What is a pre-touch point as it relates to your business? The pre-touch point is when a customer still hasn’t interacted with your business directly. They’re in the phase of considering who to choose. They’re researching. The question is what will they find?
An example of how this works
An example of this would be someone looking for a business coach. They might ask friends for a referral or they might perform a search online. During this process, they may see or hear about you. This is a pre-touch point. This is their first exposure to your business before they really interact with you.
Creating a great pre-touch point phase
How can you create a unique experience for your customers during the pre-touch point phase? The pre-touch point is most impacted by how you’ve done business in the past.
The person looking for a business coach who asks a friend for a recommendation. That recommendation is determined by how business has been done in the past.
That online search for a business coach turns up reviews of the business. These reviews are a reflection of how clients have been treated in the past.
The above example is for digital experiences. What if you have a physical business?
Even with a physical business, word-of-mouth and online reviews play a role, but so does your physical location.
What is the appearance of your business? Clean or dirty? Organized or disorganized? Does it consider the needs of the customer? What does your landscaping look like? What about your signage–is it easy for your customers to read?
In order to help improve your pre-touch point, you need to get into the experience and mindset of a potential customer. How might they perceive what they see, hear, feel and experience when they first make contact with your business?
Physical pre-touch points
If you have a physical location, personally drive-by it and see what it might look like from the customer’s perspective. Then try to take on the customer’s mindset and pull into your location. Walk to the door of your business thinking about what the customer is sensing. Go into your place of business and think about the first impression that’s made as they come through the door.
Reviews are a digital pre-touch point
Let’s come back to reviews for a moment. It seems that a lot of companies try to fight against negative reviews. Might it be better to accept those views as the reality of the reviewer? Is it possible that your marketing material is attracting the wrong people? Or is it possible you really could improve an area of your business that would cause negative reviews to stop?
Instead of reacting negatively to negative reviews, why not look at them as an opportunity to make improvements? Use this information to make your business better for your customers or clients. If you use this to make corrections, you can become really, really good at what you do. And when you become really, really good at what you do, guess what happens? You stand out from the crowd! When you stand out from the crowd, you make it easy for the right people to choose you.
And yes, sometimes there are negative reviewers who just love to nitpick and maybe there’s nothing wrong with what your business is doing. Just let it go and focus on serving the right people. Their reviews will outweigh the few negative reviews you get.
Being brave can have big payoffs
Another way that you can affect reviews and word-of-mouth referrals is again by making changes to how you’re doing business now. Have you ever taken the time to ask your clients or customers what they hate? Yes, actually ask your customers what they hate about doing business with you. Okay, so you can ask them if there is anything that they hate about doing business with you that way you’re not assuming there’s a problem.
Maybe it’s because we’re afraid of what we’ll hear, but we have to be brave and ask our customers and clients these kinds of questions. It’s the only way to know how to fix things and make improvements.
After you find out what’s wrong, then ask your customers or clients what they love about doing business with you. That way you can do more of it or even improve it so they love it even more.
If you want to improve your pre-touch points with potential customers or clients, you need to improve your existing business. Because what you do now will be a reflection of who you are for future clients or customers.
This goes not just for the pre-touch points, but all touch points customer or client may have with your business. Remember they’re human. They want to feel seen, heard and that they matter. Because people don’t buy things. They buy how it makes them feel.
Create an experience they’ll love.
Photo credit: And yet again, we thank rawpixel for a great photo!