Customer satisfaction is vital to the success of your business, but improving your levels of customer satisfaction can be tricky. If you feel like you need a little bit of help in that department, you should first determine what your customers’ touchpoints are, so you can zero in on them and make changes to meet their needs and expectations. If you don’t know your customers’ touchpoints, no worries, we can help you figure them out and analyze them so you can make them work in your favor.
What Are Customer TouchPoints?
A touchpoint is any time a potential customer comes in contact with your business – before, during, or after working with you. This is your brand’s point of customer contact from the beginning to the end, starting from initial contact with your customer, whether it is intentional or not. For example, scheduling a meeting with a customer initiates an intentional touchpoint, but if they reach you through your website, or after seeing ratings and reviews from other customers, this is an unintentional touchpoint.
How Do You Identify Your Touchpoints?
Inventory Your Touchpoints
To identify your customers’ touchpoints and make sure that customers are satisfied at every step of their journey with your business, you should create a process map. The map will identify the touchpoints, or all the ways a customer encounters your brand throughout the customer life cycle:
Acquisition
Determination
Decision-making
Cultivation
Profiling
Termination and win-back
Take these touchpoints and group them where they occur in the customer life cycle. Include every manner in which customers encounter your brand, such as:
Understanding a customer’s life cycle can help you determine what the touchpoints are and how to rate them.
What’s The Purpose?
After you’ve done this, you will need to identify the purpose behind each of these touchpoints, which becomes easier after grouping them according to their position in the customer life cycle. Your purposes can include:
Developing a lead
Influencing a decision
Building loyalty
Making a sale
Solving an issue
Rate Impact
Once you have identified your touchpoints and their purposes, you will then have to rate their impact. Which touchpoints resonate most with customers? Which ones bring in more customers and satisfy their needs most effectively? For example, will an email make your customers want to renew their plans? Or would a phone call?
A touchpoint analysis is a great way to assess how customers perceive your brand. Each touchpoint has its own impact, depending on the situation and needs of your lead/customers. The best way to find out how effective your different touchpoints are is by creating a scale from 1 to 10 and rating each touchpoint’s impact and effectiveness. 1 is the highest impact and 10 is the lowest: if a touchpoint creates more interactions and drives value, rate it higher up the scale. After this, you can create a plan that will improve customer retention, increase sales conversion, and cultivate brand loyalty!
Touchpoint Action Plan
Trying to figure out how to increase customer satisfaction and increase sales when you have so many different touchpoints can be overwhelming. So, once you have identified and sorted the touchpoints on your list from above, create an action plan for the ones that rate higher than a 5. We recommend starting by focusing on the ones that seem like the easiest wins, and by looking at something you can change that will have a real impact on how customers view your business. You can:
Develop an outreach plan for customers that are coming up to their renewal times by sending them regular email/SMS alerts starting 5-6 weeks before the renewal date. This will increase customer satisfaction and retention.
Improve your website, blog, emails, and social media presence. This can cultivate brand awareness and loyalty.
Focus on cross-selling opportunities: according to one study, 69% of customers want agents to contact them about the coverage they might not have, and 81% are receptive to information from their agent about how to save money. This will focus on increasing sales conversion.
Touchpoints are important to identify, so you can improve them and boost your business. Remember, customers are your most valuable asset, so you should always be looking for ways to improve your customer experience, including identifying and focusing on your touchpoints, analyzing them, and seeing where you should make improvements.
In the meantime, if you are looking for a push in the right direction, Benepath can help. We offer exclusive leads who are ready to buy, all you have to do is tell us when you are available to work with them! Benepath will provide you with better tools, more guidance, unsurpassed sales training, and techniques from the most successful agents and trainers in the industry, not to mention the best leads available!
To get more information, fill out the form above, or call 866-368-0377.
