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How To Improve Customer Service At Every Customer Touchpoint

Contributed Article by Anjali Audichya

Today, good customer service is every brand’s aspiration. Customer service is essential in a business's success or decline, and each customer interaction will be a positive or negative experience. A positive customer service experience will likely increase repeat business and strengthen customer loyalty.

95% of customers are more interested in sharing a bad customer service experience with any brand or business compared to 87% who are interested in sharing a good customer service experience. Customer experience depends on how good your customer service is and that can be improved by focusing on customer service touchpoints.

To improve customer service businesses make numerous efforts in that direction. This is possible only when you have the consumer’s best interests in mind at every touchpoint. 

This article will help you to understand what touchpoint is and how you can optimize them to improve your customer service.

What is a touchpoint in customer service?

Customer touchpoints are the places or points where your brand or company interacts with customers from start to end. A customer touch point is any time a customer has direct or indirect contact with a brand. These touchpoints can occur within and outside of a brand’s control. This can be through an employee, a website, an advertisement, or an app. And the experiences customers have with those touchpoints can shape how they view your company.

Your Overall Customer experience is affected by all the customer touchpoints that you set up directly. Whether it’s for a marketing purpose – to raise awareness and build consideration -, or for a customer support purpose – to increase retention – customer touchpoints are crucial to understanding your customers and how they perceive your business.

We can understand this from the example somebody saw an Ad for a new dress online, visited the brand’s website for details, checked reviews on some customer reviews website, contacted your support or customer service rep for the address to a local store, and bought it.

The Journey started online with an ad and went through various mediums, but the purchase was made at your physical store. This is how customers interact with customer touchpoints.

Different Types of Touchpoint

We can look at an overall view of different touchpoints occurring within customer service. This makes it a lot easier to spot areas of your business that can be improved to increase customer service. Here are a few examples of different types of touchpoints:-  

1. Live chat
2. Website
3. Social media
4. In-store
5. Calls center 

Live chat

Compared to other touchpoints, live chat support generates higher customer satisfaction levels, and 79% of consumers prefer live chat support because of the immediacy it provides.

Brands using live chat for customer service can understand their needs and line up their services to meet their expectations. Live interaction with the customers not only cultivates brand loyalty but also increases customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Website

At some point, customers will come to your website and this will be the touchpoint that can give a complete overview of your business or brand. 

Considering that 81% of consumers do their research online, before buying a product, they will come to your website to search for the information they want. A website of any business or brand builds trust in their customers and provides all the information they want to know about business.

Call Center

Meaningful touchpoints occur every minute in a call center, and because so many humans are involved, these are probably the most difficult touchpoints to control. The call center touchpoint is the channel of choice for customers when the interaction is complex, Customers want their inquiries or problem to be resolved on the first contact using only one touchpoint. 

72% of customers using the website touchpoint and 93% of customers using the call center touchpoint expect to be able to resolve their inquiry or problem in one contact according to SQM Group’s research.

In-store

Customers will interact with the physical store and this is the most important touchpoint, so delivering a consistent experience is always the key to success at the store. 

Plus, consumers want in-person customer service, which is essential to differentiate your store from the online store experience. 80% of consumers say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized customer experiences.

Social Media

Social Media is a useful tool for Brands as it gets them in direct touch with their targeted audience and, more importantly, their customers. This customer touchpoint that social media provides is already an integral part of customer experiences and businesses that leverage this aspect of social media will be able to cater better to their consumers.

 

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Significance of customer touchpoints

Once you identify what your customer touchpoints are, it will lead you to improve your customer service across the entire customer journey. Customer touch points are essential to understand how your business or customer services can influence the buying decision and how the brand can attract customers towards its offering.

Besides this, having a knowledge of customer touchpoints is also essential to -   

• Develop Business Strategies - A good understanding of every customer interaction with business helps to develop better business strategies that can add meaning to every interaction.
• Customer Satisfaction and loyalty- Brands that understand and optimize the quality of their customer touchpoints can provide more customer satisfaction and gain loyal customers as a result.
• Improve customer services- understanding touchpoints will improve customer service. Customer interactions with the brand at every stage of its purchase can give an idea of how a brand can improve customer service.
• Develop a brand image- Mapping and tapping customer touchpoints effectively result in a positive brand image. Which can attract more customers. 

