Optimizing Customer Contact Points

Your customer journey map is missing the 8 touchpoints that matter most. You've optimised your ads, polished your landing pages, and A/B tested your emails to death. But whilst you've been obsessing over the obvious touchpoints, your customers have been forming opinions about your brand in places you've completely overlooked. These hidden moments of truth determine whether customers stick around or silently disappear. The good news? Your competitors are probably ignoring them too. 1. Pre-awareness Influences • What it is: Social conversations & word-of-mouth before formal brand discovery • Why it's missed: Difficult to track & attribute • Optimisation tip: Create shareable content specifically designed for peer-to-peer sharing • Impact potential: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 2. Post-Purchase Onboarding • What it is: The critical first 24-48 hours after purchase when buyers seek validation • Why it's missed: Teams focus on acquisition, not retention • Optimisation tip: Create "success accelerator" emails with usage instructions • Impact potential: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 3. Product Documentation • What it is: Help guides, FAQs, & support materials • Why it's missed: Often delegated to technical teams without marketing input • Optimisation tip: Inject brand personality into help documentation • Impact potential: ⭐⭐⭐ 4. Customer Support Interactions • What it is: The conversations with service teams that shape perception • Why it's missed: Viewed as cost center, not marketing opportunity • Optimisation tip: Create scripts that highlight complementary products/features • Impact potential: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5. Digital "Dead Ends" • What it is: 404 pages, out-of-stock notifications, & other negative pathways • Why it's missed: Seen as technical errors, not opportunities • Optimisation tip: Transform dead ends into discovery points with recommendations • Impact potential: ⭐⭐⭐ 6. Transaction Confirmations • What it is: Receipts, shipping notifications, & order confirmations • Why it's missed: Treated as operational communications only • Optimisation tip: Include personalised next-best action recommendations • Impact potential: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 7. Post-Usage Check-ins • What it is: The period after customer has used your product for intended purpose • Why it's missed: Customer journey maps often end at purchase or initial use • Optimisation tip: Create timely follow-ups based on typical usage patterns • Impact potential: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 8. Community Participation • What it is: Customer-to-customer interactions in forums & social spaces • Why it's missed: Difficult to scale & often understaffed • Optimisation tip: Identify & empower customer advocates within communities • Impact potential: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Your marketing doesn't end where your analytics dashboard stops tracking. The brands that will win tomorrow are already investing in these invisible touchpoints today. Which one will you optimise first? ♻️ Found this helpful? Repost to share with your network.  ⚡ Want more content like this? Hit follow Maya Moufarek.

Remember rage-quitting a customer service call? This guide helps you avoid such CX nightmares. Inside: hard-earned lessons, practical solutions, and strategies to transform CX from cost center to growth driver. 1) Right people, right seats. - Develop clear agent profiles - Hire for skills, attitude, and cultural fit 2) Create specialists, don't hire them. - Comprehensive training in brand culture and product knowledge - Use varied learning methods 3) Co-author the process. - Implement agent feedback loops - Encourage peer-to-peer learning 4) Learn from every interaction. - Create a team-wide knowledge center - Real-time issue reporting and regular syncs 5) Personalize it. - Prioritize one-to-one communication - Allow script deviation for personal touch 6) Meet customers where they are. - Go omnichannel, including social media - Maintain conversation history 7) Intuitive self-service options. - Design user-friendly experiences - Offer clear paths to human support 8) Value-based CX. - Educate customers appropriately - Explain concepts clearly and securely 9) Don't obsess over ROI. Long-term benefits include: - Reduced churn - Longer Customer Lifetime Value - Positive referrals 10) Metrics that matter: - Net Promoter Score (NPS) - Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) - Customer Effort Score (CES) - First Contact Resolution Rate Celebrate achievements along the way. Ready to elevate your CX? Share your challenges. We'll craft a bespoke strategy to set you apart.

Great journey maps start from the intersection of user touchpoints. A customer journey map shows a customer's experiences with your organization, from when they identify a need to whether that need is met. Journey maps are often shown as straight lines with touchpoints explaining a user's challenges. start •—------------>• finish At the heart of this approach is the user, assuming that your product or service is the one they choose to use in their journey. While journey maps help explain the conceptual journey, they often give the wrong impression of how users are trying to solve their problems. In reality, users start from different places, have unique ways of understanding their problems, and often have expectations that your service can't fully meet. Our testing and user research over the years has shown how varied these problem-solving approaches can be. Building a great journey map involves identifying a constellation of touchpoints rather than a single, linear path. Users start from different points and follow various paths, making their journeys complex and varied. These paths intersect to form signals, indicating valuable touchpoints. Users interact with your product or service in many different ways. User journeys are not straightforward and involve multiple touchpoints and interactions…many of which have nothing to do with your company. Here’s how you can create valuable journeys: → Using open-ended questions and a product like Helio, identify key touchpoints, pain points, and decision-making moments within each journey. → Determine the most valuable touchpoints based on the intersection frequency and user feedback. → Create structured lists with closed answer sets and retest with multiple-choice questions to get stronger signals. → Represent these intersections as key touchpoints that indicate where users commonly interact with your product or service. → Focus on these touchpoints for further testing and optimization. Generalizing the linear flow can be practical once you have gone through this process. It helps tell the story of where users need the most support or attention, making it a helpful tool for stakeholders. Using these techniques, we’ve seen engagement nearly double on websites we support. #productdesign #productdiscovery #userresearch #uxresearch

