In order to achieve business outcomes, successful brands understand that they have to develop a customer-centric outlook on the customer experience. Throughout the journey, touchpoints must be matched with breakpoints, which are the interactions that decide whether or not the customer becomes loyal or maintains loyalty. These four tips can be applied to customer journey mapping, with importance paid to touchpoints.
1. Universal Touchpoints: At first, map out universal touchpoints, which are ones that can be applied to all of your brand’s customers. Eventually, you’ll create more specific experience maps with more distinct touchpoints.
2. Detail Each Touchpoint: Make a list of touchpoints and pay extra attention to the ones that serve as breakpoints. For each one, include a description, interaction method, and customer expectation. At this step, you may need to get other people from the organization involved. Many organizations find it helpful to collaborate with their customer advisory board when mapping the customer journey. Working sessions and interviews will help capture data about customer expectations.
3. Visualize the Touchpoints: Visually illustrate the customer journey map, including flow from one touchpoint to the next. Having a visual will help you to see areas that work well and also areas that need to be improved. Spend extra time with the touchpoints that act as breakpoints.
4. Further Customize Each Touchpoint: Based on the data that was gathered throughout the mapping process, brands should revisit each touchpoint and further develop content that’s more relevant to the customer.
Competition, price transparency, and short product lifecycles mean that customer expectations are regularly changing. Improving the customer experience and fine-tuning the customer journey is an ongoing process.
Register for ‘Shaping the Journey of the Connected Customer’ Virtual Conference March 16 – 19 to learn more about Customer Touchpoints. Attendance is free.
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