6 Technologies To Extend Customer Touchpoints

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Customer Touchpoints
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Are you looking to remain relevant and competitive in the foreseeable future? If your answer is yes,  you must work towards boosting your customer experience. It’s true regardless of the size of your business or the industry. 

Promoting your customers’ experience allows them to remain loyal to you, thus boosting your brand reputation and visibility. It goes a long way in enabling you to generate more sales.  

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As noted above, there are reliable benefits of promoting customers’ experience and satisfaction. Yet, if you don’t have your customers in mind at every touchpoint, then you might lose it.  

Thus, even if you offer great products or services, you might not reap better benefits if you don’t interact with your customers at every step of their buying journey. But the good news is that you can adopt some modern technologies and extend points of contact.

This article walks you through some modern technologies that can help customer touchpoints. But before diving into these technologies, it’d be a good idea to understand the customer touchpoints. Read on to get enlightened.  

What Are Customer Touchpoints? 

Customer touchpoints are the various points where your brand engages with customers. In other words,  stages of interactions between customers and a business enterprise.  

Customer touchpoints separate into three major phases. That’s, before the purchase, during the purchase, and after the purchase.  

Before purchasing, a customer learns about the existence of your business or products. It can happen after a customer has seen your ads online or by reading other customers’ reviews. 

During the purchase:  a customer decides to visit the websites, order goods, and make payments. 

The purchase phase deals with how you interact with the customers after making purchases. It can be when following up with your customers or appreciating them for shopping with you. You can interact with customers through phone calls, email messages, and live chats. 

What Technologies Helps Extend Customer Touchpoints? 

Today, various brands produce almost similar or identical products to the market. So, most consumers might not differentiate your products from those of competitors. For that reason, customers prefer a business that can provide a seamless experience.  

Sometimes promoting customers’ experiences can be a daunting task. Yet, you can adapt some modern technologies and extend customer touchpoints. Doing so helps to market customers’ experience, thus allowing them to remain connected to you. Some of these technologies include.

  • Artificial Intelligence 

Customer experience plays a significant role in the growth and success of any business enterprise. It’s what differentiates between a good and a bad company. Thus, you must promote your customers’ experience if you want to retain your customers. 

Although promoting your brand’s customers experience is a great idea, you must also care for your customers. That’s where artificial intelligence technology comes in.     

Artificial intelligence can help extend customer touchpoints in various ways. First, artificial intelligence can facilitate a better understanding of customers. It allows you to collect customers’ data and other information. For instance, through artificial intelligence technology, you can understand your customers’ behavior and interests. 

Besides, artificial intelligence enables you to understand where your customers spend most of their time and their buying patterns. So, you gain a more accurate understanding of your customers. This helps provide relevant content on your website at the right time, thus boosting your customers’ shopping journey.  

Furthermore, artificial intelligence can help you to collect and analyze customers’ feedback. Collecting customers feedback is essential for the growth of your business. It allows you to know how customers view your business products and customer service. Through customers’ feedbacks, you can get to know whether customers are happy or not when shopping from your site. 

You can collect data via various means. These include conducting surveys, making phone calls, sending email messages to customers, utilizing social media channels and other online platforms. Yet, analyzing such data isn’t a simple task. But you can use artificial intelligence technology and make the process much easier. 

Artificial intelligence can easily analyze customers feedback to help understand customers’ feelings or emotions. It categorizes customers’ emotions as either positive, negative, or neutral. You can address the negative feedbacks to boost customers’ experience and satisfaction.  

But to enjoy the great benefits of artificial intelligence, you should find a reputable and reliable service provider. For instance, if you’re looking forward to integrating artificial intelligence into your business systems, you can consider working with a company like Drop Cowboy or any other similar firm.  

  • Chatbots 

It’s no doubt that most customers are always busy. They want to take the least time possible to shop and move on to other personal matters. Thus, customers need immediate feedback as soon as they visit your website.

In other words, no customer will be willing to wait for days or even hours to have their queries responded to. In general, taking time to respond to customers’ queries can impact their experience and shopping journey.  You can avoid this by installing chatbot software on your business website.  

A chatbot is a computer application or program that can communicate with users in a natural way. In other words, it allows customers to interact with digital devices as they could do with a real person. It interacts with mobile apps, messaging applications, websites, and other online applications.  

Chatbots can help extend customer touchpoints in various ways. For instance, they can give your business an image. 

Customers first interact with your website chatbots before engaging with an actual person. Thus, chatbots give users a more personal touch than they could have experienced when communicating via other means like email messages. It goes a long way in promoting your customers’ experience, allowing them to remain connected to you.  

Chatbots also allow you to provide services to customers 24/7 because they operate around the clock. So, you won’t worry when your customer support team isn’t available. The chatbot can take care of that by responding to customers’ queries.  

Unlike your customer assistants, chatbots can respond to several customers simultaneously. It helps cut the delays or waiting time, thus promoting customers’ experience.  

