Customer Touchpoints for Feedback: Capture Useful Customer Feedback

You can probably name most, if not all of the customer touchpoints for your business. Customer touchpoints are points of interaction between the customer and your brand. They play an important role in creating a positive customer experience. But not all touchpoints are created equal. Some touchpoints are more important to your customers’ experience than others. These are the touchpoints that you should focus on when improving customer experiences.

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Understanding your customers’ journey is essential for implementing effective changes. Customer feedback, when captured effectively across touchpoints, can get you the information you need. It can help you understand how well your touchpoints are performing and what your customers are happy with. And don’t forget, customer feedback is a touchpoint in itself too. When used effectively, it can help you create a strong customer experience.

Here are the touchpoints you should ask for feedback across to enhance the customer experience.

1. Knowledge Articles, Blogs, and Resources

When a customer is considering whether to purchase from you, they are in research mode. This is their information-gathering stage. Your blog, knowledge-base articles, guides, resources and product demos come into play now. Don’t waste this opportunity to collect useful feedback from customers.

Send out email surveys to customers on your newsletter or blog mailing list. Use email or online surveys to gain genuine customer feedback on the effectiveness of this touchpoint. Collect useful insights into the customer experience and increase customer engagement, with the following useful tips.  

• Ask survey questions about how useful customers find the information you provide in your newsletters.
• Use a mix of close-ended and open-ended questions. Balance ease-of-analysis with getting the customer’s perspective.
• Ask customers to tell you about topics they found particularly relevant or would like to know more about.
• Include questions about the length of your articles and posts.

2. Account Creation

When a customer creates an account, the customer has buying intent, has explored their options and has decided to do business with you. You can’t afford to miss this important touchpoint in the customer journey. Acting on customer feedback you’ve collected at this point is crucial for improving the customer experience.

If your account creation process is simple – requiring an email and password – the account creation touchpoint still remains important. If you are an e-commerce site, make the process simple and easy. Suggest users to use a password manager like LastPass or Dashlane for enhanced password security. Then send out a welcome email and a simple email survey asking for feedback on the account creation process. Or, display an online survey with a brief rating question.

Customer feedback on the customer’s experience at this touchpoint can help you improve their initial experience with your organization. You can also gain insights to simplify the touchpoint and improve the experience for future customers.

3. When a User Abandons Cart

If a customer is redirecting away from your cart, there’s a chance something isn’t right. This is a great time to understand why conversions aren’t happening. You can create a short email survey to send out when the customer exits the page. Either embed the survey in the email itself or send a link to a survey in the email.

• Ask your customers to explain what the problem is. You can use open-ended questions.
• Or, use multiple-choice questions. These would make it easier for customers to answer and for you to analyze their answers.
• Provide a number of options to understand why users want to leave. These can include:
  • Unexpected additional charges
  • Delivery options that don’t suit them
  • The process is taking too long
  • A better price/ option at a different site

Don’t forget to add an email address, customer care number or another way for the customer to get in touch with you for problem resolution.

4. Live Chat Option

Customers often expect a live chat option on a website. This is where customers can share their concerns, ask questions and get the information they need. Live chat, when used well, can contribute greatly to the customer experience. It can also divert the load from the customer service center and improve customer engagement.

You can configure a chat to pop-up once a user has been on your page long enough, say 30 seconds. Having a proactive chat button or window on your website can increase the chances a customer will engage with you.

Apart from being a great customer touchpoint in itself, live chat is a great place to ask for customer feedback.  

• Send an email survey to gain valuable feedback after a transaction.
• Use the survey to find out what made the customer end up at live chat in the first place.
• Ask open-ended or multiple-choice questions to find out what issues customers face.
• Use this information to resolve issues for your customers, direct them to useful resources, and close the feedback loop.
• You can also get feedback on customer service itself. Use this opportunity to ask the customer if their issue was resolved satisfactorily.
• Ask customers for suggestions to improve their chat experience.

With a few well-chosen questions you can find out what brought your customers to that touchpoint, how their experience at the touchpoint was. You’ll learn about the gaps that exist in providing a better customer experience. Use this feedback to assess the effectiveness of the touchpoint and the success of your customer service efforts.

