User Experience and Touchpoint Management: A Case Study for the Mechanical and Engineering Industry

Touchpoints are the moments of truth. At these contact points, it decides whether customers will buy and be loyal or not. To make it easier for customers to buy, B2B marketers must not only understand the course of the buyer journey, but also address the greatest challenges for decision-makers at every point of contact on their path-to-purchase. For this reason, at the beginning of every user experience initiative, the goal should be to identify and evaluate the touchpoints relevant to potential as well as current customers. The deployment of a B2B touchpoint evaluation tool enables an interactive and multidimensional evaluation of individual touchpoints not only from an internal point of view, but also from a buyer perspective and thus helps to derive customer-oriented recommendations for future management of the identified contact points. Building on this, an international industrial technology group has conducted a research project on touchpoint identification and evaluation in their industry. The case study provides insights into how the technology group involved customers in the touchpoint analysis, how results were evaluated with the help of a B2B touchpoint evaluation tool, and to which findings the project has led, influencing decisions on the distribution of marketing resources per touchpoint.