interface. However, once the touchpoint is handed off to an agent, the organization has to rely on the agent's ability. 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, because it streamlines the process and enables the agent to concentrate on the customer, not the tool.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customertouchpoints. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact center operations. CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to enhance customer experience and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic contact center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.