6 Effective Customer Journey Touch Points You May Have Overlooked
When it comes to getting meaningful, actionable insights from customers as they make their journey on your site, analytics can only tell you so much. Find out the 6 touch points you may have missed in this article.
According to Medallia Digital, customer feedback can help you understand the wants and needs of your audience, letting you optimise your interactions with them, improve satisfaction, reduce abandonment and increase revenues.
Customer feedback can also alert you to issues and unmet needs, allow you to resolve questions and concerns in real time, and improve overall business results.
But how do you get this feedback? Customers experience your brand through a myriad of touchpoints, both online and offline, each one presenting a valuable opportunity to interact with them and hear what they think about their experience with you. As long as they’re approached in an appropriate way, customers are usually happy to share their feedback.
Medallia recommends setting up “listening posts”, or points at which you can engage with customers and ask them for feedback about their experience so far to learn how you can improve.
In a new white paper, Medallia counts 28 different touchpoints along the customer journey where marketers should consider asking for feedback. This blog post covers six of these digital touchpoints that you might have overlooked.
On their way out
What is the last thing your site visitors see before leaving your site? While analytics can let you know which pages have high abandonment rates, customer feedback can help you determine why.
By establishing listening posts at points just before users usually abandon your site, you can invite customers to tell you in their own words why they chose not to stay with you.
Along “shuffler” journeys
You might have found that some customers “shuffle” through the customer journey, repeatedly advancing and retreating through your conversion funnels. This often indicates that your customer is struggling to navigate the site, or to accomplish tasks.
Gather feedback from these “shufflers” to uncover user experience issues such as navigation difficulty, or device or browser incompatibility.
When they’re trying to register or sign up
As we’ve found so far, just as you can gather valuable insights about your service when things go right, you can learn important details about the customer experience when things go wrong.
When a site user has tried, but failed, to register on your site, error text and pop-up tags may offer some help, but they might not find the problem. Feedback can offer something more. After a number of failed registration attempts, engage the customer and offer registration assistance, FAQs, a chat box, as well as the chance to give feedback. And after that…
… Close the loop after you’ve solved their problem
Here’s a great opportunity to make a good impression on the customer. After their registration has been accepted, or after you’ve solved any other problem the customer was having, close the loop by reporting back to them, double-checking that they registered successfully and thanking them for their help. This opens the door for more information and insight about your site and its functionality.
It also lets you explain to the customer how you’ve addressed the issues they raised, and gather more feedback about why they may not be satisfied with the service delivered.
On newsletters and updates
Email marketing continues to prove an effective channel for marketers, particularly those in B2B. Sending newsletters and updates is a great way of engaging customers – it also provides a great medium for expressing your brand’s personality.
They can also serve as a place where you can ask for customer feedback to learn if the newsletter content interests readers and gather suggestions for future articles to increase customer engagement.
At completion or abandonment of a self-service task
Tasks on your site that take too long, or are difficult to complete, may lead to more abandonments. Consider gathering feedback about the effort required to accomplish these tasks and asking your customers’ thoughts about the process.
This way you can determine how to make these processes seamless and easy to complete, even for those who aren’t technically savvy. With this feedback, it’s also possible to create personas based on demographic data, so that you can design processes that are suitable for your full range of clients.
These touchpoints are just the beginning. As Medallia explains, by considering these touchpoints, along with the other 22 it identifies in its white paper, you can start to think about the unique touchpoints in your customers’ digital journey.
“Map the customer journey to identify the moments of truth – that are make-or-break in terms of driving customer acquisition, continued loyalty and average order size,” it says. “With a customer journey map in hand, you can set up strategic listening posts that align with each moment of truth.”
Download Medallia’s white paper, The Digital Customer Journey: 28 Highly Effective Touchpoints for Feedback, to discover 22 more touchpoints and create a fuller picture of your customers.