“The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” – Jerry Gregoire
There are so many e-commerce players, all competing for a finite market. In such a situation, as an e-commerce brand, how will you increase your customer base? Moreover, it is also essential to retain existing customers.
The solution is simple; enhance the customer experience if you want your e-commerce business to be successful.
Customer experience has two main components, customer perception, and Customer interaction. You must focus on enhancing positive perception for your brand and increasing customer engagement through all channels of communication.
Read further to find how to create the best customer experience for your e-commerce website.
Product search is the most prominent feature of an e-commerce website. If your customer is not able to find the product he is looking for, he will leave your site and buy it from your competitor’s site.
Do you want your competitor to surpass you? If not, make sure that the customer can find the relevant product conveniently and in the shortest possible time.
For good customer experience, and to increase conversions, e-commerce developers must make the product search as effective as possible. This includes easy navigation, optimized product pages, accurate and elaborate product descriptions, detailed specifications, relevant titles, high-quality product images, and videos, etc.
All the details of the product should be SEO friendly, including the text, images, and videos. This makes it easy for the customer to find your product through its attributes. Ultimately, no matter how much paid advertising you are doing, you can’t ignore targeting organic search.
According to research by Goodfirms, a lengthy checkout process is a paramount reason for cart abandonment.
An effective checkout process can increase the chances of conversion manifold. So, how to make the checkout process effective and prevent cart-abandonment?
Most carts are abandoned due to a lack of clarity about the shipping and return information. So, make this information easily accessible, before the checkout process, if you want to prevent the customer from abandoning the cart.
The checkout steps should be as less as possible so that the customer can checkout in a minimum number of clicks. The navigation should be clear and non-distractive. Prominently visible “Add to Cart,” “Move to Wishlist,” and “Checkout” buttons are mandatory for helping the customer manage the cart.
No matter how good your e-commerce website it, customers are not going to be loyal if you don’t offer them the best customer service. Necessarily, to be successful in e-commerce, you must master the art of making your customers happy!
Trends have changed, and customers want more. So, while customer service was reactive, now, it is proactive. By implementing the customer experience best practices, the customer service departments are soon graduating from cost centres to profit centres for the business.
But how do you know what the user wants? Why don’t you ask him? Your e-commerce website must have a chat assistant activated after tracking that the user is navigating from one page to another. Maybe, the user needs help; ask him if he does.
The AI-enabled chatbot learns from customer interaction, to serve him better in succeeding interactions. Voice assistants make the experience more portable. It queues and routes the customer queries intelligently to ensure that the problem is resolved by the right department, as quickly as possible.
A message at the right time, fast response time, availability through different channels, all are compulsory for the customer to appreciate your customer service. The use of bots in customer care eliminates human bias and makes the process faster.
So, if you haven’t tried AI-based bots, do it now and make your e-commerce customer experience memorable.
The past few years were about personalization in customer experience for the e-commerce industry. But, with cutting-edge technologies like AI, the trend is gradually moving to predictive customer experiences.
For effective e-commerce, it is important to track user behaviour. This data is recorded to create customer profiles. With a comprehensive customer profile and the use of artificial intelligence for the analysis of this data, the right decisions can be taken to maximize the results.
Machine learning is another feather in the cap. It empowers the application to understand the customers better. It can be used to time the customer experiences well so that you contact the customer at the right time. As there are active and passive times of the customer, follow up emails or offers can be sent during the best times when these would lead to conversion.
Through AI-based predictive analysis, you can also suggest to the customer the related products and accessories, complimentary products, substitute products, or products that exactly match the features that he is looking for.
In this era of omnichannel marketing, you must target customers through email, social media platforms, phone, and website. The customer experience should also evolve to managing customer journeys from all channels.
Not only should there be consistent customer experience across all the channels, but the different channels must exchange information effectively. When you have a 360-degree view of the customer from all the channels, it will be easy to understand and analyze the customer sentiment.
The activity doesn’t end here; customer journey management also involves customer experience mapping! So, you should not only track, but map the customer interactions and engagement from the first point of contact to the conversion. It gives valuable insights into the loopholes in your e-commerce website that need urgent attention.
After tracking the customer journey, the next step is to provide the customer access to one point of contact and a single interface for all customer communication.
Customers feel valued when they are asked for feedback. And, you need their feedback for improvement. So, customer feedback activity is beneficial to both the e-commerce brand and the customer. This makes it more important to focus on the customer experience component of feedback.
Just imagine that you just bought a product, and the e-commerce site presents a 10-page feedback form to you. What will you do? Undoubtedly, be it you or your customer, no one has so much time. So, make the feedback specific, concise, and easy for the customer to fill. It is also a good idea to send a quick and easy 5 point rating scale to the customer on social media. And, after the customer has submitted that feedback, ask him if he would like to give further comments.
Successful businesses create excellent customer experiences. This famous quote describes the importance that businesses give to delivering the best customer experience.
We take most of the money that we could have spent on paid advertising and instead put it back into the customer experience. Then we let the customers be our marketing.” – Tony Hsieh
If you want the best quality customer experience for your e-commerce website, hire the top e-commerce developers for your next project, and they will manage the rest!
Jin Markov is a Content Writer with GoodFirms, a research firm in the USA. He has expertise in writing on e-commerce development.
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