Enriching Customer Experiences Through Meaningful Digital Touchpoints

It’s predicted that in the near future, companies will need to accommodate as many as 10 additional customer service interaction touchpoints.

Envisioning the experience your customers have when they interact with your business is an important step in developing customer-facing policies that generate positive real-world experiences.

This is a guest post from Amy Bishop, a digital marketer from Indianapolis. She regularly writes about customer experience.

Considering the full range of touchpoints available in the digital marketplace, this critical task is definitely not getting any easier.

As Internet-connected devices spread and people adopt them, companies can reach and engage with their customers wherever they are and in new ways not possible through brick-and-mortar stores, television advertising, and catalogs.

-John R. Rymer, VP at Forrester

Rymer predicts that companies will need to accommodate as many as 10 additional customer touchpoints in the coming years.

This means that business leaders must overcome challenges to stay focused on business goals and avoid getting dazzled and distracted by every new tool that comes along for customer engagement. To remain focused and effective, marketing pros need to stay grounded and commit to platforms that are most meaningful to their target customers.

Considering the Customer Experience Possibilities

Keeping up in a fast-changing digital age and differentiating your company from competitors is tough. Emerging platforms require new types of technical expertise and specialized content in order to properly leverage them for customer engagement. Yet, despite all the changes, connecting with customers and projecting stable, desirable and professional brand messaging is still the job of marketing pros. The most effective digital messaging programs continue to center on a well-considered web design.

From there, with so many options available for customer interaction, you may be struggling to figure out where to begin and how much digital territory you should attempt to cover. But being able to acquire the resources you need to manage niche spaces in a multi-platform marketplace is simply unavoidable.

Here are some popular digital platforms that today’s customers are using to go beyond the basic website to connect with businesses:

• Mobile websites
• Email campaigns
• Mobile-optimized websites
• Gaming
• Branded apps
• Wifi-enabled televisions. For smart TV options visit https://www.vizio.com/en/shop/remotes.
• eReaders

5 Ways to Better Understand Your Customers

Figuring out which touchpoints to prioritize may be as simple as learning as much as possible about your target customers. Consider these 5 questions to grasp a better understanding of their needs:

1. What information sources do they use to gather information about your products?
2. What triggers positive responses from this group?
3. What concerns or other obstacles prevent them from choosing your brand?
4. How do they typically make purchases?
5. In what ways do they influence the buying behavior of each other?

Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reports that more than half (56 percent) of all American adults now have a smartphone. The study’s 2012 data shows that smartphone ownership steadily increases with income and education levels and decreases as age ranges get higher. But demographic breaks aside, smartphone use is increasing across the board.

So, if your company sells gardening supplies in a bustling neighborhood and relies on attracting business from homeowners throughout the city, build an informative website for a home-based computer and also invest in a meaningful mobile website design that contains a few pages of the most critical information, including your physical address, hours of operation, and a mapping feature that provides directions to the store. From there, offer your customers a branded app that helps them manage seasonal plantings for your zone or provides some other relevant utility.

All in all, by aligning your digital and face-to-face branding efforts with customer habits and preferences, you can demonstrate a high level of understanding and respect for the people you’re targeting for business. This kind of effort makes customers happy, and that leads to better business overall.