Why You Should Build Your Customer Journey With Touchpoints

Someone enters keywords on a search engine. Your business and products appear. They visit your website and browse through your information. They check out your social media accounts and follow a few. They see a sale you post while they are out shopping and decide to visit. Your staff welcomes them and helps them find what they need. They make a purchase, take the product home and tell all their friends about it. What they say and how they feel about their interactions with your company makes up their Customer Experience. Every part of those interactions could make it positive, negative or have no impact at all. If you are going to understand the context of their Customer Experience, you need to build a Customer Journey. 

What’s A Customer Journey?

Think of your customer journey like the story we told above. It’s not always complicated, though it can be. It details how a potential customer finds you, purchases products/services, and how they come back to purchase again or refer a friend. 

Why Is Knowing This Important?

A Customer Journey is vital in the world of Customer Experience because, without it, it’s hard to find context in the feedback you might receive. Building your Customer Journey helps you identify the touchpoints along your customer’s path that would be most valuable for you to gain their feedback as it happens. 

What Do You Mean By “Touchpoint”?

A touchpoint is a defined experience or interaction common to most of your customers. They can be general that most businesses will have in their Customer Journey’s like a visit to your website, or be very industry-specific, like using a self-checkout at a retail location. 

How Do Those Help With Context?

If you only asked the question “Did you like shopping with us?” at the end of a customer’s purchase experience, the feedback they provide might be about the product they purchase or how hard it was to find a parking space. It’s a very open question that without the context of the specific touchpoint you want to know about, it’s challenging to know what they mean. 

How Do I Build A Customer Journey?

A great place to start with your customer journey is by mapping out the points in your operation that are important to you to gain feedback from your customer. The real advantage we like to offer with our solution is that we have Collectors that can be added in many different ways along the customer journey you define. 

Can You Give Me Some Examples?

Yes, definitely. We’ve chosen to detail some example, Customer Journey paths by industry, complete with the types of touchpoint and collectors that can be used. 

• Retail
• Property Management
• Public Sector
• Gaming & Entertainment
• Transportation
• Colleges & Universities
• Fitness Club
• Healthcare
• Restaurant
• Hospitality
• Banking
• Shopping Center

Once your journey is mapped, the next step is deciding which questions to ask at each stop — our guide to the five questions to ask when building a customer journey walks through exactly that.

Ready to build a customer journey and collect feedback at every touchpoint? Book a demo to see how our Collectors map to your journey. You can also follow our LinkedIn page for more customer experience tips.