Connecting the Touch Points on Your Customer’s Journey

A traveler heading from London to New York has to undergo a long and tiring journey. It starts when they pull back their office chair, take their seat, turn on their computer and navigate to a booking site. They’ll move from site to site, checking airline prices and browsing hotel rooms. When they’re ready to make their booking, they’ll need to complete forms, enter their credit card details and store the confirmation — perhaps in a way that allows them to wave their phone to obtain their boarding card. They might have to call to book a taxi, arrange for a car to meet them at the airport, and email the hotel to warn of a late check-in. And that’s all before they’ve even reached the security line and the check-in desk, passport control and the departure lounge. At each stage in that journey, they have to stop, think, make a decision, and take action.

As in any customer journey, the shift from touch point to touch point has to be natural and even enjoyable. But the method in which customers now take that journey has become increasingly complex.

One survey held in the run-up to the holiday season in 2014 found that nearly 60 percent of consumers were planning to use more than one online device to research and purchase their Christmas shopping. Eighty-five percent would use a desktop but a quarter would also use a smartphone and 22 percent a tablet. Customers are researching their purchases at different times and in different places. Some might browse on their desktops at work, others at home in front of the television and some would use their commute to check out travel destinations or read tech product reviews.  

Businesses need to understand the nature of the touch points on the customer journey, recognize how the customers feel as they use those touch points, and make sure that those feelings at each stage are as positive as possible.

Make Contact The Easiest Touch Point On The Customer Journey

The easiest solution is to make sure that websites use responsive design. Regardless of the platform on which customers engage with the brand, they’ll always see the same content and in a way that’s comfortable and user-friendly. But that’s not always sufficient. Because different customers demand different experiences at different times, brands have to be ready to adapt their content to the different platforms they’re using at each touch point.

Autoglass, the UK’s leading vehicle glass repair service, for example, saw that most of its customers contacted it on smartphones so they made sure that each step on their customers’ journey was targeted towards drivers who found themselves standing on the roadside, phone in hand. One option the company chose was to use a click-to-call facility in mobile ads to make it as easy as possible for customers to move from interest to interaction. In effect, Autoglass made use of a particular function to remove the low point on the customer journey of noting and dialing a number. They made it as simple as pushing a button. 

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Other companies have built apps to address low points in their client’s journey. For Domino’s Pizza, that meant keeping the client updated of their order status from the moment it was placed, through preparation and boxing all the way to their door. The brand used available content to raise the lowest point on their customer’s journey: the hungry wait for the order.

Touch points now come on different platforms and they come in different forms, made up of a range of different materials. Whether the brand needs to plan its responsive design, implement a particular UI or UX function or roll out an entire personalization, the infrastructure of the customer journey needs to be built out of a number of joints that together create a smooth and seamless experience.

When a passenger flies to New York, he’s not aware of all the waypoints the plane must pass through and the different air traffic controllers who guide the plane to its destination. A well-planned customer journey is equally smooth and equally effective all the way to the landing.

In the next post, we’ll look at more ways in which content affects the customer journey.

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