How and Why ‘Customer Journey Touchpoint Analysis’ Pays Off

Featured blog by Debbie Fletcher, Independent Technology Writer

We all know the tale. The hero sets out on a journey, encounters countless harrowing adventures and hazards along the way, reaches his destination in triumph or defeat. That’s a plotline that has served storytellers well, from the ancient Israelites and Greeks right up to the latest buddy movie, because we can learn a lot about human experience by following heroes on their journey.

Well, your customer is on a journey, too, connecting with your brand at any number of touchpoints along the way. You just have to know how to analyze the journey and put the information you glean to good use, through customer journey touchpoint analysis.

Touchpoints will vary to some degree from business to business, but the broad definition of the increasingly important term is any time consumers come in contact with your brand. That can be prior to, during, or following a purchase from you, and it can be by way of any channel or device that’s available,

Just as classic hero journeys like “The Odyssey” and “Star Trek” reveal big truths about humanity, tracing your customer’s journey through the entire spectrum of his or her contacts with your business reveals truths that can guide you in optimizing the customer experience in order to generate more sales.

By tracking how customers and potential customers move through classic interactions such as awareness, discovery, purchase, and use of your product or service, you gain important insights about both what’s working well and what may need improvement.

What can touchpoint analysis reveal?

Customer journey touchpoint analysis, as explained by nanorep, one of the industry leaders in guiding the digital experience, has become nothing less than essential for digital businesses concerned with shaping and optimizing the customer experience across the array of devices and channels the contemporary consumer uses.

The caveat there is that consistency counts, according to nanorep. The customer, who for instance utilizes a website and then moves to a mobile app or a social media site all in the course of a single journey, must have a consistent experience across all of those touchpoints. If not, the analysis might degenerate into a fruitless comparison of apples and oranges.

The nitty-gritty of deciding what touchpoints to track and analyze depends to a great extent on the nature of each business and its operations, but there are numerous templates on the web that simplify the process. One accessible and easy to follow guide to identifying your own key customer journey touchpoints can be found at SurveyMonkey. This site can also offer a starting point for thinking about how to assemble the data being collected into a useful format, typically through Customer Journey Mapping (CJM), a graphic representation that provides a readily understandable – and actionable -overview of the information.

Just as with the touchpoints, the metrics analyzed may vary with the business, but some of the most common KPIs evaluated include Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate, and Exit Rate, all indicators that can help you understand how well the customer journey is working for your customers – and therefore for your business.

Putting the information to work

The customer journey touchpoints are the raw material of the process, or course, but the end product is the analysis itself and that’s where the payoff lies. In best cases, you may find that a touchpoint is working exactly as planned. In others, you may discover that there are gaps in information or performance that you need to remedy. Either way, the takeaways from the analysis will enable you to improve your customers’ journeys.

That, after all, is the primary focus of any customer-centric business, and today’s customers expect nothing less than a satisfactory journey. The idea is to guide them on that journey – and to make sure they don’t encounter any shipwrecks or one-eyed monsters along the way.