Providing exceptional customer experience has become a necessity for any eCommerce website. In this blog, we have summarized frequently asked questions about what customer experience is, the importance of customer experience, how to measure customer experience, and several practical ways to improve the customer experience for eCommerce stores.
Introduction
E-commerce shopping has changed the retail landscape as more and more consumers are looking for accessibility, variety, and competitive pricing. Research published by HubSpot revealed that 80% of consumers would stop doing business with a company because of poor customer experience.
What is Customer Experience?
In simple words, customer experience is the impression you leave with your customers, resulting in how they conceive of your brand, across every stage of the customer journey.
Know the Difference Between Customer Experience and User Experience
Customer experience and user experience sound similar, and people often use these terms interchangeably. As an eCommerce service provider, it’s crucial for you to know the differences. The fundamental difference is that the customer experience is concerned with the end-to-end customer interactions with a brand while user experience is more specifically aimed at the usability of a website or product (and therefore, an eCommerce website).
Why Measure Customer Experience?
Customer experience is significant to the sustained growth of a business. It’s even more critical to ensure a positive customer experience. Satisfied customers build brand loyalty and affinity, and refer their network and give you positive customer reviews that will help your business earn new customers.
Remember, customers, are your best resource for positively and organically growing your brand awareness because their recommendations shared with networks(for example, friends or family) are more reliable than marketing and advertising channels.
Related Article: Top Website Redesign Practices for Improved Conversions & Sales
How to Measure Customer Experience?
- Analyze customer satisfaction survey results
Using customer satisfaction surveys regularly will provide you an idea of your customers’ experience with your product or service. A highly recommended method to measure customer experience is the Net Promoter Score or NPS. It estimates how likely the customers would recommend the brand, product, or service to their friends, family, and colleagues.
- Analyze customer support ticket trends
Another method to ensure the positive customer experience is to investigate into the tickets your customer support team is tackling every day. If there are recurring issues that cause much discomfort for your customers over an extended period, make an effort to try to resolve them on high priority to make the process easier.
- Ask customers for product, feature, or service requests
Create a discussion forum for your customers to request new products, features, or services to make your offerings more useful and helpful. That forum can be an email survey, on social media, or a community forum, allow customers to offer suggestions proactively. It doesn’t mean you must implement all of the customers’ recommendations. However, if recurring trends are cropping up, time and again, they might be worth investigating into with some additional R&D to see.
- Diagnose the rate and reasons for customer churn
Customer churn is a big business killer. It can happen even with the established brands; it’s part of doing business. However, it’s essential that you learn from churn when it happens so you can prevent it from happening for the same reasons. Make sure you’re doing regular analysis of your churned customers. Reduce churn among paying customers, and you’ll be rewarded with higher revenue, guaranteed.
Ways to Improve Customer Experience
Practical and useful ways to improve eCommerce website experience are as follows:
- Provide user-friendly website
According to Episerver, 54% of online shoppers will abandon a purchase if they can’t find what they’re looking for. User-friendly site navigation makes it easy for visitors to find the information that interests them quickly. It helps the search engines index your essential information efficiently and effectively. On the other hand, poor navigation distracts visitors. When shoppers can’t find what they’re looking for, you don’t get the conversion you want.
- Hassle-free check-out process
Checking out is the end of eCommerce shopping. Research published by PRWeb shows that 87% of customers will abandon their online carts if the check-out process is too complicated. Therefore, the check-out process should be seamless, painless, and straightforward. The check-out page should be consistent with the home page in terms of color and background themes. Your conversions will increase with how easy it is to check out from your online store.
- Proactive customer service
One of the most realistic ways to create customer confidence is to practice active customer service. According to Microsoft, 96% of consumers around the globe say customer service is a crucial factor in their preference for loyalty to a brand. Gartner predicts that 89% of businesses are expected to compete mainly on customer experience. When you recognize what can potentially go wrong and inform the consumer, you deliver impressive customer service, creates confidence, and confirms the customer made the right decision to do business with you and your company.
- Personalized Experience
According to Salesforce, 88% of retailers say personalization has improved their marketing effectiveness. Infosys research shows that 59% of consumers who have experienced personalization say it has a noticeable impact on their purchasing. Implement personalization strategies such as encouraging customers to create profiles, geotargeting, implement customer loyalty programs, monitor their browsing and purchase histories, write content, and email subject lines with a personal message. It’ll help enhance the customer experience and ultimately drive more sales.
- Take advantage of social media networks
Social media is not limited to connecting with friends, chatting, blogging, and sharing pictures anymore. An estimated 67% of consumers now use social media networks like Twitter and Facebook to seek resolution for issues. Leverage the benefit from social media and increase sales by using them wisely.
- Include customer reviews
Customer reviews or testimonials help product sales and overall website conversion. It works as social proof to your website; displays the quality and authenticity of your product.
- Well Optimized website for desktop and mobile
According to Think With Google, 53% of customers will leave a mobile site if it takes more than three seconds to load. Therefore make sure your site loads quickly, whether on a computer or a mobile device.
- Offer live chat
Live chat provides visitors a convenient channel to get questions answered, help them make decisions, and move them forward to purchase a product. eCommerce enterprises can leverage the potential of the latest technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solutions and Natural Language Processing (NLP), to improve the overall customer experience. For example, Chatbots can effectively provide customers with instant responses and resolving complaints quickly without the need of a customer representative.
- Accurate shipping information and tracking updates
Online order tracking is one of the essential factors in eCommerce because it allows clients to serve their online customers with precise shipping details better. Providing customers with realtime shipping information and tracking updates lets them know that their business is both reliable and trustworthy, both of which are crucial to customer retention.
- Provide order history
Insights provided by a customer’s purchase history provide you with the necessary information like what works well and what doesn’t in terms of the products customers want to buy from you. It helps you strategize marketing campaigns better by providing necessary information to create highly targeted campaigns and ads.
- Include a high-quality photo of products
According to ViSenze, 62% of young consumers want visual search capabilities. Weebly research revealed that 22% of online product returns are because the ordered items look different than in the photos. Therefore, it’s important to include high-quality images on the website. High-quality images have the potential to increase traffic, improve engagement, increase conversions, and enhance the overall experience for your audience and consumers.
- Provide same-day delivery or faster delivery
Same-day-delivery is one of the most critical factors pushing eCommerce enterprises to stay ahead of the competition. According to PwC, 88% of consumers say they would pay more for same-day or faster delivery. Customers these days expect low-cost, fast, and highly transparent delivery of goods.
- Provide secure and multi-channel payment options
The reliable and more accessible payment options are also the driving force of Commerce businesses. According to Global Sign, 84% of customers will abandon a purchase if the website isn’t secure. Therefore, eCommerce retailers can provide safe and convenient payment mechanisms to consumers by removing the need to carry cash, queue in shops to pay, take a wallet, or remember numerous passwords required to make a payment.
How can Esferasoft help you?
Hopefully, by now, you have a better understanding of the customer experience, to make your customer journey as positive as possible. Need additional help to create an outstanding customer experience for an e-commerce website? We’re here to help! Learn more about our eCommerce website services. We provide custom eCommerce development solutions to businesses that provide exceptional customer experiences.
