Touchpoints are places along the customer journey where customers interact with brands. An interaction may be passive, like viewing an ad or receiving an email newsletter, or it may be passive, like commenting on a social media post or contacting customer service. In any case, 

Every point of contact a customer has with a brand is a touchpoint, and touchpoints are critical to customer experience.

Why Do Touchpoints Matter to Customer Service?

The more you understand about your customer touchpoints, and the more data you gather, the better you can design the customer experience and provide excellent customer service. A customer can take all manner of paths to purchase, but a typical example of the various touchpoints a customer might encounter looks something like this:

• The customer sees an ad for your product while conducting a product search online
• The customer sees another ad or two on Facebook because of your retargeting efforts
• The customer is curious about your brand and decides to follow your Facebook page
• The customer has a conversation with a friend about one of your products
• Eventually, with enough positive experiences at touchpoints along the way, the customer decides to purchase your product

It’s important to note that touchpoints do not only describe the places a customer touches your brand pre-purchase. Touchpoints also include interactions with your brand after purchase — most notably, customer service. Any time a customer interacts with your customer service organization, there is an opportunity to make a positive impression at a touchpoint.

How Helpshift Supports Touchpoints

Because Helpshift enables you to connect and control so many elements of your customer service strategy, you gain the ability to create a positive customer experience across a spectrum of customer touchpoints. From web chat to in-app messaging to phone service to email, your customer conversations are connected and fluid.

Helpshift connects all your digital customer support channels with your phone support, and allows you to take advantage of self-service and bots. By embedding all of these tools within a single messaging thread, Helpshift’s Connect Customer Conversation platform lets your customers reach you through the touchpoints they prefer, and always experience an efficient path to resolution.