A lot of people talk about the “customer journey” as though it’s a tangible object. But the truth is, there’s no one-size-fits-all to a customer journey. It can involve a lot of moving parts depending on what your business offers, the unique relationship that your customers have with your brand, and finally, the specific actions you’re asking your customers to take on a daily basis. This is because the customer journey is made up of these things called customer journey touchpoints—or rather, transactional moments, at key stages throughout the customer experience, that ultimately define what kind of journey a customer takes.
Because we tend to think about customer journeys in a “big picture” kind of way, it’s easy to lose sight of all of the customer journey touchpoints that feed into that experience. This is especially the case for customer service interactions where one “wrong turn,” so to speak, can easily send a once-loyal customer packing in your nearest competitor’s direction.
So, in this article, we’ll take a closer look at why focusing on these customer journey touchpoints—and continually optimising them over time—is truly the key to creating better customer service experiences, those that drive greater customer satisfaction, boost long-term customer loyalty, and also have the added benefit of reducing customer service inquiries.
What is the customer journey and why does it matter?
There are a lot of definitions for customer journey swirling around today, but here’s one that gets right to the heart of it: “A customer journey is an entire experience a customer has while communicating with a brand. It considers the complete interaction roadmap—from brand discovery to purchasing and beyond. The focus isn’t on transactions, but rather on how the customer feels after interactions with the brand.”
Oftentimes, we think of customer journeys as simple interactions that have clearly defined start- and end-points. And while the latter may be true, a customer journey is far from a simple interaction. In fact, it’s been found that customer journeys are made up of a series of steps—sometimes lasting days, weeks, or even months and spanning across various channels, devices, platforms, and apps—that shape the relationship that customers have with brands.
However, because there are now so many ways for customers to interact with brands at virtually all hours of the day, whether they’re making a purchase or reaching out to customer service for help, it creates a lot of space for the customer journey—and more broadly speaking, the customer experience as a whole—to become fragmented and flawed. According to McKinsey, this “makes consistency of service and experience across channels [nearly] impossible—unless you are managing the entire journey, and not simply individual touchpoints.”
Unfortunately, many companies still operate in a siloed way, which means different teams are focusing on the individual transactional moments relevant to them instead of working together to create a unified customer experience across all of those touchpoints. This can create a negative “domino effect” that can have long-term repercussions undermining the customer journey and weakening the end-to-end customer experience. In other words, one kink in the chain can be enough to derail customers entirely.
“Thinking about customer journeys—instead of traditional touchpoints—can require an operational and cultural shift that engages the organization across functions and from top to bottom."
— McKinsey, From Touchpoints to Journeys: Seeing the World as Customers Do. (2016)
By now, it should be pretty clear that customer journey touchpoints are the transactional moments or steps that dot any given customer journey. But here’s another definition of customer journey touchpoints that puts the concept into a broader business context:
“Customer touchpoints are defined as the point of interaction with the brand across three main phases of the customer lifecycle: awareness, evaluation, and post-purchase. It has a great impact on the way customers perceive your products and services. The touchpoints include various digital or customer relationship management (CRM) touchpoints.”
Simply put, customer journey touchpoints are essentially any moment when a customer is engaging with your brand. It might be reading product information on a product page. It might be requesting a demo. It might be contacting customer service for help (via your website, a chatbot, social media channels, etc.). It might be viewing the shopping and completing a transaction. You get the point. A customer journey touchpoint is merely any step along the customer journey that gets a customer closer to taking some sort of action.
Admittedly, this concept of customer journey touchpoints might seem a bit vague at first because, in reality, a touchpoint is basically any interaction a customer has with a brand—whether it’s online or in the real world.
Indeed has offered up a few examples of customer journey touchpoints, broken out by where customers are in their path to purchase, to help put this more into context:
Pre-Purchase
During Purchase
Post-Purchase
Simply understanding which customer journey touchpoints you need to deploy and optimise at different stages of your customer's relationship with your brand is an important part of cracking the code of customer experience. But one thing is absolutely critical here: The experience you create must be consistent across all touchpoints. That is the only way to build, nurture, and grow customer journeys that boost satisfaction, loyalty, and, most importantly, business growth.
According to Spectrio, customer journey touchpoint mapping outlines “each interaction a customer might have with your brand. This process looks at each step of the buyer’s journey and identifies the places where customers come in contact with or experience your brand.”
However, it’s important to note that these points of contact are not simply transactions or transactional moments when customers move onto the next step of the path to purchase—or whatever the “final destination” may be. Customer journey touchpoint mapping must also examine the points of friction that customers experience along their journey with a brand.
When all of these different experiential moments are combined, you can get a clearer sense of what the end-to-end customer experience looks like as well as the roadblocks that stand in your customers’ way that may make the journey less effective or efficient.
Keep in mind that the consumer journey may not necessarily be linear in nature, even though each journey will have a defined start- and end-point. For one reason or another, they may backtrack after hitting a wall at a specific touchpoint or even skip over a step (or two) altogether to get to their final transactional moment faster. And in this era when digital customer journeys may skip from one digital touchpoint to another—for example, from social media to your website—the process of going from point A to point B can become complicated.
Now, how can you get this birds-eye view of the customer journey? Easy. You need to build a customer journey map that takes all of these elements into consideration.
There are a lot of different ways to go about creating customer journey touchpoint maps. The method you use must be relevant to your business and to the kind of journey your customers take when they engage or interact with your brand.
However, before you carried away and start outlining every detail of your consumer journey, there are a few customer journey touchpoint mapping best practices to think about first:
If you’ve been following along up to this point, it should be pretty clear by now that customer journey mapping is an intricate process—one that requires you to hone in on each of the touchpoints that your customers have with your brand as they navigate their path from point A to point B (whatever those start- and end-points maybe). And once you’ve closely examined what your customers do at those touchpoints, including any friction they feel along the way, you will be in a better position to optimise the customer journey for effectiveness and efficiency.
Suffice it to say that optimising the customer journey—via customer journey touchpoint mapping—is one (of many) tactics that brands can leverage for improving the end-to-end customer experience. After all, by ensuring that customers have a consistent and consistently good experience with your brand, regardless of the touchpoints they’re interacting with, you will be in a better position to create an experience that drives customer satisfaction and loyalty while also increasing revenues and reducing the number of inquiries into customer service.
Knowing just how important customer experience is to the success of any business, perhaps it’s about time to map out your customer journey touchpoints to see where you’re exceeding customer expectations as well as where you might be falling flat.
Check out these customer service stats to learn more about the impact that customer journey touchpoint mapping can have on creating a better customer service experience.