Digital Customer Touchpoints: How To Track Them & Make Them Actionable

In today’s world of digital touchpoint communication, a computer-telephone integration (CTI) strategy is more critical than ever.

Indeed, there are more ways to communicate with clients and prospects than there have ever been before.

Webchat, social media, direct messaging, forums, and SMS are just some of the available communication channels you can choose from to connect with your customers and prospects.

While some methods—such as Google Ads, SEO tools, CRM add-ons, and MRMs—track a variety of digital touchpoints, they overlook the single most valuable and direct path to and from your customers: the phone call.

The Evolution of Customer Touchpoints – From the 90s to Today

Our age of digital marketing has offered up quite a range of customer touchpoints.

In the early days of digital, (circa 1998), there were simply landlines and mass emails. The latter was so rudimentary that we can’t even call them “campaigns.” Emails were sent without knowing the recipient, their persona, their intent, or their need.

Then, from the late 90s to the early 2000s, most email blasts were nothing more than junk mail sent to addresses of unknown persons. The best marketers could hope for was that their emails were being sent to a valid email address.

But fast forward to now, and we find that the communication pendulum has swung very far from the days of AOL and local ISP.

Now we have social media, blogs, webchats, video-on-demand, content syndication, call centers, connected devices, podcasts, etc.

And what do all of these platforms and media choices have in common?

The marketer has a very clear idea of their audience’s persona, socio-demographics, and buying behavior.

How did that come about? How do marketers know so much about us?

By our smartphones. We carry them with us everywhere; we browse the internet with them, interact on social media with them, and make purchases on them.

Then why have most marketers lost sight of this?

Phone Calls Are Critical Customer Touchpoints

The invention of the smartphone dramatically changed how business-to-business sales are conducted. As a result, the phone call is precisely the touchpoint that marketers, business leaders, and brands need to leverage.

The problem is that most marketers and businesses see customer touchpoints as a way to guide the business customer or prospect towards an end—one that usually just leads to more digital touchpoints.

Yet while most business customers bounce around doing business on their phones—skimming social media, doing cursory research, and even getting into the details of a company offering—most of them still do their purchasing voice to voice, human to human.

Marketers should learn from that.

It’s why a business’ customer touchpoints must include one that gives the client or prospect the ability to speak to a salesperson, customer service agent, or technical support specialist.

More importantly, when a company leader knows a prospect or client is doing research or trying to solve a problem, a proactive outreach solution can be highly productive.

What Defines a Proactive Customer Touchpoint?

There are several ways for businesses to be proactive.

SMS is a superb avenue to initiate discreet digital customer touchpoints—and it’s easy for the business to implement. It also gives the prospective or existing business customers a “bookmark” to a possible solution to their concern, providing a way for them to reconnect with their account manager or CSR.

Sending an SMS to a client’s smartphone helps the business customer engage in the way they want to. Then, adding both inbound and outbound calling on top of SMS goes a long way.

Want to make it even more attractive? Offer in-app chat or webchat.

When your inbound leads are linked to your digital advertising data—regardless of its source—they are nearly 15 times more likely to close.

The Value of a High-Performance BI Tool

With the increasing amount of digital touchpoints, combining data from all marketing and communications channels is now essential. But this can easily become laborious and time-consuming! Using a highly capable and integrated data analytics & BI platform to combine that information is surprisingly easy, and even more importantly, absolutely critical to long-term success.

Here’s why:

Data connectivity

An integrated BI solution lets you bring together every facet of data you have about your prospective and current customers and their journeys and also allows you to connect all of the systems that touch them.

Data management

With high-performance BI solutions, you have all the data, tools, and widgets you need to combine and analyze data from any source and create deep and accurate customer insights.

You can comb customer information, for example, from your CRM, telephony, finance, and marketing systems, and set up key performance indicators (KPIs)—critical metrics to monitor performance and guide your business decisions.

These can be either direct metrics—from the source data—or derived metrics, which are calculated from data from multiple sources. For example, you can draw from your customer, sales, finance, and employee data to spot trends, acknowledge benchmarks, recognize related performance issues, and more.

Both are invaluable to assess and manage your business operations most effectively

Data visualization

Data visualization tells your data story in a way that’s easy and intuitive to consume.

Just as importantly, it allows you to review daily reporting in an efficient and predictable manner, as it will enable you to quickly assess what’s going well, where are the areas of concern, and what requires your immediate attention—all with a single glance.

Automation

The power of automation affords you a “set it and forget it” approach.

A feature-rich BI solution will, according to your specifications, automatically gather, combine, clean, and fuse data routines for you.

Automation makes it possible for you to be confident that everyone you want to see the reporting does so—when you want them to see it, and in the way, you would like it to happen.

The Secret Sauce: Turning Digital Touchpoints into Customer Action

So, if we boil down everything we explained above, you need 4 main ingredients to cook the perfect marketing and sales performance management strategy:

1. Predict what’s going to happen next,
2. Monitor your customer and marketing activities in real-time in live dashboards,
3. Blend customer information, such as behavioral data from social media, your website, email campaigns, declarative data, reviews, phone calls, support tickets or claims, etc.,
4. Create cohorts that enable you to easily spot successes and pitfalls and take immediate action.

Dashboard Examples to Turn your Customer Data into Action

With ClicData, you can build your custom dashboards to track your sales team’s activity and the results of their conversations with customers. We also produce dashboard templates to help you get started even faster.

Here are a few sales dashboard examples we thought you’d find helpful:

1. Call summary dashboard to track inbound and outbound calls

Track your team’s call activity with this summary report.

You have an overview of the call frequency, duration, response rate, and the activity overview per BDR or AM and call type.

This report goes beyond the built-in report in your telephony or VoIP system as it allows you to visualize stats by weekdays, and business days, and allows you to drill down into the data.

2. Call activity per campaign

This dashboard mixes data from telephony or VoIP and CRM systems. It gives you extra insights into your team’s call activity.

You can see who’s calling per campaign, who’s on track, and who’s falling behind compared to the team’s average activity and targets.

3. Lead performance tracking dashboard

Measure the quality and the value of your organic, PPC, PPL, MQL, and SQL leads in a single dashboard. By adding marketing and financial KPIs to your lead performance dashboard, you get the full picture of the performance of your pipeline.

Learn how to build this dashboard for yourself, in our step-by-step blog.

4. Customer profiling dashboard

Get an accurate, and up-to-date view of your customer profiles with this dashboard example. Quickly see the distribution of your customers by type, subscription level, and market. Identify your key accounts by MRR and region. Now you can measure the evolution of your customer profile over time.

Over To You!

A smart digital marketer wants to know how their customers behave across all segments and all vehicles. Then they tee up the ones with the highest potential for outreach from their company’s sales team.

When all of your data is connected, and you can see everything that is happening with your social media, telephony, CRM, and website—at a moment’s notice and from a single pane of glass—you get an in-depth, real-time view of your customers and their behaviors.