Written by Mesh Omonkalo
Managing Customer's Touchpoints
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"It is absolutely vital to understand and know customer touchpoints as they buy and use products or services, and engineer the right solutions to meet their needs and create the total customer experience".
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Customer touchpoints are the problematic areas or the frustrations customer faced in buying or ordering and using products and services. Therefore, a market-based business must pay critical attention to customer behavior to proactively identify and manage customer touchpoints during the process of product or service purchase and at that point, the business has the opportunity to create value by helping them through the process and create the total end-user experience.
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Business must realize that products or services does not exist without the end-users and is imperative to educate customers with product information and the value propositions, and helping customers through the product purchase process will create that customer value and eliminate the low customer retention rate and subsequently drive business growth, which is critical in a fast-changing disruptive marketplace.
Some of the few ways to manage customer touchpoints are as followed;
Point of product ordering or purchase: Business should closely monitor the problems and frustrations that customers repeatedly encountered as they shop for products and services; and some of this issues may be lack of product information, poor customer service, complicated processes, etc and identifying these touchpoints will help to improve products, services, and process improvement and create customer value.
Customer Feedback: A market-based business should not underestimate the importance and the power of feedback from customers. Obtaining customer feedback regularly will enable a business to manage the touchpoints that customers always encountered as they buy and use products or services. Remember outside-in-thinking – viewing things from a customer's perspective is very critical to product design and service management. Therefore, always factored in the end-users or customers when designing your products and services and their input is an ice breaker.
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Product and Service Usage: A lot of times customers do not spend time understanding how to use the product and services they purchased. Educating customers of the product information, the value props and the tool usage at the point of purchase will help to manage those touchpoints, and helping them through the process will resonate in their mind and it will create much-needed customer value, total experience, loyalty, and retention.
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Product returns and claims: This is another great way to manage customer's touchpoints. Products are returned for several reasons such as performance issues or the inability of the customer to utilize the tools to maximize product performance and benefits. Interviewing customers to understand the reasons for returns will help to manage the problems or frustrations they encountered and in the future, it will help to improve product design, process re-engineering and product performance.
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Generally, managing customer touch points cannot be overemphasized, a market-based business with strong customer focus leverage customer touchpoints to create a lean strategy by eliminating the inefficiencies associated with the process to improve product design, increase sales, revenue growth, drive customer value, enhance customers trust and retention and overall create the total customer experience.