5. The Product or Service Itself

Adam Richardson in his article in the Harvard Business Review divides touchpoints into four categories: products, interactions, messages, and settings. Products include hardware, software, services – the things that are core to adding business value.

The greatest marketing, branding, pricing in the world cannot prevent your customers from churning if you have a terrible service or product. Your product or service is one of your most compelling touchpoints. Just ask Apple.

Make sure you ask for feedback on the product or service itself. Use product feedback to implement updates that improve the product-use experience better. If you provide a service, use customer feedback to make process, infrastructure and even team changes that will improve the customer’s experience with your service.

• A Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) question is a great way to understand how loyal customers are to your product or service.
• Close the loop on your detractors but don’t ignore your promoters. They are your most enthusiastic users and know your product or service well.
• Promoters are a great source of insight into things that work:
  • Favorite features,
  • Prices that are just right, and
  • Upgrades they would love.
• Promoters can offer you unexpected insights and even help with market research before any big releases.

6. Order Confirmation/ Purchase

Once a customer has placed an order or made a purchase, ask them for feedback. This is an ideal touchpoint to gather valuable customer feedback. You will get to learn what you are doing right. You’ll also learn what you could do better to improve the customer experience during the purchase process.

• For online orders, use a simple online survey that opens after the order confirmation page.
• Ask for customer feedback on how easy it was to navigate the website, find product categories, and more.
• If your customers are making a purchase in-store, use a tablet-based survey app at the billing counter to capture customer feedback.
• You can even set up a kiosk survey.
• Ask questions about how the customer heard about you, how happy they are with the product choices, store layout, and more.
• Use multiple-choice questions to make it easy for your customers to answer, and easy for you to assess the responses.

Use this customer feedback to improve the purchase process. Improve channels – website, mobile app, in-store – that specifically affect this stage of the customer journey.

7. Post-Purchase Surveys

Don’t think that once your customer has bought from you, your job is over. Communicate with your customers after they’ve made a purchase.

• Send an email survey a few weeks after the purchase to understand product usage and service issues.
• You can even print QR codes that customers can scan to give feedback.

This customer feedback is great for working out the kinks in the customer’s purchase journey. You can also use the feedback from these surveys to identify the customers who had a great experience. You can create a separate strategy to encourage these customers to refer others.

8. Customer Feedback

Don’t forget that customer feedback is a touchpoint itself.  By asking for and acting on customer feedback, you get customer insights. Your customers feel heard, valued, and you enhance the customer experience.

You can ask for feedback through NPS surveys, CES, CSAT surveys and more. Use NPS to assess customer loyalty to your organization. There are a number of creative ways to use NPS for creating a customer-centric business. Use the insights you gain to improve processes, policies, products, and services. Use NPS surveys to boost customer referrals. You can target your promoters, and encourage them to promote on your behalf.

You can use customer feedback to create a team of power performers. Use feedback to identify and resolve issues that come up often. You can find ways to create process- and long-term improvements, and, create company-wide efficiencies.  

Once you act on customer feedback, tell your customers about it! By acting on customer feedback, you show your customers you put them first and are serious about making improvements. Once customers know you act on feedback received, they are more likely to offer you useful insights.

There are plenty of customer touchpoints in your business. You must focus on the ones that impact the customer experience. You must strategically gather customer feedback at important touchpoints in your customers’ journey. But this is only the beginning. You must extract useful insights from it and use it to close the loop for your customers. A feedback management software can help you analyze and manage this feedback. You’ll be able to create a superior customer experience across the customer’s journey, and throughout their lifetime.  

Use Zonka’s feedback management software to create and manage feedback that delivers actionable insight.

Learn more about the Customer Feedback

• What do you do with Customer Feedback?
• 3 Types of Metrics to Measure Customer Feedback
• 5 Must-Ask Questions For Customer Feedback Survey
• 5 Best Strategies to Respond to Customer Feedback
• 7 Reasons why you should take Customer Feedback