To achieve product success, you will need to establish, create, and monitor customer touchpoints. The success of your customers becomes your product’s success. By implementing customer touchpoint management, you improve the relationships your company has with its customers, which leads to higher loyalty and advocacy. 

Your customers will have a wide range of touchpoints, be they online or in-person. The proper management of those touchpoints will ensure your brand and product are being reflected, presented, and engaged in the most optimal and beneficial way. 

A touchpoint will alter how a customer sees your product and brand, which makes managing them that much more vital to achieving product success. 

Every SaaS business needs to make decisions that will lead to customer success. With as massive as the SaaS industry has become, you cannot afford to ignore touchpoint management. To achieve this, you need to understand what a customer’s experience is like at various touchpoints. This will help you identify where opportunities to improve exist. When you improve the effectiveness and quality of the engagements, customers will be more satisfied. 

Customer touchpoint management provides the opportunity to evaluate touchpoints that customers engage with, which can provide insight into how well a product is perceived. If it appears that there is low engagement with particular touchpoints, those should be re-evaluated and updated to more closely align with what customers find appealing and useful. 

Shining the Spotlight on Customer Touchpoint Management 

A recent survey has found that three out of four consumers have either recommended, selected, or paid extra for a product that included personalized service. This shows the power of touchpoint management, because each point of interaction and engagement with a consumer is an opportunity to influence them to become a customer who is loyal to your product. When there is a person, system, and process that effectively manages touchpoints, the experience consumers have with your brand is a positive one that will lead to increased revenues. 

If you want to achieve product success through appropriate customer touchpoint management, you can follow these steps: 

• Identify all customer touchpoints and ascertain whether there are any data gaps to be filled. 
• Collect additional data by conducting interviews and surveys, as well as use other metrics. 
• Identify which interactions between customers and your brand are the most engaged with. Understand what makes those touchpoints the most effective in the increase of engagement. 
• Prioritize touchpoints that customers feel are the most useful in their eyes. Identify which touchpoints should be updated, or discard underperforming ones altogether. 
• Develop a map for high-value touchpoints that appear to always increase engagement with your brand or product. 
• Use measurable metrics regarding a customer’s experience with your product, such as lifetime value, retention rates, and the degree of willingness a customer has to promote your product.

The SaaS industry has to place emphasis on managing customer touchpoints, so that it generates value for those interested in its products, as well as its existing customers. This leads to both customer and product success. 

The identification of the most engaged with touchpoints will be a good starting point to understand what works and what can be replicated in other touchpoints, with some customization to match the particular medium of communication. A social media post that is highly-engaged with can be used as a blueprint for an email that is sent out, with a few minor tweaks made to match the different medium of communication. Touchpoints that see a high level of interaction from consumers will be understood as being ones that are found to be important and useful. 

Touchpoint management should not cease once a customer purchases a subscription to use your product. In fact, the very next touchpoint is their first interaction with your product once they log into it. This will mark the start of the customer onboarding process and what their initial perceptions of the platform are. As we all know, a good first impression is immeasurable. It can make or break a relationship with a customer. When your customers has a positive first impression of your product, this means the touchpoint will be a favorable one. 

Identify every following touchpoint after this one, for there will be many more. These include the emails they receive, as well as the personal outreach by company staff, to ensure the customer is satisfied and has all their needs met. Additional touchpoints can include communication within the platform, be it through a chatbot, notification, or something else. 

Proper customer touchpoint management will keep track of every point of interaction and engagement with your brand and product. This tracking and mapping will allow you to identify what can be improved to help achieve greater customer success and product success. When you have a large body of customers, you will have to get more resources dedicated towards touchpoint management, to ensure you retain loyal customers and reduce churn. 

When you know who is using your product, when they are using it, how frequently they use it, and how they are using it, you can collect valuable data that will identify the best and worst-performing touchpoints. 

Wrapping Up 

You can never stop focusing on managing customer touchpoints if you want to achieve product success. It will be an ongoing process that becomes refined over time. It will also take time, if you wish to see meaningful results. The needs and expectations of consumers change continuously. This makes touchpoint management something that should always be adhered to. Otherwise, you risk losing touch with what consumers are looking for. 

Managing customer touchpoints is a simple process overall, but executing it can become complicated. You will need to keep your ear to the ground and listen attentively to customer feedback. Then, you make changes according to what will lead to customer success. When they succeed in their goals, you achieve product success. 

WRITTEN BYSurojit Ain

Surojit has over 15 years of experience in quality and implementations. He is a promoter of an extremely light and efficient Agile process to fit business needs. In his prior role as product owner, he built a robust product in a very short span of time.

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