Mapping the customer journey is essential to optimizing your sales funnel and driving growth. Creating a comprehensive map that reflects that journey can be a challenge, though. There are many customer engagement touchpoints to consider across many channels.
In this post, we identify common touchpoints (and some less common ones) to help you optimize customer engagement and create a clear, actionable customer journey map.
Main Takeaways
- Touchpoints refer to interactions that occur between a consumer and a brand across any channel (e.g., website, phone, chat).
- Auditing current interactions, gathering feedback, and prioritizing high-impact interactions can help businesses identify and map touchpoints.
- Technology tools, especially artificial intelligence (AI), deliver data at scale to help surface overlooked touchpoints and build a comprehensive customer journey map.
What Are Customer Journey Touchpoints?
Customer journey touchpoints refer to the points of engagement between a customer and a brand. These interactions can be planned or unplanned and occur across every channel, both online and offline. (Think of channels as the communication mechanism, and touchpoints as the communications happening over those channels.)
Here are a few touchpoint examples:
- A customer calls a business about a missing delivery
- A marketing department sends a coupon via a text message
- A sales agent makes a cold call to a potential customer
- A repeat customer initiates a live chat
- A consumer makes a comment on a business’s social media post
Touchpoints can happen with human agents or with a brand’s technology assets, such as websites, phone systems, virtual assistants, and chatbots.
Types of Touchpoints Across the Customer Journey
We’ve identified five critical stages involving touchpoints that should always be included in customer touchpoint mapping.
1. Awareness Stage
Awareness happens when a consumer is first exposed to your brand. They might see an ad, view a social post, discover you through a topic-based search like “banks near me,” read a review, or hear about you through a referral.
Many touchpoints can spark awareness, so it’s essential to maintain consistent messaging, especially when using an omnichannel marketing strategy.
2. Consideration Stage
Website visits, product comparisons, email interactions, customer reviews, and feedback are all touchpoints in the consideration stage. That’s why it’s so important to ensure your website and social channels offer high-quality, relevant content.
Use all the customer data at your disposal — including insights from phone conversations — to make sure your content truly speaks to the customer’s needs. Keep messaging on webpages, in social posts, and in sales materials clear, concise, and current to guide the customer smoothly along their journey.
3. Decision Stage
More than three-quarters of consumers will desert a brand after just one bad experience. So the pressure is on to provide smooth, persuasive interactions for your customers at the decision stage. You should strive to:
- Keep your website and app FAQs visible and up to date
- Provide easy-to-find contact forms and clear contact information
- Ensure you have enough staff to handle phone calls
- Offer live chat, virtual assistants, and helpful product videos
- Implement phone options like interactive voice response to route customers quickly
4. Customer Onboarding Stage
How you treat your customers has a direct impact on future customer loyalty, of course. Do it well, and you’ll extend customer lifetime value (CLV) and earn customer referrals.
Keep up the positive communication with customers in the onboarding stage by sending welcome emails and helpful texts, and offering product tutorials. Provide phone numbers, email addresses, and direct messaging options so customers can easily reach customer support.
5. Post-Purchase and Loyalty Stage
It costs more to find a new customer than to keep an existing one. In the post-purchase phase, continue supporting your buyers to keep them satisfied and engaged. Offer reliable after-sales support to show you stand by your products or services and value their business.
Look for opportunities to establish additional touchpoints that can foster long-term devotion to your business. Enroll customers in loyalty programs, invite them to participate in satisfaction surveys, or ask them to share their reviews. These actions can help strengthen the relationship and keep your brand top of mind.
Personalization is the key to making customers feel special. Use their names in communications, tailor messages to their interests, and address their specific needs. The more valued they feel, the more likely they’ll stay loyal — and even become enthusiastic advocates for your brand.
How to Identify and Map Customer Journey Touchpoints
Here are three steps to help you get started with building a clear and actionable customer journey map:
Step 1: Audit Current Customer Interactions
You no doubt already have a wealth of customer journey touchpoint data at your fingertips. Start by exploring your customer relationship management (CRM) system, which holds records of customer interactions through ads, emails, and outbound calls.
