Can all online retail struggles be solved through digital feedback?
Online retailers face tough competition when it comes to offering a good customer experience and winning over customer loyalty. Whilst striving for this much-sought-after “perfect customer experience”, there’s still many other struggles retailers have to go through that hold them back.
In this blog we will go through the top struggles of online retailers and how these struggles can be tackled one by one using digital feedback.
1. Understanding the full customer journey
While this varies from website to website, understanding the full customer journey remains one of the top struggles of online retailers, especially considering consumers don’t shop in the same way they did before.
As an online retailer, you want to understand why your visitors are failing to convert. This inability to pinpoint root causes often stems from the fact that consumers interact with retailers across multiple channels, including via mobile devices, laptops, tablets, etc, which can make it really challenging to keep tabs on these customers. And not only that, despite the existence and use of tools such as web analytics, many retailers are unable to determine why their customers do what they do.
How can digital feedback help?
There are three different stages in which you can collect feedback, that will provide you with a good understanding of the customer journey:
- Beginning of the funnel: Here you can capture and analyse feedback to understand the quality of things like your product content, and offer relevant product information so more visitors will enter your sales funnel.
- Actual purchase within the funnel: In this stage of the funnel, you can capture ‘exit insights’ from visitors who didn’t complete the order and ascertain why these visitors did not proceed in the ordering funnel. An example of this is shopping cart abandonment.
- Confirmation page at end of the funnel: Using feedback here, you can gain insights into areas of improvement across the ordering process and the effort it took customers to reach their goals. For example, by collecting Customer Effort Score.
It’s very important to monitor all of these stages as it will give you a better indication of where exactly the pain points are and/or where frustration sets in.
2. Digital savvy consumers are more demanding
Gone are the days when the only way consumers could purchase a product was to go into a physical store and grab it off the shelf. Now nearly 51% of shoppers purchase their products and services online. This luxury of being able to shop wherever and whenever has, as a result, instilled higher online expectations among today’s consumers, and we’re not just talking about Millennials. Many modern-day consumers want to be able to easily search and find the products they need at the right price. And not only that, they want to be able to do this via multiple channels.
Studies show that 71% of internet consumption is now mobile. So along with website optimisation, retailers need to consider the performance of their mobile apps as well, which can be a big challenge without the right tools.
How can digital feedback help?
In-app feedback can greatly enhance user experience for mobile users, which is particularly critical considering so many consumers are shopping via mobile devices. Mobile apps are still somewhat new for a lot of companies, which means there’s a lot of room for improvement in terms of usability. And the transition from website to mobile app isn’t always an easy one. So should something go wrong, you’re going to need a way of finding out where and how – this is where feedback comes in handy.
Your customers are often the first to find technical errors and flaws on your mobile app so having a feedback option available will help you capture valuable insights (in real-time) and quickly resolve any issues that sprout up.
3. Customer centricity
Adopting a customer-centric approach is crucial for online retailers nowadays. They are realising that a traditional focus on sales isn’t going to win over the loyalty of their customers. So now what they’re having to do is entirely reorient their businesses and shift the focus to their customers. A big job for some, who were previously only devoted to figures rather than the customers themselves.
How can digital feedback help?
Digital feedback enables you to listen to your customers as well as let them know they’ve been heard. This is critical in building up customer loyalty as it shows that you are willing to ‘hear your customers out’ and take action based on their feedback.
Additionally, it can differentiate your business from its competitors. Listening to the feedback of your customers and using it to enhance your website and make structural improvements will make them more willing to come back again and again.
4. Creating strong and effective website content
Strong website content can go a long way, especially in the eCommerce industry. Many webshops tell the story of their products through website content; stories that help educate, entice, and sell their products to their customers. They also use it to enhance online support services as well as general website content (e.g. news pages, blog articles, etc). But sometimes it isn’t enough.
Sometimes your customers are looking for additional materials/information such as product videos or perhaps they think the specifications are not clear. And what do they do when they can’t find what they’re looking for? That’s right, they’re going to run into the arms of your competitors – where they have product videos and clear specifications readily available.
How can digital feedback help?
As discussed in a previous blog post, website content largely defines the success of your business. It seems trivial but missing just a little bit of information or detail can be a game-changer. Unless you’ve got digital feedback…
There are several ways to ask for content feedback on your website or mobile app, including placing an embedded form below the content and asking for feedback once the visitor has scrolled to the bottom of the page (helpful when collecting feedback on FAQ/service pages). These methods of feedback collection can help you understand what kind of content works best for your customers.
The struggle is real
But it doesn’t have to be a struggle with the right tool in place. Digital feedback provides you with the opportunity to enhance each and every funnel of your website or mobile app, while simultaneously keeping your website professional and your customers happy and loyal.