Impacts of touchpoints

Aaron Moraes #108438201

Kuldip Makwana #136140209
Shilpa #128734209
What are Touchpoints ?

• A touchpoint is any time a potential customer or customer comes in contact with your brand–before, during, or after they
purchase something from you. (Survey Monkey)
• Touch points are collaborations among organizations and clients that happen during the client's journey. These moments
fundamentally impact client experience just as a brand perception. By outlining key touch points on a map, businesses can
capitalize on timely opportunities to optimize their customer journey.
• Client touchpoints are commonly recorded on a client venture map. They're assembled in sequential request to exhibit
what a client's experience resembles with a business. This enables promoting and client to support groups recognize
touchpoints that cause friction so they can eliminate them and upgrade the client venture.
• Touchpoints are your brand's points of client contact, beginning to end. For instance, clients may discover your business
on the web or in a promotion, see appraisals and audits, visit your site, shop at your retail location, or contact your client
assistance.
• Every touchpoint assumes in fortifying the brand's position by overall recognition. Moreover significant touchpoints that
are majorly misused can fly away the clients and bring about harming and negative word of mouth.
(Buttle)
How to Identify Customer Touchpoints
Social
Media

Peer Ratings &

Referral Reviews

Before
Purchase
Digital Company
Marketing Events
Content

Word of
Advertising
Mouth
 Product
Catalogs

Conversations
With Company Ecommerce
Representatives

During
Purchase
Product
Website
Reviews

Promotions Point of Sale

 Thank You
Letters

Service and
Online help
support
center teams

After
Purchase

Product
Cross-selling
Feedback
Emails
Surveys
• Customer touchpoints improve and enhance customer management and customer
experience with the help of CRM technologies and human skills set.
• Touchpoints impacts the entire customer lifecycle. Starting from their first encounter with the
company and their products, their experience at those touchpoints, and the outcome of those
experiences.
• Touchpoint plays the major influential role in forming an impression in the mind of the
customers during their interactions. Those integrations and impression created at the
touchpoints helps the customers to take a call whether to buy or not buy the product, if they
should wait before making a purchasing decision, and if they should go with the product of
the competition.
(Buttle)
• Digital touchpoints makes the customers go through several steps before deciding on a
certain products. Initially they become aware through some touchpoint like social media,
word of mouth, influencers, advertisement post that they visit comparison website or any
other website to gather more information or reviews of the product and finally when they
purchase the product from the official website.
• Touchpoints are making the company and businesses think and act placing them in the
customers shoes. This is helping them to produce various innovative ideas to ensure that the
customers purchase journey and the experience with the company are smoothly done.
• First impression is the last impression, touchpoints are highly influencing the customers to
create a pleasant first impression and encouraging re-purchases and enhancing loyalty of
the customers towards that product.
(Buttle)
• Touchpoints are helping customer engagement to perceive a multi-dimensional concept
composed of majorly four elements:
I. Cognitive engagement
II. Affective engagement
III. Behavioral engagement
IV. Social engagement
Touchpoints affects the feelings and experiences of the customers and the behavioral and
social area is assessed by capturing organizational participation other than just purchasing the
products.. A loyal and engaged customers will be involved in writing reviews, various referral
schemes, registering for newsletter, showing interests in the new products launched. Therefore,
customers engagement will create more touchpoints which will connect them closely with the
brand.
(Buttle)
• Touchpoints are effective and consistent in creating customer centric –customer by
embracing systematic approaches like Design Thinking.
• If a company is likely to face changes like closing, change of website address, acquired or
temporary closing down for renovation the touchpoints will also change. Lack of proper
touchpoints can play a major role in losing customers and their loyalty.
• Lack of proper touchpoints can cause delaying in responding to the customers like dealing or
resolving an issue they have enquired or registered for a long time can lead to customer
defection.
• Touchpoints increases reliability, reduces any amount of re-work and enhances customer
retention and satisfaction as they help in root cause analyze by capturing the complains
easily
(Buttle)
• Touchpoints impacts largely on the very first step of designing a customer’s journey which
will eventually meet with the customers expectations from those touchpoints.
• Interactions at touchpoints impacts on the customer’s knowledge and forming the evaluative
judgements (positive or negative) and about their experiences.
• Touchpoints impacts CRM as it requires customer focused behavior and customer facing
employees which works as a motivation for the customers and enhances business
performance.
• Touchpoint impacts social media analytics which helps to identify the best social media
campaigns and channels in driving the traffic to other customer touchpoint like stores or other
corporate website.
• Touchpoints anticipates customer needs so that the company can provide customized offers
in order to create a personalized experiences across.
(Buttle)
 Engage Attract your target