Besides, a chatbot can use many languages. It is vital, in particular when your business deals with customers globally. Chatbots allow your business to accommodate and interact with various customers who speak and understand specific languages. This not only helps boost your customers’ experience, but it can also allow you to generate more sales.  

  • Internet Of Things 

In the modern competitive world, retaining and keeping customers happy is essential. Thus, customers expect high-quality products and exceptional customer service. You can achieve this by having a deeper understanding of your customers. That’s where the internet of things technology comes in.  

The internet of things is a technology that allows physical devices to connect and share data on the web. These objects range from simple to complex tools, all connected through wireless networks.  Some of these objects include refrigerators, printers, televisions, locomotives, and others.

The internet of things can help extent customer touchpoints in various ways. First, it helps provide up-to-date information to customers. 

In the past, customers could make orders and wait for several days without knowing exactly when their products could get delivered. It wasted much customer’s time because they went to the delivery points to check whether their orders had arrived. 

Today you can utilize the internet of things technology and boost the experience of your customers. For instance, you can put sensors on the vehicles or equipment carrying your cargo. By doing so, it enables customers to track their orders through their phones and other smart devices. It helps keep customers updated, thus improving their experience. 

Apart from that, you can use sensors to collect customers’ data when interacting with them. For instance, you can collect data about their location, their interests, and shopping patterns. It enables you to provide personalized communication, which also promotes your customers’ experience.  

Besides, collecting customers data through the internet of things can allow you to understand the new needs of customers. For that reason, you might want to produce other products lines or services. Thus, not only helps boost customers’ experience but can also enable you to boost your sales.  

  • Smartphone Technology 

The smartphone is another technology you must consider if you want to extend your customer touchpoints. This is because most consumers use smartphones to find information and products online. 

Smartphones are portable is because most customers prefer these over other devices like desktops. Thus, smartphones allow customers to shop from anywhere and at any point. That’s where there’s a need to integrate smartphone technology into your business systems. 

There are several benefits of integrating smartphone technology into your business systems. For instance, with smartphone technology, customers can engage with your business through texts, email messages, voice, and video calls. 

Besides, smartphone technology enables customers to interact with you on social media and other online platforms. All these helps promote customers’ experience, thus remaining connected to you. 

Sometimes you might want to communicate with several customers simultaneously. Also, you might want to take the least time to communicate with your customers. In such a case, you may consider installing a Call Center Dialer software.  

A call center dialer software is a computer application that allows you to  dial your customers’ phone numbers from anywhere and at any time. It enables you to boost the experience of your customers and to generate more sales. 

One good thing and utilizing such software is that it’s compatible with both landlines and mobile phones. Therefore, whatever the phone system you’re using, you can always benefit from such software.  

However, although you can reap several benefits by utilizing smartphone technology, it can also expose your business to some risks. Most hackers exploit smartphone technology to manipulate, alter or steal vital information from a business website. If this happens to you, you can lose your data, thus closing down your store. But you can avoid cyber-attacks by regularly updating your smartphone technology. One of the best ways to do this is by installing automatic update software on your business website.  

  • Video Chat Technology 

Engaging with customers through voice calls, live chats, and text messages isn’t enough. Sometimes, you may want to connect with them through video chats. In such a case, it’s advisable to integrate video chat technology into your business systems.  

Having video chat technology can enhance your customer touchpoints in several ways. For instance, it’s more engaging than audio calls. Thus, utilizing video chat technology can help promote customers’ experiences. 

Besides, video chats can help boost communication. It is because people are likely to process visual information more quickly than audio or text messages. So, video chat technology enables you to understand your customers better. It allows you to provide personalized services to enable them to remain connected to your business.  

Last, video chat technology enables you to demonstrate your products or services to customers. It helps to guide them in making their purchase decision. Utilizing video chats not only helps boost customer experience but also generates more sales.   

  • Virtual Reality

Virtual reality has become one of the main components in helping extend customer touchpoints. It’s a technology that creates a simulated environment. In other words, it enables customers to interact with 3-dimensional artificial objects.  

Virtual reality technology can help extend customer touchpoints in various ways. For instance, it enables consumers to test products before purchasing them. They can achieve this by using the headset with glasses. Therefore, customers can no longer pick the wrong items online. This is because virtual reality technology allows them to test any product online as they could do in a physical shop.  It also helps boost customer experience and satisfaction.  

Takeaway 

Boosting customer touchpoints is essential to the success of your business. It helps engage with your customers at every step of their buying journey, thus promoting their experience and satisfaction. It goes a long way in boosting your business sales and growth. That said, if you’re looking to extend customer touchpoints, then you must adopt one or all of the above-explained technologies.

Rizwan Ahmad
Rizwan Ahmad

Rizwan is an avid mobile geek and a gaming lover. He loves to keep a tab on new tech and loves to share the latest tech news and reviews on Smartphones, Gadgets, Apps, and more.

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