The customer experience carries many touchpoints that brands rely on to communicate with customers. Each brand will have a unique combination of touchpoints that creates their unique brand experience, but those touchpoints can be used for another purpose – guiding customers to participate in brand research.
One challenge that insight teams struggle with is encouraging customers and the wider consumer population to participate in transformational research, generating insights that inform key strategies across the stakeholder organisation. Customer-centric organisations have managed to take charge of their research recruitment processes, one way of doing this is through insight team communication through branded touchpoints.
But which touchpoints are the best for research recruitment?
The Most Important CX Touchpoints to Research
Without participants, there would be no insights and no voice of the customer to guide key decisions within organisations. While insight teams have a connection to customers through research, getting customers into research in the first place is a practical concern. So, using existing customer-facing channels that get some footfall on the customer journey is a great way of finding and guiding the right customers to research.
The video above covered four of the most important customer experience touchpoints to research, the first being brand communication through email. When signing up for an online account in online shopping, or for an e-receipt which are becoming more normal now than ever, customers typically opt-in to receive marketing communications. These emails present a great opportunity for the brand to invite customers to join the customer research community or panel or even just a simple research project.
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| The customer experience carries many touchpoints that insight teams can use to recruit customers for important market research projects - but which ones should they choose? |
For those brands who already have an existing research panel, project or community, but who need more research participants, those existing research participants are vital connections to other customers.
This existing research panel is a brand touchpoint on its own, and when insight teams implement a referral system that rewards both the referrer and the referee, this can bring in many more customers into the research fold. Referrals will spark more engagement with research tasks with the customers already enrolled, but also with customers, you potentially don’t interact with quite as much.
For those brands that don’t have a research community or panel full of customer research participants, there are two crucial touchpoints that all businesses have formulated to communicate with customers: social media and customer service channels.
Brand social media channels are a great touchpoint that insight teams can use to communicate with customers and potential future customers who are interested in the brand about new research tasks and opportunities. Through targeted social media posts, brands can communicate with particular subgroups of their customer base that can inform current research, or contact all customer groups through a wider non-targeted post.
Customer service channels are one of the only touchpoints where customers get in touch with brands rather than the other way around. When customers have issues they want the brand to know, but at this point, customer service representatives can solve the immediate issue and then refer the customers onto the insights team so they can continue to point out issues and reform the brand processes, products, policies and services through troubleshooting research. These are the customers who actively want to spark positive change in the organisation, and so will be valuable assets to the insight team.
The Animated Insight Series
Our Animated Insight videos take a look under the hood of some of the less explored areas of the research industry. From the history and development of the sector, to recent trends shaping consumer behaviours - we want to present these topics in a fun, engaging and dynamic way. Because, after all, why shouldn't market research be fun?
