Customer experience is something that, when planned, moves mountains.
It’s a lot like the relationship between guide and hiker. Point to point to point, up the mountain, looking for the next safe landing spot— until you reach the summit together. You turn and look at the path you charted, and your client experiences that pivotal ‘aha’ moment. The one where they stare at the beautiful scenery, and appreciate what it took to get here.
As the guide, you need to assess and visualize that view before you even start:
- Where do you begin?
- What trails do you lead them along?
- At which points do you stop and engage them along the way?
- What do you supply your client with so they can successfully plant their flag at the top?
There are a couple of concepts that can help you with this. Developing an accurate customer profile can tell you a lot about where they might want to stop to see a particular feature. And anticipating your customers’ needs and desires allows you to leverage your experience to establish trust with your client as they make their way up.
But what are the transformative moments of conversation between you and your client that make the journey truly worth taking—that gets them to follow you?
Those moments are called touchpoints. A touchpoint is any form of communication a consumer uses to interact with a business. And creating a strategy around your touchpoints can make or break your customer experience.
Evaluate Your Customer Strategy
While many businesses have disorganized ways of acquiring customers, strategizing based on touchpoints and deploying them via CRM can lead to the most successful and coherent customer strategy. Having an outlined strategy is also better for the individual customer, because you are giving them a natural starting point at the bottom of the mountain.
Creating a customer strategy requires you to ask some questions while you envision the summit:
- What is indispensable to your customer’s experience?
- What types of touchpoints can address that experience?
- How will you implement those touchpoints?
- What types of customers do the touchpoints you create – or that are organic – drive to your business?
- Do you have multiple touchpoint plans plotted out for different types of customers?
- Which touchpoints do you choose once a contact becomes a lead?
- How do you funnel them toward a sale— what types of touchpoints will inspire their trust and continued loyalty?
“Linking your customer strategy to your company’s value proposition goes beyond lining up the right processes from marketing, sales, and data analytics,” write Thomas Ripsam and Louis Bouquet for Strategy+Business. “It means aligning the emotional elements of your customer strategy, and all customer touch points including pricing, with the strongest capabilities your company has.”
In a nutshell: figure out what you want your customer to experience, nail down how you want them to experience it, and decide what will best promote what makes you attractive.
Use CRM to Layer Your Touchpoint Approach
When you’ve gone through and answered the questions above, you should deploy the touchpoints that work best for your company. This is the step after visualization, where you actually create the path you want the client to follow. Knowing how to utilize language that supports each level of touchpoint is imperative, because it helps to successfully create that path.
Business owners can structure their touchpoints at the company level and at the sales level.
Company-level touchpoints set the public identity for your business. There are a number of touchpoints that can be considered company-level:
- Website
- App
- Social media channels
- Online testimonials
- Whitepapers
These are not housed inside of your CRM software. However, they can be utilized through the touchpoints available to you at the sales level. Sales-level touchpoints set the tone for the consumer on a one-to-one basis. Some examples of sales-level touchpoints:
- Sales agent-to-client emails
- Phone calls
- Newsletters
- Demos
- On-site consultations
You might have user documentation on your website that prospects would like to see before they make a commitment with you. You can use your CRM system to send out targeted links containing relevant information, and record which agent-to-client emails your prospect opens. Newsletters can serve as a funnel for social channels or a link to a whitepaper.
There are an infinite number of combinations and ways for your clients to experience your company through the touchpoint strategy that you create.
Conclusion
Designing the customer experience doesn’t require you to use all of the touchpoints at your disposal. Knowing which touchpoints to choose and how to structure the relative content is a strategy unique to every business. It’s what makes a great guide, and what consistently gets your clients to the top of their mountain.
Utilize collaboration with your team to figure out where potential contacts and potential clients are likely to encounter your company, plot out your touchpoint strategy, and continue to evaluate which ones are likely to execute your customer strategy effectively.
This article is part of a series on CRM software. Stay in touch to find out more about CRM, its uses and functions, and how it can help your business grow in 2020.