TL;DR:
The basic customer journey is made up of five stages (awareness, consideration, decision-making, retention, and loyalty), each with their own touchpoints along the way.
To gain insights into your brand’s customer journey touchpoints, analyze the segments of your target audience to discover the different ways each will interact with your brand as they move through the journey.
The first step in optimizing touchpoints is to analyze data to identify areas for improvement.
Creating better touchpoints also requires that you understand the emotions that motivate customers to purchase as well as the emotions they experience when they interact with your brand.
Some touchpoints — like customer service interactions — can prove overwhelming or frustrating for customers, providing you with opportunities to create better experiences.
Personalization is a powerful tool that you can use to optimize many touchpoints.
Every brand wants happy customers who keep coming back for more. Awesome products will get you part of the way there — but in today’s competitive market, you’ll need a little something more to truly stand out.
So how do savvy brands meet and exceed customer expectations? They do it through an in-depth understanding of customer journey touchpoints — and the ways to optimize those touchpoints to send customer satisfaction through the roof.
Ready to learn more? We’ve got the scoop. Read on to explore how you can successfully identify and optimize the touchpoints along your brand’s customer journey.
Understanding the Customer Journey
Before you optimize customer journey touchpoints, you’ll need to understand the journey itself and how it works. A basic customer journey looks like this:
Awareness: Customers realize they have a need or problem to solve, and as they search for a solution, they discover brands with possible answers. This represents the initial point of contact with your brand.
Consideration: Having found brands with possible solutions, customers spend this phase comparing those solutions. They may try out product demos, read website content, speak to a sales rep, check out the product in-store — anything to learn more about the new products or services they’re considering.
Decision: Customers have narrowed down their options and decided to purchase one of them.
Retention: The customer retention stage is where customers decide whether they’re satisfied enough to renew or repurchase in the future. In this stage, brands often work to reduce churn through follow-ups, customer feedback requests, or other measures designed to make for a better post-purchase experience.
Loyalty: When people reach the customer loyalty stage, it means they’re happy enough with their purchase that they’re not only willing to come back for more but also recommend it to friends, family, and colleagues. In this stage, brands often send out feedback surveys to generate a net promoter score, which is a measure of the number of customers who are happy enough to make word-of-mouth referrals.
That’s what a basic customer journey looks like, but keep in mind that not all customer journeys are exactly the same. For example, consider chain stores that offer oil changes or tech retailers that will set up new hardware or software purchases for the customer. These brands will have an extra “Service” step in between the decision-making and retention phases where customers will interact directly with staff or customer support who perform the actual service.
Think about your brand’s customer journey, and identify the phases that are relevant for you.
How to Identify and Map Customer Journey Touchpoints
Once you have a sense of the major steps on your brand’s customer journey, you can start identifying individual touchpoints and placing them on your customer journey map. So how do you pick out the specific touchpoints that your customers will encounter?
One of the best things you can do is to examine your target audience segments to discover how each segment interacts with your brand at different stages of the customer journey. Differences in demographics, lifestyle preferences, motivations, and other factors can lead customers from different segments to encounter different touchpoints.
For example, if you’re marketing a product that has a broad target audience (like a sports drink), then audience segments that trend young may enter the awareness stage of your journey when they spot an influencer drinking your beverage on Instagram or TikTok. On the flip side, segments that trend older may enter the awareness stage when they’re grocery shopping and spot an in-store display featuring your brand’s drinks.
As you go about identifying touchpoints and adding them to your customer journey map, remember that touchpoints can come in many different formats. Various types of digital content like social media posts, whitepapers, blog posts, or other assets may be the first touchpoints that jump to mind, but things like billboards, in-store displays, email marketing, customer support calls, and more can all be touchpoints that customers will encounter over the course of their relationship with your brand.
4 Ways to Optimize Customer Journey Touchpoints
Ready to turn potential customers into paying customers and lift engagement rates? Those are some of the benefits that come with optimizing customer journey touchpoints. Read below to discover how you can get started.
1. Analyze Data to Identify Areas of Improvement
Ideally, touchpoints should always provide customers with an easy, rewarding experience. However, in reality, some touchpoints could actually take away from the overall customer experience — and you can use data to discover many of these problematic areas.