Dig deeper into web analytics and use call tracking with conversation analytics to uncover insights from inbound calls. For example, a customer might mention a broken website link during a support call. That single conversation can help you identify and fix an ineffective touchpoint, sparing countless other customers a frustrating experience.
Step 2: Gather Direct Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is valuable for helping you understand which touchpoints are effective and which ones are not. Use customer satisfaction surveys, online reviews, and metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gather relevant feedback. Social posts are a great resource for feedback, too. You can also cull direct insights from phone conversations and gather them at scale using AI-powered solutions like Invoca.
Step 3: Prioritize High-Impact Touchpoints
When you map your customer journey, patterns will emerge, revealing which touchpoints are most important. One of the highest-impact — and most often overlooked — moments happens when a customer transitions from online activity to making a phone call.
Considering that 68% of consumers value human connection, that phone call may be the first personal interaction they have with your business. Make it count by ensuring it’s smooth, responsive, and tailored to their needs.
Best Practices for Managing Customer Journey Touchpoints
You must actively manage customer journey touchpoints to deliver a seamless customer experience. Here are 10 best practices to help you do it.
1. Map the Full Customer Journey
A customer journey map is a visual representation of all the interactions between a customer and your brand. It helps you better understand your customers, anticipate their needs, and predict their behavior so you can engage with them more effectively.
Marketing, sales, and support teams should all be familiar with the customer journey map and use it to inform their work. You can reinforce the map’s value and promote a deeper understanding of the information by holding internal workshops to educate stakeholders.
2. Align Touchpoints with Customer Intent
Every touchpoint on your customer journey map should reflect the customer’s mindset in that moment. If your messaging is off, you risk losing their interest or trust.
For example, customers in the awareness stage need educational content to learn about your brand, not loyalty rewards. Meanwhile, customers at the post-purchase stage are already familiar with you, so they’ll respond better to perks like discounts or exclusive offers.
3. Ensure Consistency Across Channels
Customers want an omnichannel experience that allows them to interact with brands when and where they want. So, it’s important to unify messaging across every channel, online and offline.
For example, don’t advertise a 5% discount on Google when your sales agents are offering 10% discounts over the phone — that inconsistency can damage trust. Similarly, if your Trustpilot rating increases by a few points, be sure to promptly update all your marketing assets to reflect this change. Consistent, omnichannel communication creates a cohesive brand experience that your customers will appreciate.
4. Personalize High-Impact Interactions
Customers want to feel special. So, focus on personalizing their experiences, especially during the critical decision and onboarding stages.
Use CRM data and call analysis to tailor messages for customers at key touchpoints. Tools like Invoca PreSense, for example, deliver pre-call insights into caller intent, helping personalize phone conversations right from the start. See how it works in the short video below:
You can also personalize marketing emails by using customers’ actual names and relevant details when promoting a new product.
These high-impact personalization efforts can build stronger connections and boost engagement.
5. Monitor and Analyze Phone Call Touchpoints
Most consumers value human connection, especially when they’re making a high-stakes purchase. Making sure your customer service agents can handle inquiries professionally and effectively is therefore a must.
Monitor and score calls so agents can learn and grow from real interactions with customers. Also consider using an automated quality management tool like Invoca, which objectively scores calls at scale, helping you get a complete picture of your team’s performance with minimal effort on your part.
6. Use Real-Time Customer Feedback
Tap into survey responses and post-call evaluations to identify where touchpoints might be creating friction. Look for patterns where customers get stuck or drop off.
AI-powered tools like Invoca’s conversation analytics can help surface these insights at scale by tapping into the voice of the customer. For instance, if you notice an agent is pushing the sale too aggressively during the awareness stage and causing customers to disengage, you can flag that drop-off point and provide targeted training to improve the interaction.
7. Optimize for Mobile Experience
There are more mobile phone subscriptions in the world than there are people. With so many consumers relying on their phones, a poor mobile experience can easily drive them away — and fast. Your app, website, and digital assets should be designed with mobile-first principles to deliver seamless, frustration-free experiences on every screen.
