What is a Customer Touch Point?
When speaking about customer experience, a touchpoint is any moment when potential customers receive an impression of a business. The customer touchpoint could be a TV commercial, a post in social media channels, an interaction with a store employee, or a call with customer service, to name a few. Every touchpoint is part of a customer journey that shapes potential customers' opinion of a company and will influence the likelihood they will do business with an organization.
Why are customer touchpoints important to businesses?
Each touchpoint is important and needs to be well-considered and designed. This includes even the smallest details, such as product packaging and the voice that greets customers in an IVR or Voice Portal when they call customer service. Customer touchpoints need to be consistently on-brand and of high quality as the customer contact point affects whether the new customers will purchase or existing customers will stay with you forever. The more loyal customers your company has, the more clients you can earn.
Ever been wowed by your experience in a store but went online and found that the business has a clunky website or social media? You were probably disappointed and a little confused. This is why consistency of customer touchpoints is so important. Consumers are looking and judging and they will go somewhere else with their wallets if they think a business is lacking in any part of their experience.
Contact points help you to understand customer experience and increase customer satisfaction. Using customer touchpoint analysis or mapping, customers can easily identify customer experiences that will make them feel more comfortable and stay with you.
Customer touchpoints in the contact center
Meaningful customer touchpoints occur every minute in a contact center, and because so many humans are involved, these are probably the most difficult customer touchpoints to control. Organizations can control the quality and consistency of the entry points, such as the design of the interactive voice response (IVR) menu and the performance of the online chat user interface.
However, once the touchpoint is handed off to an agent, the organization has to rely on the agent's ability. This confidence is supported by having the right elements in place that shape the customer experience like high-quality hiring practices, agent training, supervision, monitoring, and easy-to-use, intuitive agent interfaces. Limiting the number of interfaces an agent needs to use during a customer interaction will usually help improve the customer experience because it streamlines the process and enables the agent to concentrate on the customer, not the tool.
How NICE can help build a loyal customer base
NICE CXone is the market-leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer touchpoints and achieve brand loyalty. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact center operations. CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing
Omnichannel routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels, which are important customer touch points. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization
Workforce Optimization unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to improve the customer journey and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Analytics
Analytics turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, the customer's journey, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic contact center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.
