Five ways to eliminate consumer stress from your digital experiences
For today’s brands, the fastest way to ensure customer loyalty is by providing a stress-free experience. This experience should not only minimize consumer stress, it must also account for all of the different mindsets, moods and emotions that consumers may experience as they work their way through a purchase journey. But how can brands build such a stress-free and emotionally positive experience? And how can they start to recognize the subtle emotional annoyances that cause a stressful digital experience?
For today’s brands, the fastest way to ensure customer loyalty is by providing a stress-free experience. This experience should not only minimize consumer stress, it must also account for all of the different mindsets, moods and emotions that consumers may experience as they work their way through a purchase journey. But how can brands build such a stress-free and emotionally positive experience? And how can they start to recognize the subtle emotional annoyances that cause a stressful digital experience?
1. Identify your stressors
Before a brand can start to remove potential stress-points from its customer journey, it must first identify where those stressors are most likely to occur. To uncover these insights, brands must look beyond traditional website analytics and start to consider Experience Analytics. They must start to explore new metrics, examining everything from hovers, to scrolls to ‘rage clicks’. Only by examining these subtle signifiers can brands start to understand their customers’ Digital Body Language and uncover the real sources of stress online.
2. Look beyond feedback
While the vast majority of brands are already using customer surveys and NPS scores to monitor sources of stress, such direct feedback doesn’t always provide the most accurate results. In a recent survey by Clicktale, 1 in 20 consumers said that they regularly lie on customer feedback forms, either as a result of embarrassment or the so-called ‘participant bias’ (wanting to please those running the survey). To overcome this, brands must start to look not only at what shoppers say, but how they act. Only then will they uncover those subtle stress-points that consumers themselves may not even be aware of.
3. Put customer service first
When designing a customer journey, it’s very easy for marketers as well as app and web developers to work in a silo and forget to interact with other areas of the business. For many such designers, customer service becomes an afterthought, as, if an app or a site is designed correctly, visitors should never have to interact with the customer service team. In reality however, this is rarely the case. Customers will always have questions and queries, and customer service teams will inevitably remain a big part of the buying process. In fact, consumers rank a fast and responsive customer service team as their #1 factor for improving experiences. With this in mind, brands must work hard to ensure that access to customer service and support teams remains a central part of their app and website flows and customer journeys.
4. Provide answers
It’s not always possible to remove sources of stress from the buying cycle. Websites inevitably require maintenance and apps cannot survive without updates. Unfortunately, all of these things weaken the customer experience, increase stress levels, and are ultimately out of a business’ hands. What brands can do however, is prepare their customers for such changes. Our research found that even the most basic forms of explanation – whether a customized error page or a ‘back in five minutes’ sign – reduce the number of consumers reporting stress by 13%. By building such explanations into the customer journey, brands can significantly improve customer experiences at the most difficult moments.
5. Think about emotions
In the age of big data, it’s all too easy for brands to get wrapped up in the idea that all decisions must be based on hard facts and rational evidence. But, no matter how much people want to see themselves as wholly rational beings, the reality is that consumers purchase with their hearts just as much as their heads. Consumer purchase decisions are typically highly emotive, being driven by happiness, boredom, hunger and even stress. These activities result in a great range of emotions, and brands must do their best to understand those emotions and to help consumers walk away with a positive feeling. This is not only the secret to a positive customer experience, it is also the secret to a successful business.