You may think improving your website or your point of sale system or even your after-sales service will help increase your sales. They most likely will. But there usually are more places that customers (and potential customers) interact with your brand (touchpoints). Ignoring these other customer touchpoints may counter-act the good you’re trying to do.
Finding Customer Touchpoints
It may help to list out all the different ways a customer (or potential customer) may interact with your brand. Talk to customers to make sure you have everything on the list. Think about all the different times in a sales process that someone may interact with your brand. Also think about all the times a customer interacts with your brand, product or service after a purchase. Things like trying to look up a question on your website are often overlooked.
Customer Experience Mapping
Once you have all the touchpoints, map out how customers interact with each touchpoints and what they’re trying to do. Think of different tasks a customer may be trying to accomplish. How do they accomplish them? The map will probably look like an inter-connected network.
Improving Customer Touchpoints
Now that you have your customer experience map, highlight places where you’re doing well and places where you can improve. What can you do to make the experience easier for the customer in the places where you need to improve? What parts of the process are giving customers difficulties and how can you fix them? With touchpoints that are going well, what’s working and what can you learn about it?
Increasing Sales
Customers are more likely to buy from you again if they have a positive experience with your brand (all the way through their experience). Customers are also more likely to recommend you to others if they have a positive experience. By improving customer touchpoints, you improve the experience of current customers who will be more likely to purchase or recommend you in the future.
How do you improve your customer touchpoints?
(image by Patrick Hoesly)