The way we shop has evolved with the seasons. However, the customers remain the same as before. Every time a buyer visits their preferred retail location, a helpful sales assistant will usually welcome them and offer to assist in choosing the finest item for their needs. Every product ordered will be neatly arranged, and they address any questions likely to arise along the way. Finally, the customers make a purchase and happily exit the store, having had a positive shopping experience. For this to happen, E - retailers all around the world must place a high priority on enhancing the overall eCommerce customer experience.
Every customer expects a smooth checkout process, particularly when purchasing goods online. Online buying promises to deliver convenient and efficient shopping experiences. By providing consumers with lasting memories and meeting their expectations, smart retailers have been experiencing significant product sales and revenue growth. Remember, your online retail success is evaluated based on the actual customer experience a shopper has ever had, regardless of the size of your store.
But what is eCommerce customer experience? How vital is customer experience? And what are the key strategies that eCommerce retailers can deploy to boost customer loyalty, conversion rates, and user experiences? Worry no more, as the answers to these salient questions, will be addressed in this article.
What Is eCommerce Customer Experience?
Customer experience refers to the impression potential buyers develop of a business based on their encounters with it, whether such interactions occur in-person, over the phone, or online. In e-commerce, customer experience refers to how well customers perceive a company's ability to interact and engage with them. Also, it frequently affects how they act in the future.
Note: Since actual customers post testimonials (reviews), they frequently provide excellent insights into what customers will value and look for in your enterprise. Therefore, You may learn about the qualities that users find appealing by reading what they say about your service or product offerings.
Why Is Customer Experience Important In E-commerce?
Ideally, when you provide customers with a wonderful experience, they will repurchase, be more devoted to your business, and tell others about it. Positive experiences influence customer retention, which also increases customer loyalty, increased revenue, and high conversion rates. The opposite happens when a customer has a bad experience. Therefore, it might be time to think about repurposing your advertising spending.
How to improve your eCommerce Customer Experience?
Retailers must think carefully about navigating each stage of the customer experience while remaining true to the company brand identity; if they intend to create an immersive customer experience for their eCommerce store. To build genuinely immersive user experiences, you need planning and expertise. These tactics can assist you in giving your clients rich and fulfilling shopping experiences by starting with the way you structure your product pages and concluding with feedback from customers.
While customers expect so much from an online store during their shopping galore, companies must put checks and balances in place to aid this transition. Below are proven strategies that enterprises should adopt to improve customer satisfaction in the 21st century significantly;
1. Utilize a smooth checkout process
Making the user checkout process as simple as possible may decrease the number of abandoned product carts. The shopping cart must show on every page, and transactions should be safe and protected. To avoid having a consumer arrive at the checkout and discover you don't accept their payment method, clearly display the various payment options, including Stripe, Paypal, etc.
When you discover that your eCommerce store has a high cart abandonment rate, you may rapidly install a feedback monitor to determine the root of the problem.
2. Offer Excellent Customer Support
Customers often desire online customer assistance because many of them are buying your items online. Companies may boost the likelihood that customers will get their issues resolved by providing a variety of customer care channels, such as live chat, product-specific forums, automated bot replies, etc. Users may look for a rival with more user-friendly support channels; compared to competitors with one or two forms of additional support choices. Also, if you don't address or resolve their concerns promptly, do not expect them to shop again at your store.
Note: Individuals should be able to speak with a live person regarding product inquiries, just as they do in a physical store, and many customers prefer such to using real-time chat controlled by a live agent.
3. Encourage Customer Reviews
Via your website, offer a review section where buyers may leave feedback and give their latest purchases a rating. These provide a simple means of assisting clients who require guidance. Prospective buyers might research a product's quality and suitability for their purposes and base their purchase decision on the feedback of other users.
4. Integrate Augmented Reality
Although the concept is still quite new, augmented reality engagements in e-commerce have become an intriguing trend. Ordinarily, shoppers cannot see how a couch will feel when they shop online or how garments will appear, which might cause potential buyers not to proceed with the product purchase. However, augmented reality will fill this gap.
For instance, Target Inc has introduced a robust augmented reality component called "Feel (See) It In Your Place (home)" via their website, enabling home product consumers to view furniture in person using a smartphone. Additionally, Warby Parker provides a VR option such that buyers may view how their prospective eyeglasses/spectacles will appear on their faces without leaving the comfort of their own homes.
5. Enhanced Mobile Optimization
According to recent research, mobile eCommerce transactions account for more than 72 percent of all e-commerce transactions. Unfortunately, many companies fail to offer a pleasurable and user-friendly mobile shopping and buying experience, despite the industry's tremendous growth. A company can best serve its clients than a competitor or rival that doesn't have a mobile-friendly online store; just by optimizing the platform to appear nice and work well on desktop computers, tablets, and mobile devices.
6. Provide a Personalized Shopping Experience
Creating tailored user experiences via online retailing is an intriguing and efficient method to gratify your online purchasing clients. E-retailers must make their product offers appeal to their customers by giving them the impression that their purchasing experience is personalized. It will also assist customers in selecting and deciding on a service or product they are considering acquiring from your company.
By recommending relevant products that your customers might also like or using any of their data to customize specific website features, such as the checkout and homepage, companies can provide personalized customer experiences as part of their e-commerce strategies.
Read More: E-commerce personalization: All you need to know
7. Offer Free Shipping
Free delivery on customers' orders is an excellent way to improve the eCommerce consumer experience. When making purchases online, 75 percent of buyers now anticipate delivery incentives. Even though 85 percent of US customers want speedy shipping, there has also been an increase in customers' expectations for the duration of free shipping. As shown in a Deloitte report in early 2019, 87 percent of customers who want free shipping also anticipate the fulfillment of the orders within seven days.
8. Showcase Engaging Product Pages
Smooth navigation, enticing images, and descriptive writing are essential components of an effective product page. Retailers can quickly communicate their value proposition by including a brief product description, quality images, and price. Through this means, customers will clearly understand what your items can achieve for them and picture themselves utilizing them.
9. Embrace Social Media
Interestingly, finding out what your clients want and need isn't just possible through survey data only; businesses can also utilize social media to gather feedback and interact with them there. Through your social media channels like Twitter and Instagram, customers frequently write comments regarding your services, products, and their online shopping experience. It's crucial to reply to all those comments immediately so that consumers know you are paying attention.
10. Integrate Email Forms
Include an email contact complaint form to make it simple for customers to reach you online. Users will be able to contact your company in this way even if they cannot place a call and receive assistance from a live representative. By so doing, you will have access to the valid email addresses of users, which a company can further harness to build the email lists.
What are The eCommerce Customer Experience Metrics?
In reality, it's impossible to control a metric you can't evaluate. Customer experience should be closely considered, just like any other part of operating a large eCommerce store, to achieve the highest investment returns. Therefore, enterprises that devote themselves to customer experience usually undergo digital transformation, which creates customers who are interested and engaged in an organization's product offering.
The important metrics you need to monitor to make sure that customer experiences are satisfactory in e-commerce are;
- Churn Rate
- Net Promoter Score
- Return Customer Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Customer Effort Score
- First Response Time
What’s Next?
Enterprises must improve customer experience to produce satisfied, happy, and loyal consumers to flourish in a market filled with numerous online retailers vying for a significant share of users' wallets.