Struggling to set meetings? Try my three-step framework to make sure you are using the right messaging, with the right contacts, within your best accounts. Here are the questions to answer: 1) Are you calling the right accounts? Here’s what to make sure you are focused on the right companies: - Potential budget Are they investing in areas tied to your solution? For example, at MongoDB, we look for companies that are hiring developers. Hiring developers = building applications = spending money on databases. - Use case Are there multiple landing spots for your product? For example, at Qualtrics I focused on accounts that needed to understand brand, customer, and product experience. Three different use cases = three shots to win business at the account. - Personal Familiarity Massive budget and multiple use cases won’t help you land an account if you can’t speak their language. Simple question to ask yourself: “If I was in a room with their executive team, could I have a conversation about their business, in their language, without being completely out of place?” Good accounts that you understand are better targets than great accounts that you don’t understand. 2) Are you calling the right contacts? Two questions to ask about the contacts in your sequences: - Would this person personally benefit from our solution? - Is this person at all responsible for solving the business pain our solution solves? No personal benefit = no reason for them to respond. No connection to business pain = no reason for you to want them to respond. 3) Messaging Two points I’m looking for in effective messaging: - Emotional relevance What is the email/phone call your buyer never wants to get from their boss? If your email shows them a way to avoid that dreaded call, it’s emotionally relevant. - Specificity Could you write the same email to a different person? Or, worse, could your competitor send the same email to your buyer? If the answer to either of those questions is “yes,” your messaging isn’t specific enough. Meetings are tough to come by right now. But it’s hard to go wrong if you use the right messaging, with the right people, within the right accounts.

 The great irony of exceptional customer experience? The less you have to interact with a company, the better. Amazon gets it. One-click ordering. No conversations needed. Apple gets it. Products that just work out of the box. Netflix gets it. Content appears before you search for it. Yet most SaaS companies are still building elaborate support centers, scheduling "success calls," and celebrating high touch engagement. We've got it backwards. When customers do need to engage with us, it should be: • Personal - they know you understand their business • Fast - no ticket ping-pong or "let me check on that" • Efficient - solve the real issue, not the surface symptom But here's where 90% of companies fail: They design a Service Blueprint instead of a Customer Journey. Service Blueprint thinking: "How do I want customers to interact with me?" → Fill out this form with 15 fields → Book a demo before seeing pricing → Complete onboarding modules 1-10 → Attend mandatory QBRs Customer Journey thinking: "What's the natural path my customer wants to take?" → Try before they buy → Learn at their own pace → Get help exactly when they need it → See value before investing time The difference? One optimizes for your metrics. The other optimizes for their success. AI is about to make this gap painfully obvious. Companies using AI to reduce customer effort will dominate. Companies using AI to create more touchpoints will struggle. Smart AI implementation means: • Anticipating needs before tickets are created • Personalizing the journey without manual intervention • Removing friction at every step • Making the complex feel simple The best customer experience isn't about how much you engage with customers. It's about how little they need you because everything just works. Stop measuring touchpoints. Start measuring outcomes achieved with minimal effort. Your customers will thank you by staying longer and buying more.

One of our biggest mistakes was treating demo calls as a single touchpoint. This is ineffective, especially for B2B companies. There are distinct stages to focus on: 1. Tracking: Every demo call needs to be recorded and analyzed. 2. Client Interaction Patterns: Identifying patterns can show you where your clients drop off or what excites them. 3. Common Bottlenecks: Once you spot trends, you’ll see where prospects are losing interest or getting confused. 4. Biz Dev Optimization: Regular communication with your biz dev team is key to refining and improving the process. 5. Script Adjustments: By understanding the friction points, you can edit your scripts to address potential client concerns proactively. For example, in analyzing our calls, we found that clients were often uncertain about pricing before the end of the demo. By tweaking our demo flow to bring up pricing earlier and give more clarity, we saw a 15% improvement in conversion rates. Breaking down each part of the process has given us clarity and helped us make impactful improvements. Are you taking a similar approach with your demo calls?