8. Automate and Streamline Repetitive Steps
Reducing customer effort improves experiences at touchpoints. Consider automating routine tasks, such as sending personalized emails, text confirmations, or scheduling appointments. Additionally, use automation to intelligently route incoming phone calls and use pre-call digital data to direct callers to the right agent the first time.
9. Align Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service Teams
Silos are bad for business and lead to inconsistent messaging and customer experiences. Align your sales, marketing, support, and CX teams by involving them in customer touchpoint mapping. Share all data, including digital-to-call data gathered with tools like Invoca. Getting everyone on the same page will make handoffs between marketing and sales much smoother.
10. Continuously Test and Improve Touchpoints
Customer expectations evolve constantly — and so should your touchpoints. For example, as mobile connectivity improves, more consumers may shift to using an app rather than a website.
Stay in tune with customers’ preferences and changing trends by regularly testing your messaging, ads, and other assets, and by reviewing performance metrics to see what’s working and what needs adjustment. Solutions like Invoca can help you track the phone call conversions your ads drive, providing you with the insights needed to continuously refine the customer experience.
Why Optimizing Touchpoints Is Key to a Positive Customer Experience
If you follow the 10 best practices outlined above, your touchpoints will lead to a more positive customer experience. Here’s why that matters.
- Each touchpoint plays a part in shaping the overall customer experience.
- Poorly managed touchpoints create friction and lead to churn.
- Well-managed touchpoints enhance customer satisfaction, foster trust, and drive conversions.
- The clincher? Three-quarters of customers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experience alone.
Optimize Important Customer Touchpoints with Invoca
Customer touchpoint mapping, optimization, and measurement are essential to delivering a superior customer experience. A smooth journey with insight-driven touchpoints leads to greater customer loyalty, more conversions, and business growth.
Invoca can help you create that journey by unifying online and offline experiences. We help you route calls intelligently, so customers don’t have to endure long holds or multiple transfers. Tools like PreSense brief agents on caller identity and the likely reason for calling based on their pre-call online activity, enabling personalization from the outset of a call.
We can also help you train agents to deliver the best call experiences. Our automated quality management provides the data and tools you need to train and coach agents effectively so they can help your business provide an exceptional customer experience.
Additional Reading
To learn more about customer journey touchpoints and their impact on CX, see these resources:
- Customer Journey Tracking: Mapping the Path to Conversions
- 8 Customer Journey Questions You Can’t Answer Without Conversation Intelligence AI
- Creating an Omnichannel Customer Journey: Top Strategies
When you’re ready, book a free demo with our team to explore how Invoca’s AI-powered quality intelligence tools can help you identify and map key customer touchpoints and deliver a superior customer experience.
FAQs
What Is an Example of a Customer Touchpoint?
One example of a customer touchpoint is a phone call initiated by a customer to a call center. This call creates an interaction between the customer and the call center agent who answers, shaping the customer’s perception of the brand in that moment.
Why Is It Important to Identify Customer Touchpoints?
Businesses should identify and map customer touchpoints for two main reasons. First, mapping touchpoints helps marketing and sales teams identify high-impact points of contact where they can allocate additional resources to spur conversions. Second, identifying and mapping touchpoints can help highlight areas of friction that need to be addressed, such as broken website links or outdated phone numbers.
How Do Customer Touchpoints Impact Customer Satisfaction?
Customer touchpoints directly influence customer satisfaction. When touchpoints are smooth and make it easy for customers to interact with a brand, they create a positive experience and build satisfaction. On the other hand, if communication is difficult — for example, when customers struggle to reach support or navigate outdated systems — it can lead to frustration, a poor experience, and prompt customers to do business with a competitor instead.
What Is a Customer Touchpoint Strategy?
A customer touchpoint strategy is a comprehensive plan for managing all interactions a customer may have with your brand. Creating an effective strategy involves identifying and optimizing key touchpoints, as well as leveraging high-impact touchpoints to drive sales.
