In today’s world, information is available to anyone with a simple swipe on a 
smartphone. With this ease of interaction, customers are increasingly rejecting traditional brand touchpoints, such as print media, and focusing their time on personalized interactions that are designed with the customer in mind. A future filled with digital experiences is closer than we think and we need to adapt, or be lost, to this new reality.
But with all this change on the horizon, how do we ensure that our customer touchpoints are on track? What even is a customer touchpoint? And why do we need digital experience, anyways?
Let’s start with the simple things:
First off, what is a Customer Touchpoint?
According to the link above, a customer touchpoint is simply“... any interaction (including encounters where there is no physical interaction) that might alter the way that your customer feels about your product, brand, business or service.” This can include walking into your brick and mortar store, shopping on your website, reading a review about your business, etc. The important thing to note is that you do not have to have a direct interaction with your customer for them to have a "touchpoint" with your business.
Speak to the Customer
This may sound obvious, but speaking to the customer is the step in our roadmap that is the most ignored. There are millions of excuses for not speaking to the customer - time, budget, customer availability - but the truth is, if we don’t speak to the customer, we aren’t gaining any true customer insights. At best, we’re making our best guess at what the customer really needs; at worst, we are heading down the wrong direction all together. To succeed in the future, we need to make direct customer interaction a real priority.
This step is ideally done in our touchpoint’s Digital Experience Concept Phase, where we unpeel the layers of our future digital touchpoint from the customer’s point-of-view.
Focus on the True Customer Problem
Often, we can get caught up in trying to solve our own internal problems, which may or may not cross-over to the something that provides true value to our customers. We need to determine and prioritize the most critical problems our customers are facing. We can’t fix everything overnight, but we can focus on the issues that will provide the most value, which will set the stage for what will be part of our Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Every decision we make should be tied back to enhancing the customer experience.
Stay Iterative and Lean
When writing a novel, the first draft is not the last; the same occurs when creating a customer touchpoint. We should always stay open to change, whether it occurs in the first week of our Digital Experience Design & Development Phase, or the last. As our project evolves, so do our priorities and we should adjust accordingly. That said, we should always strive to keep a tight ship. If an old idea, or a new one, is no longer providing value to the customer, we should remove it from our project.
Build Touchpoints Toward a Complete Customer Experience
A completed customer touchpoint isn’t the end of our journey, it’s just the start. Now that we’ve solved our first customer problem, we can begin tackling the other issues that our customers presented to us in our Digital Experience Concept Phase. From our customers’ point-of-view, our touchpoint is just one of the many that they use; to keep up with customer expectations, we need to ensure that our touchpoint evolves appropriately and is a stepping stone into solving other customer problems.
Online’s Digital Studio specializes in designing and building amazing digital experiences and products. We help businesses understand their customers better and to create compelling experiences through web and mobile applications that are purpose-built to deliver business results.
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