How to optimize different touchpoints for better customer service

We can’t have a complete conversation about customer touchpoints without discussing how they improve customer service. Every touchpoint will have an impact on the overall customer Service. 

Thus, you must have a clear idea about the touchpoints your potential customers will have. Based on that, you can better understand the customer journey mapping and then optimize customer touch points. 

Here are a few tips to optimize your touchpoints:-

1. Optimizing Live chat 

Interactive resolution

Your brands can align live chat with co-browsing and video chat to enable the solution of the problems in an interactive manner. To solve customer queries in a more interactive way there is a tool like decision tree software which helps in improving customer interaction and as a result, provides better customer satisfaction.

Proactive support

When the customers are stuck on specific pages, with live chat, you can proactively start a conversation. It helps them to reduce the bounce rate and in quick decision-making. 

Fast response

With the help of pre-drafted answers and connecting to the right team live chat can deliver faster responses to sales & support queries. It decreases the number of support requests raised by customers.

2. Optimizing Website

Design

Consider making your site visually appealing to give an overview of your products & services. Focus on hassle-free navigation between the menus. Good website design increases conversions and reduces the bounce rate.  

Social indication

Social indication in the form of reviews, testimonials, star ratings, and real-time statistics can be used on different pages such as the homepage, product/service page, contact us, etc. It helps in validating their decision. 

Clear CTAs

CTAs are a call to action. Consider placing a relevant CTA text. Make it short and to the point which requires minimum effort to read. For example, book a demo, Buy now or Contact us. 

3. Optimizing Call Center

First Call Resolution Rate

Customers who have the best customer experience during their first interaction with your business are more likely to become loyal customers and have a positive customer experience. Your first call resolution rate (FCR) shows how often a consumer’s queries are satisfied during the first call.

Average Speed to Answer

Average speed is the amount of time it takes for your call center agents to answer a call. The lower the number, the better. To improve customer service you should focus on minimizing this time. There are tools like agent scripting software that help in reducing the time.

Customer Satisfaction Rating (CSR)

CSR is a five-point scale that shows one as “not satisfied” and five as “very satisfied”. These metrics are shows how satisfied customers are with their call center agents. CSR helps call center agents improve customer satisfaction.

4. In-Store Optimization

Personalized service

Customers want personalized service from a sales associate and they are ready to share their personal details if it helps you provide a better experience. You should focus on how you can provide a better-personalized service with their details to improve customer service. 

Rewards and programs

You can provide consumers loyalty rewards and programs that allow them to identify shoppers via their smartphones when they are in-store.

Credible brand impressions

All the touch points of the store need to be consistent so that they can help in building sustainable brand impressions.

5. Optimizing Social media

Embolden Engagement

You can create engaging video content for your brand’s social media to get a better idea of your followers’ preferences. You can encourage your customers to leverage new ways like posting Instagram Stories or hosting a quick Q&A session via Facebook Live video streaming.

Communication Channel

Using social media channels as a mode of communication helps to track comments, questions, and complaints. By responding quickly to their concerns you can make them feel heard.

Socialize your brand

Social media is ideally the best platform to socialize the brand with a bit of informality and causal discussion it helps boost the engagement level.

Conclusion

Touchpoints are the most effective part of customer service. Focus on what touchpoints are you going to use and how you are going to optimize them to illustrate which touchpoints are effective or ineffective in improving your customer service.

Make your customer service more interactive with the touchpoints which can offer more interactions with your customers. Let them know they are being heard and their queries going to solve quickly.

Author bio

Anjali Audichya is a member of the digital marketing team at Knowmax, an AI-powered Knowledge Management software that helps enterprises to solve customer queries in the most effective way and improve their customer experience as well as agent experience.