In particular, be sure to examine traffic metrics across each of your channels. For example, if click-through rates aren’t as high as they could be on social media platforms or elsewhere, you may need to do more A/B testing on online advertisements or posts to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Conversions between your website and mobile app are another example. Let’s say your mobile app has relatively high traffic compared to your website, but actual purchases are higher among website visitors. This could indicate that a key touchpoint — in this case, the in-app checkout process — is clunky or otherwise difficult for users to navigate.
2. Consider the Emotional Aspect
The emotional aspect of the customer journey is complicated. It helps to put yourself in your customers’ shoes to examine the emotions that:
Motivate them to search out and purchase products
Customers come away with after having interacted with a touchpoint
Where motivations are concerned, it’s critical to understand the emotions behind them because that allows you to craft messaging that resonates with those emotions. From there, you can use that messaging to speak to those emotions.
The emotions customers have once they’ve interacted with one of your touchpoints are just as important. Ideally, customers should come away with some sort of positive emotion, no matter what motivated them to seek out your products in the first place. For example, a customer who is annoyed with a problem in their own life should feel hopeful that, in your brand, they may have found a solution to that problem.
3. Identify and Eliminate Pain Points
In a perfect world, every customer touchpoint would be a positive experience. However, the reality is that many brands have at least a couple of touchpoints that are actually pain points.
Here’s a common example. Do you ever dread making a call to customer service? Lots of people do, to the point that one survey found 38% of people would rather get a cavity filled than contact a customer success or service department. Why? Because between long hold times, frustrating automated voice systems, and poorly trained customer service teams, the whole experience can feel like an infuriating waste of time.
Experiences like this can drive existing customers right into the arms of your competitors — and that’s why it’s crucial to spot the pain points in your customer journey, then put them at the top of your priority list for optimization.
Here’s an example that comes from NuLeaf Naturals, one of the top hemp companies in the United States. They partnered with Jebbit to create a product finder quiz because they had a major customer pain point that they wanted to solve.
The problem was new customers often felt overwhelmed or uncomfortable trying to choose a product to try — and that led to high numbers of customers contacting the support team for a recommendation. To that end, the brand worked with Jebbit to create a product finder quiz that helped customers identify the right products quickly and easily, no need to wait for a support associate to respond.
The quiz worked wonders to solve this particular pain point among customers. Ninety-nine percent of users who saw the quiz engaged with it, and 75% of those users went on to complete it. This led to a 20% to 25% reduction in support calls for product recommendations.
4. Personalize Your Touchpoints
One of the best ways to optimize touchpoints is through personalization — and there are many touchpoints along the customer journey that can be personalized.
For example, with personalized email marketing, you can upsell or cross-sell products related to those that customers have already purchased or expressed interest in. Dynamic website content that offers recommendations based on customer interactions with your brand is another way to encourage both first-time purchase decisions and repeat purchases.
However you employ it, personalization is all about using data about customer needs and preferences to not only increase conversions but also to improve the overall user experience.
Personalization can also come in the form of interactive experiences like the one IKEA designed through Jebbit. It’s a self-service experience in which users speak to a chatbot to answer a few fun questions about lifestyle preferences. Once answers have been gathered, it then creates a sharable Pinterest board filled with personalized inspiration and ideas based on the answers provided by each individual user.
This chatbot-turned-board-generator offered a lot of benefits, both for customers and for IKEA. Through customized Pinterest boards, the experience went big on personalization — and that led to high rates of customer engagement. Fifty-eight percent of users who engaged with it created Pinterest boards, which represented more than 5,000 boards created and 93,400 pins created.
On top of that, IKEA collected valuable data about user preferences that they could use to refine other touchpoints or improve future personalization efforts.
Build Better Customer Journey Touchpoints With Jebbit
Each of the stages of the customer journey comes with its own set of touchpoints. Brands that want to stand out work hard to optimize those touchpoints in order to provide a more engaging and satisfying experience.
Fortunately, there is a lot that you can do to optimize your customer journey touchpoints. Start by analyzing the data to discover areas for improvement, and be sure to prioritize optimization for touchpoints that prove frustrating or overwhelming. Consider the emotional side of things too. You can also make experiences more engaging by leveraging data to drive personalization.
When it comes to building a better customer journey, Jebbit is here to help. Our interactive experiences make for highly engaging touchpoints that will help you boost customer satisfaction and increase conversions. They’re also a great way to gather the data you’ll need to further improve your customer journey. To learn more, schedule a strategy call with a Jebbit Experience Expert.
