Identifying your touchpoints is the first step toward creating a customer journey map, and making sure your customers are satisfied every step of the way.

Once identified, your customer touchpoints will serve as a guide for improved customer satisfaction across the entire customer journey. 

The benefits of knowing your customers’ touchpoints include:

Use your market research to examine the types of consumers who are likely to purchase from you. Decide what initial touchpoints would be appropriate for your customers. For example, if your target market is expectant mothers, you might add promo codes and coupons to your social media marketing and discount emails for new customers.

Because there are so many ways for customers to experience your brand, figuring out all of your touchpoints may seem daunting at first. But you can make this task more manageable by stepping out of your role–and into the customer’s shoes.

You’re the customer now. Make sure you have a pen and paper handy because you should take notes while you’re in the customer mindset.

Ask yourself the following questions:

Where do you go (and how do you get there) when you:

When you walk yourself through the customer’s journey step-by-step, all the pieces should become pretty clear.

You could also accomplish this task by asking customers to walk you through their experience with your brand, or putting the questions above into a survey.

What touchpoints are currently in place? What ones do customers use regularly? If you have an online store and you use online advertising, social media, and email marketing, you may find that social media yields the most sales on your website. This may then guide you to enhancing your social media presence as a touchpoint. Find out where customers prefer to engage with your brand with a content strategy survey.

Customer journey maps help examine the buying process for a particular customer segment purchasing a specific product or service. You can map how a typical customer from the segment identifies a problem, researches an answer, learns about your business, engages with your business, makes a purchase, and finally interacts after the purchase. 

Customer experience maps are useful in discovering why customers aren’t having a great experience. Use them to visualize the customer journey and identify areas that need improvement.

Use both types of maps to determine touchpoints at each stage of the customer journey and what you can do to ensure a successful experience throughout.

Take the touchpoints you’ve identified on your customer journey map and categorise them as before, during, and after purchase. This will help you identify what areas are working well and what needs improvement.

You could also categorise touchpoints as products, interactions, messages (manuals, advertising, etc.), and settings (where products are sold). 

Or you can determine your own categories. Use what makes sense to you for your specific brand and products to categorize touchpoints. 

You’ll find that a Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey is invaluable in ensuring that your customers are satisfied at each touchpoint. Add surveys throughout your touchpoints and take action on the feedback.

Your customer touchpoint map is a living document and will need ongoing updates as you introduce new marketing initiatives and purchasing paths. Continue to refine your touchpoints for the best CX.

Knowing your touchpoints is only half the battle. To improve customer satisfaction, you need to make sure each touchpoint leads to a good customer experience, and that the journey as a whole delivers on customers’ expectations.

To see what’s working, you can run customer feedback surveys at each major touchpoint or set up customer experience management software. But make sure not to lose sight of the big picture, and always look at your entire customer journey.

Use surveys to evaluate customer experiences at different touchpoints through their journey. The quantifiable data will provide you with areas you have not yet touched on in your marketing efforts. Some of the smaller touchpoints that you haven’t addressed could become integral in providing superior customer service.

Not every touchpoint you address in your marketing campaigns will have equal value. Analyze your data for each touchpoint to identify the best-performing areas for marketing.

Analyze the feedback from your customers’ experiences with your brand from beginning to end. Set priorities, address gaps in your customer journey, and fix problems at the root of issues you’ve discovered. This will serve to improve customer satisfaction, experience, and build your brand’s reputation as a customer-first company.

The best way to find out how your customers are faring at each touchpoint is to ask them. Survey panels of customers from each touchpoint to find out where the customer experience is lacking and where you excel. Identify areas for improvement and take action on them. Ultimately, using customer feedback can be used to increase customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

Improving the customer experience at each touchpoint will dramatically improve customer satisfaction. This, in turn, will increase customer loyalty. And your loyal customers will use word-of-mouth to advocate for your brand.