Half the battle of patient recruitment is getting a potential participant to respond to your outreach. This challenge is particularly acute in the US. Americans receive an average of 26 scam calls and 11 scam texts a week. People have learned to ignore unknown numbers entirely. Your legitimate recruitment outreach gets lumped in with car warranty ruses and fake IRS threats. Let’s compare a cohort of American sites to similarly sized European peers. Both cohorts recruiting for very similar studies. Both using a combination of SMS and phone outreach from within their existing database. Here’s what our data shows us…  • US sites see a 20% lower pick up rate on their first phone attempt  • After three call attempts this gap has grown to 28% 🤕 Ouch! So, how can you improve reach rates? Short of transplanting your site to a different country we’ve found there to be four key levers you have to improve your engagement…  • 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲: While your participant database is your greatest asset for recruitment, leads generated from advertising are 15% more likely to engage when compared to an older database lead.  • 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴: Implementing call branding for our customers resulted in meaningful lifts in the SMS response and call pick up rates. If you ain’t brandin’ you ain’t landin’.  • 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹: Combining phone calls, SMS and email together provides participants with greater certainty that you are legitimate. Sending an SMS prior to a phone call improves pick up rates by 5%.  • 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆: The average lift in pick ups between a first call and second call attempt is 10%. For later contact attempts this diminishes but is consistently around 2-3%. Combining all of these levers together levels the playing field. For US sites following these best practices, we see that our blended approach across multiple channels and with 7+ contact points, is consistently driving reach rates above 75%.

Email too much, and you annoy your customers. Email too little, and they forget about you. Find the right balance 👇 → Where Most Dispensaries Get It Wrong X Emailing Only When There’s a Sale: If the only time customers hear from you is during a discount, they’ll start expecting lower prices and stop buying at full price. X Blasting Every Customer With Every Email: Not every customer wants the same content at the same frequency. Sending too often to inactive customers can damage your email deliverability. X Not Testing Frequency at All: Many dispensaries guess at their send schedule instead of testing what actually works for different segments. → How to Optimize Your Email Frequency 1. Segment Customers by Engagement > High-engagement customers (open rate above 30%) can receive 2-3 emails per week without issue. > Moderate-engagement customers (10-30% open rate) should get 1-2 emails per week. > Low-engagement customers (less than 10% open rate) need win-back emails, not constant promotions. 2. Match Frequency to Buying Cycles > Daily shoppers might appreciate frequent updates on new arrivals. > Casual shoppers might prefer a weekly digest of deals and recommendations. > Lost customers need less frequent but high-impact emails with compelling reasons to return. 3. Monitor Unsubscribe & Spam Complaint Rates If unsubscribes spike after a specific email, that’s a sign you’re sending too often or to the wrong segment. If open rates drop below 15%, scale back or improve subject lines. 4. Test & Adjust Regularly Try sending one extra email per week and measure if engagement improves or drops. Compare sales data—are more emails leading to more revenue, or just more unsubscribes? → Try This & See the Difference Look at your email send frequency over the past month. Are you emailing different customer segments strategically, or just guessing? Test a small adjustment in frequency and track the impact on sales and engagement. If you want a data-driven email strategy, Tact Firm specializes in optimizing dispensary emails for maximum retention. Let’s get your frequency dialed in.

The days of "I noticed you like Guinness!" personalization are dead. Here's how top sales teams are identifying specific pain points their solution can uniquely solve. After building Apollo's AI research agent from zero to thousands of users, I've seen what separates good prospecting from great - and it's not what most people think. The Old Way: Generic Filters & Surface-Level Personalization - Start with basic filters: job titles, industry, company size - Download list, manually research each prospect - Find something generic to mention ("saw you went to Stanford!") - Send bland outreach with superficial personalization - Hope for 1-2% response rates while burning through your TAM The New Way: AI-Powered Pain Point Identification 1. Multi-source data enrichment: Configure multiple data sources in one place to maximize contact accuracy. For example, set up a waterfall enrichment that tries several email and phone providers in sequence to find valid contact information before your first touchpoint. This significantly increases your reach rate without wasting time on bounces. 2. AI qualification for genuine pain points: Create natural language prompts that identify prospects with problems you can solve. For a localization company, this means scanning websites for translation gaps. One prospect had a product supporting 30+ languages but maintained an English-only website – a perfect opportunity to start a value-driven conversation about expanding their web presence. 3. Signal stacking for personalized outreach: Combine multiple signals in priority order to craft messages that address specific pain points. Look for companies showing international expansion signals alongside their existing language limitations. One prospect was expanding overseas but only offered English language support – a clear opportunity to help them scale localization for customer acquisition in new markets. The result? Instead of "Hope this email finds you well," you can send: "We noticed you support 14+ languages in your product, but your website is only in English. Are you looking to expand your website to better service your international users?" The best part? You can do all of this inside Apollo.io - from initial prospect search to multi-source enrichment to AI custom research to signal stacking to AI messaging - in just a few clicks. Check out the demo to see how easily you can transform your outreach from generic to genuinely valuable.