To grow your freight dispatching business and get more clients in 2023, your top priority should be to improve your customer experience for current and potential customers. After all, happy customers are the key to more contracts and bigger paychecks!
Although it may seem daunting, enhancing your customer experience doesn’t have to be difficult or overly time-consuming. Even small changes can lead to major impacts on your freight dispatching business. All you have to do is look at the interactions you have with customers and assess how they can be tweaked for the better. In other words, you should focus on upgrading your customer touchpoints.
What Are Customer Touchpoints?
A customer touchpoint is simply a point of contact or the way a potential or current buyer “touches” your brand. Whenever a customer learns about your freight dispatching business from an ad, recommends a friend to your services, visits your website, or has any other exchange regarding your brand, a customer touchpoint is involved. While some of these touchpoints, like cold-calling, are fully within your control, others, like word-of-mouth reviews, occur without your input. Nevertheless, you can sway these touchpoints in your favor by creating a good customer experience.
Why Are Customer Touchpoints Important For Your Freight Dispatching Business?
Customer touchpoints often serve as a way for owner-operators to learn about your freight dispatching business. Putting your best foot forward and making a good first impression will help you turn those leads into clients. Once an owner-operator is interested in your services, exposing them to multiple touchpoints also gives them more opportunities to turn into a paying customer and will make them more likely to remember your brand when they need a freight dispatcher.
Touchpoints are important for current customers, too. In fact, clients often interact with your brand more often than leads do; they may follow your freight-dispatching business on social media, check your website for availability or sales, purchase a service, give your customer service team a call, and talk about your services with a friend. The better their experiences with these touchpoints, the more likely owner-operators will be to become repeat buyers, leave positive reviews, and recommend your freight-dispatching business to others.
Any and all customer touchpoints are opportunities, but they can also pose risks. For instance, if a customer interaction, such as a customer service call, is satisfactory, the client will be likely to work with you again and recommend you to others. But if that customer touchpoint ends with frustration, they may spread negative reviews. That’s where customer experience and decreasing your time to value come into play!
Customer Touchpoints and Decreasing Your Time To Value (TTV)
Needless to say, customer touchpoints can be a make-or-break moment for your freight dispatching business’s marketing strategy. Luckily, there are some simple ways to ensure that your customers are having satisfactory interactions. Most importantly, you’ll want to concentrate on decreasing your time to value (TTV). In other words, you want potential customers to be able to access the value they’re looking for as easily and quickly as possible. Any hoops they have to jump through will only decrease the chance that they’ll become a paying customer or return to your services.
Let’s say a customer sees a graphic on social media promoting your freight dispatching services and they’re interested! That’s great…right? It is….if they can buy. If there’s no link to your website and no number to call for more information readily available, they probably won’t know where to go to actually start working with you. Some may make the effort to search for your social media profile to find your contact info, but most won’t have the patience and will look for someone else who’s easier to work with. They may even leave the interaction so frustrated and with such a bad impression of your business that they’ll be turned off your services for good!
Do you see the issue? In today’s market, there’s always another option for buyers. So, you want to make sure that your business is positioned to be the most visible and the most accessible. The quicker you can get a potential buyer to become a paying customer, the more likely they’ll be to follow through and the more satisfied they’ll be with the ease of their experience. That also means you’ll get clients more quickly, earning you a bigger paycheck even faster!
Types of Customer Touchpoints (and How to Improve Them)
The good news is that the freight-dispatching industry as a whole hasn’t modernized. Most freight dispatching businesses do things old-school, cold-calling owner-operators and handing out flyers. But these methods, unless they’re done right, have a much higher TTV than other, more modern methods. Because of this, focusing on online customer touchpoints like the ones below can really set your freight dispatching business apart in terms of customer experience. However, you’ll still have to focus on decreasing your TTV and making the most out of these interactions to ensure your clients are satisfied!
Social Media
By staying active on social media, you create an avenue to reach both current and potential buyers without investing much time or effort. Every update serves to remind people of your services while every comment and reply builds customer relationships, making your business more personable.
You can also use these channels to inform owner-operators about promotions or other important news. Just remember to check that the links you post lead where customers would expect them to lead and that your contact information is front and center so people know how to get in touch when they’re ready to start working with you.
Online Ads
Social media and online ads are great ways to rake in leads and push past clients to purchase again. In particular, ads are fantastic for spreading the word about sales and promotions, upping interest. Just make sure that you minimize your TTV by ensuring that owner-operators who click on your ad are brought directly to the right place and don’t have to suffer through additional steps. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting your money!
Website
One of the biggest mistakes business owners like freight dispatchers make is not treating their website with the care and attention it deserves. Your website is, in many ways, the face of your business. Therefore, it must be easy to use and navigate. There’s nothing worse than a frustrating website to turn customers off. So, pay attention to the layout and formatting of your web pages and make improvements where necessary so it’s straightforward to use.
Lead Magnets
With lead magnets, you offer freebies to entice potential buyers to interact more with your brand, creating even more touchpoints. For example, you may offer a free consultation or PDF download in exchange for signing up for your email list. That way, you can re-target them later, yet they’ll feel as if they’ve gotten value with the free gift they’ve received.
Email Marketing
With email marketing, you’re able to reach out to people who you already know are interested in your services and give them more opportunities to work with you. Because you know that these owner-operators have interacted with your brand before (they had to get on the email list somehow!), you already have a leg up. And since the emails are delivered directly to their inboxes, you’ve already decreased your TTV! Now, you just have to funnel them to the final sale with enticing, easy-to-use links.
Start Marketing Your Freight Dispatching Business with Better Customer Touchpoints Today
Keep in mind that the customer touchpoints that end up being most successful for your freight-dispatching business may not be the same as those that work for another. While the examples listed above are some of the best and most popular ways to interact with customers, there are tons of other touchpoints that you can explore. The most important thing is that you find what works for you and your client base.
Paying attention to what ads, links, and pages get clicks with metrics and analytics will help you to understand what channels are best for converting your leads; however, the ultimate way to understand your customer touchpoints is to simply ask! With surveys and feedback forms, you can see how users found out about your freight dispatching business and any pain points or problems they had during the process. That way, you can improve areas that might be frustrating for your clients and focus your time and attention on the customer touchpoints that draw the most interest.
To learn more about marketing your freight dispatching business and start making $20,000 a month, I highly recommend you check out my 6-week course, which features all the best advice on how to succeed and get rich with freight dispatching. I also post tons of free tips and tricks on my Facebook page, YouTube, and Instagram. Or you can text “info” to 407-698-3972 to get advice sent straight to your phone!
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