Aim/Uses Nurture Create a relation

of
Touchpoints
Convert Turn them loyal

(Infor)
 Engage with your customers

Customers buying process begins with online research:

• Before making a purchase in-store, customers research online about various products and their features. You can
understand the demands and requirements of a customer through your touchpoints online to create more value for your
customers.
Capture audience attention before they enter the store:
• By creating superior customer experience through well planned touchpoints you can capture the attention of your
audience which will help them come one step closer towards making the purchase.
Relevant content:
• Touchpoints help us gather information on the customer such as the keywords they search, this helps us to understand
what kind of content would attract their attention the most
(Infor)
Engage with your customers

Understand their needs:

• Touchpoints help us create a broad profile of the needs of customers which in turn helps us to identify
the areas or aspects that we need to improve or create.
Track customer behaviour
• We can get a look into the customer behaviour from the data collected by FAQ, bots, email/chat
enquiries, which pages drive the most traffic in and which drive most away etc.

(Infor)
Nurture them from prospect to customers

Connect with your customers at regular intervals:

• It is important to make frequent interactions with your customers providing them with all the relevant
information that they need depending on the stage of their buying process. Such as company marketing,
customer reviews, demos, etc.
Use text, call, emails, etc. to engage with your customers
• Using multiple touchpoints to reach your audience is ideal as it will help gather and disseminate different
data in different methods such as Facebook page, email, website etc. all can be used to provide different
types of messages such as features, offers, receipts etc.
Ensure to space out these interactions
• It is better to give the customers their time and not bombard them with continuous messages/calls, etc. as it
may enrage them. You need to find a balance and not end up ignoring or spamming your customers.
(Infor)
Nurture them from prospect to customers

Relevant content is extremely important:

• While potential customers are making their purchase decision, we need to provide them with relevant
information that is specific to their requirement. If provided with irrelevant content, customers may become
uninterested.
Understand customer response
• It is important to understand how customers respond to our communications as it will give us an overview
on how our touchpoints are affecting them. Our touchpoints need to be effective in transmitting information
and so feedback is key.
Create a 360 degree profile through analysis
• Turning a prospect into a customer is a difficult task which requires detailed information about the client.
Creating a complete profile of the customer will help us understand what interactions have they had with us,
what are their requirements, and what pieces of information are key for sales.
(Infor)
Nurture them from prospect to customers

Relevant content is extremely important:

• While potential customers are making their purchase decision, we need to provide them with relevant
information that is specific to their requirement. If provided with irrelevant content, customers may become
uninterested.
Understand customer response
• It is important to understand how customers respond to our communications as it will give us an overview
on how our touchpoints are affecting them. Our touchpoints need to be effective in transmitting information
and so feedback is key.
Create a 360 degree profile through analysis
• Turning a prospect into a customer is a difficult task which requires detailed information about the client.
Creating a complete profile of the customer will help us understand what interactions have they had with us,
what are their requirements, and what pieces of information are key for sales.
(Infor)
Convert

Customers are more willing to give negative feedback than positive

• According to an article, more customers are willing to provide feedback when they have a bad customer experience than
good (Thomas). Managing touchpoints effectively will help us to understand these feedbacks and improve the companies
performance.
Maintaining a customer feedback loop:
• It is important that customers feel heard, constantly asking and providing information will help customers to be connected
with the company which helps enhance the customer experience.
Keep sharing information even after sales
• Customer experience does not end after the sales has completed, managing touchpoints shall help create an effective
relationship which is important to retain customers for future sales. According to a research, after sales service is crucial in
customer experience and strongly determines if the customer would be willing to come back (Alireza Fazlzadeh).
Create a complete profile to understand customer experience
• Touchpoints are important to understand the customers experience with us. We can learn how the customer interacts with
us and what information do we provide to them by creating a complete profile of the customers. This information can help
us improve the customers experience and make changes to the touchpoints that we employ.
(Infor)
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alireza Fazlzadeh, Fatemeh Bagherzadeh, and Pegah Mohamadi. "How after-sales service quality dimensions
affect customer satisfaction." African journal of business management vol. 5 (2011): 7658-7664.

Buttle, F., & Maklan, S. Customer Relationship Management - Concepts and Technologies. 2019.

Infor. The customer journey—How to bring excellence to every touchpoint. 26 10 2016. YouTube.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij258_QAfrE&ab_channel=Infor>.

Survey Monkey. How to identify your customer touchpoints. n.d. Website. 14 10 2020.
<https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/identify-customer-touchpoints/>.

Thomas, Andrew. The secret ratio that proves why customer reviews are so important it's what you don't
know that hurts you. 26 02 2018. Website. 14 10 2020. <Https://www.Inc.Com/andrew-thomas/the-hidden-
ratio-that-could-make-or-break-your-company.Html>.