Can you afford to jeopardize your customer experience (CX) as an eCommerce brand? Do you have plenty of chances to fix your CX faux pas?
The uncomfortable truth is—No, at least not after looking at these statistics:
73% of consumers rate a good customer experience as one of the deciding factors while making a purchase. However, 17% could abandon a business after just one bad experience.
Either way, it’s pretty evident that delivering a valuable customer experience is more important than just relying on product quality. Not to forget, the competitors are only one click away from worsening the churn rate.
Thus, eCommerce platforms need to deliberate on delivering memorable customer experiences if they want to boost their business and ROI.
What is an eCommerce customer experience, anyway?
It is your customer's perception of your eCommerce brand based on their engagement at every step of the buyer’s journey. It’s how you make them feel when interacting with your eCommerce platform.
However, CX far exceeds customer service and looks at the broader, overall picture for customer satisfaction. In contrast, customer service pivots only on the assistance you provide to your customers.
Okay, while CX optimization has a huge role to play if you are keen to grow your eCommerce business, there is still one question: how to get it right?
So, here are 7 amazing tips to get you started on enhancing your eCommerce customer experience.
How to Improve Your eCommerce Customer Experience?
1. Personalized Customer Experience
Personalized CX leverages data insights to personalize the entire customer journey.
Content, recommendations, and promotions that speak to individual customers make them feel special and want to hang out with you a little more, thus increasing the chances of conversion.
There are several eCommerce personalization tactics:
- Leverage data to build buyer persona and design targeted campaigns.
- Offer “handpicked for you” product recommendations based on individual browsing history and purchase trends.
- Tap into local weather-specific buying intentions while curating recommendations.
- Send follow-up emails offering discounts on items customers have shown interest in.
- Re-engage with a list of recently viewed items, cart abandonment emails, and incentives on abandoned items.
2. Intuitive User Experience (UX)
Prioritizing optimized UX design for your eCommerce website hinges on the fact that if customers get confused while using your site or find it tricky to navigate, they would never want to revisit it.
Here is what makes for great UX:
- Intuitive site architecture that offers frictionless user flow along the journey.
- Web pages that load quickly along with images.
- Updated designs and fresh content.
- AI-powered ecommerce plug-ins for real-time search suggestions.
- Minimalistic designs.
- Consistent product description and images.
3. Value-selling Product Page Copies
We hate to break it to you, but most visitors don’t care about your products. The only thing they are interested in knowing is what problems your product solves.
That’s why knowing how much information is too much, combined with the following tricks, should help you nail the product page copies:
- Write from the perspective of customers.
- Highlight features in a way that addresses their biggest pain points.
- Corroborate copies with high-quality images and explainer videos.
- Enhance engagement by building an emotion-evoking copy.
- Cut the fluff out and write tight.
4. Mobile Optimization
While using an eCommerce platform on mobile phones, be it just for browsing or completing a transaction, customers will always expect it to be smooth sailing.
Hence, adapting your site for mobile will get you to understand how it is different in terms of CX and cater to customer expectations exactly the way they want.
Here’s how you can offer friction-free shopping on mobile:
- Be selective about the information you display. If it’s not critical, avoid it.
- Trim the number of steps in the customer journey. For instance, allow quick guest check-out rather than account set up.
- Be deliberate about smart navigation and search functions.
- Ensure seamless integration with multiple payment gateways.
- Use autofill-enabled forms and num pads to simplify typing on mobile.
5. Omnichannel Customer Experience
It’s more important than ever to make marketing, sales, and support accessible across multiple channels while treating each touchpoint as a part of a cohesive whole.
Some omnichannel CX strategies to facilitate a convenient buyer journey:
- Capture customer data on preferences at every point of interaction.
- Embrace machine learning-powered hyper-personalization.
- Integrate in-store and eCommerce buying experience.
- Use unified data to deliver swift after-sale support.
6. Shipping Experience That Delights
Delivery happens to be one of the key contributors to positive post-purchase CX. Much as the word “free shipping” has immediate calming effects on customers’ eyes, there are several other eCommerce shipping tactics that help you build trust.
- Offer multiple shipping options along with affordable ones.
- Partner with reliable international courier freight services only.
- Ship orders within the estimated time.
- Viewable order tracking is a must.
- Avoid wrong delivery by implementing real-time inventory tracking.
- Switch to more eco-friendly and carbon-neutral shipping providers.
- Allow flexible split up and shipping to multiple addresses.
7. Unmatched Customer Support
Successful eCommerce businesses would certainly agree with this; Customer-centric support could be your holy grail of opportunity to refine your cx. Moreover, higher cost of customer acquisition than retention makes it much more sensible to keep the one you have satisfied than find a new client.
Tips for top-notch customer service:
- Answer queries on multiple contact channels such as real-time chats, social media, product support pages, forums, etc.
- Take advantage of digital engagement tools.
- Offer video-chat solutions for complex issues.
- Tap into customer reviews for CX improvement.
- Make quicker response time a ritual.
Final Thoughts
While what you read just now is an absolute goldmine of information, know that the customer expectations are moving targets and keep evolving with time.
Because customer expectations largely shape the customer experience, it boils down to one fact—improving eCommerce customer experience is an ongoing process.
That is why eCommerce businesses need to keep innovating and pushing boundaries to unlock better and better experiences in the long run.
