Measuring the correct Touchpoints

If you're reading this post, you probably care about gathering feedback from your customers, or you're already doing so via a service like LoyaltyLoop. When deploying a feedback service, it's important to recognize that every business is different. Even if your business is a franchise in a brand network, no two businesses are the same. Take the time to identify your touchpoints when running a feedback service.

A touchpoint is defined as "a point of contact or interaction, especially between a business and its customers or consumers." Essentially, every interaction with your business or brand is a touchpoint, spanning pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase activities.

Touchpoints occur when a person visits your website, views your billboard on the side of the highway, reads your Facebook posts, shops your store, calls your phone, emails you, requests a quote, meets your service technician, speaks with your call center, views your online ad, requests a quote, receives a sample, makes a purchase, contacts your support team, pays an invoice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The way to discover your touchpoints is to build a journey map of your business. On that map, you would identify the critical touchpoints that should be measured to ensure you are delivering great customer experiences to help you drive customer loyalty. But when it comes to measuring customer experiences, not all touchpoints are created equal.

For most product-based small businesses, a key touchpoint is soon after the point of purchase. This touchpoint measures the customer purchase experience and their experience with what they purchased. Take the example of a commercial print business. A customer orders promotional mugs, and the printer produces and delivers the items. To measure the purchase touchpoint, the printer engages their customer for feedback soon after the transaction is complete. They gather feedback on the overall purchase process, how the customer was cared for in that process, and how they feel about the promotional mugs they received. That may be the only touchpoint to be measured for a small printer. But what if the printer also has a critical touchpoint for the process of issuing quotes to prospects? Or, they have a critical touchpoint in the process of installing of items purchased such as signs, window graphics, and related? In these cases, they may wish to measure the pre-sales quote touchpoint, and the post-sale installation touchpoint.

Pure service business may need to measure the purchase touchpoint, but may also need to measure the actual point of service delivery. Take the example of a commercial cleaning company. The company would measure the purchase touchpoint, but also measure the service touchpoint, meaning when their service is performed for their customer. In the case of a company that both sells and supports products, they may need to measure the purchase touchpoint, but also measure the post-purchase support touchpoint when customers engage their helpdesk team.

Again, it is important to map your customer journeys to identify the critical touchpoints for your business. Once you do, then you can deploy the correct feedback mechanisms to measure the customer experience at each key touchpoint.

When using a service like LoyaltyLoop, it can be tailored to meet any business needs, and measure all key touchpoints. The trick for any business in measuring key touchpoints is having the correct data in your systems that identify when a customer completes a specific process mapped to your key touchpoints. Assuming your data systems record events like quote issuance, purchase transactions, and support ticket generation, LoyaltyLoop can be configured to engage customers at each touchpoint helping you gather that critical feedback.

Have questions about your touchpoints? Give us a call or drop us an email, and we'll be happy to help you out.