How to Improve Your E-commerce Customer Experience
Customers are the foundation of any business. This is true for businesses of all verticals, domains, and approaches. Customers are important at all stages of your business process. Business goals, strategies, and marketing campaigns of leading brands are woven around their consumers’ and target audiences’ needs and preferences.
Customers and E-commerce Environment
In an age driven by digitization, mobile technology, and fierce competition, you cannot overlook the significance of customers. More than five of your competitors offer products and services like yours to the same customer at any given time. To avoid missing a sales opportunity, the product you offer should be unique and in the interest of your users.
The key driving factor here is your customers’ experience with your product and customer service. The better the experience, the more chances you have for sales.
70% of buying experiences are based on how customers feel they are being treated.
Neosperience, Customer Engagement: 10 Stats and Facts to Improve Your Strategy
Visionary businesses strongly believe that offering a better customer experience (CX) will allow them to outperform their competition, establish customer trust, and eventually acquire more customers by word of mouth.
Philosophically, e-commerce is convenient for customers. They prefer online shopping because it is convenient, affordable, and full of options. Developments in the field of data security allow for safe, secure payment methods, while blocking the chances of online frauds associated with online shopping. This has led to a mountainous increase in the e-cdommerce sales and revenue.
eCommerce sales may hit the $4.3 trillion mark by the end of 2021.
Shopify, The Global E-commerce Playbook
To reach there, eCommerce has to fasten its belt and get set on a journey of improvements—to offer a superior customer experience. Your customer experience must increase overall customer satisfaction levels in order to add to your revenue growth.
80% of users would not trade with a company because of poor customer experience.
HubSpot, The Hard Truth About Acquisition Costs (and How Your Customers Can Save You)
This article outlines some of the best practices for improving customers’ experiences with your e-commerce business.
1. Develop a User Friendly Experience
The user experience on your website/app should be flawless, from the home page to the product pages and from the cart to the check-out page. Your customers should be able to do whatever they want to do.
Even if they are trying to empty their cart, the process and navigation should be designed and defined so they do not find it confusing to use your website. You should design your website or app from a customer-friendly standpoint. It should be easy for your web users, not just for you.
A search button should help customers find the product they are looking for. Categories, page titles, product keywords, tags, product images, and other details should be keyed in for users’ convenience. Ponder on deploying an e-commerce search extension to enable a quick and easy search feature on your website.
2. Offer Secure Payment Methods
Your eCommerce store’s payment methods should be safe, secure, and hassle-free. Customers want to know that their personal and financial data is secure when shopping online.
Add as many payment methods to your store as possible. Credit/Debit Card Payment, Bank Transfer, Cash on Delivery (COD), PayPal, and e-wallets are quite popular methods of payment these days. You must ensure that your portal allows your customers to pay through any of these payment options.
Most importantly, you will need to assure your page visitors and consumers that all your payment options are safe and secure. Invest in obtaining several security certificates for this and place those badges on your website or app as trust indicators to assure your customers that their data is safe with you.
Invest in a payment gateway with multilayered security measures. Encrypting the customer’s data will ensure the transaction is safe. Using a payment gateway fortifies your customer and business data and decreases the intensity and frequency of online fraud threats.
3. Create a Seamless Checkout Process
Most of the time, the reason behind an abandoned cart is a complicated checkout process. The checkout process on your web or app should be short, simple, and swift. Moreover, the user should be able to see his/her shopping cart at every page so he/she knows the way to complete the order.
The e-commerce industry loses countless dollars yearly due to abandoned carts or canceled payments during checkout. You could deploy automation to gauge the trends behind discarded shopping carts to improve the flaws existing in your checkout process.
During the checkout, the customer must be able to see the value of his/her cart and the shipping charges applicable. The page should also show information about offers and discount coupons applicable for the user.
Customers are always concerned about the delivery of their orders. They call to check the status of their shipments.
Deploying an advanced shipping suite will help your eCommerce business connect with multiple carriers and allow you to create flexible shipping rules based on varying orders, customer locations, and other crucial factors through a single dashboard.
If your business delivers or sources from abroad, your shipping suite must have import/export shipping functionalities. This helps you create a better user experience for shipping and order delivery.
Lastly, the eCommerce store should ensure zero downtime and no slowdowns during the checkout process to avoid last-minute cart abandonment.
4. Deliver Superior Customer Service
To improve customer experience, you must focus on providing higher level of customer service. This should include pre-sales and post-sales service.
Set up a team of amiable people to manage your customer support desk. Empower them with advanced AI-enabled CRM tools—a must-have suite for modern eCommerce businesses—so they can efficiently handle customers’ queries and issues.
Imagine a busy day and a long queue of customers waiting for their turn to speak to your customer support agent!
Having an AI-enabled chatbot saves your agents’ time and allows them to focus on other core activities of your customer support process. Chatbots can simultaneously handle multiple calls/conversations and quickly resolve issues such as order confirmation, cancellation, replacement, refund, shipment details, etc.
Leverage Search & Social Media Optimization/Marketing
With the right search engine optimization and marketing approach, you can help your target audience find what they search for on search engines like Google and Bing. If your eCommerce backend is not SEO-ready, you could use a good quality eCommerce SEO extension and implement tried-and-true SEO strategies to appear in top search results on leading search engines.
Your eCommerce business can use social media in numerous ways:
- To promote your products, services, company culture, and offers;
- To connect with your audience and customers;
- To listen to your unsatisfied customers and to resolve their issues on public portals and
- To advertise your brand(s).
You will just need to use the most effective social networks for your business and find and connect with your audience/customers. For the convenience of your consumers, you can add a review page, enable commenting and wall posting for customers, and create a shop and sell on social networks.
Apart from offering convenience, a secure environment, and transparency, you could enhance the experience by providing personalized recommendations to your visitors and existing customers. For this, you will need to work with AI and ML tools that can learn from the behavior of users on the Internet and help you recommend the right product to the right customer. It’s like offering/recommending something that a user might be looking for.