7 Ways to Improve Customer Experience for Ecommerce
According to a Forrester study,
businesses that focus on customer experience “have 1.6x higher brand
awareness, 1.5x higher employee satisfaction, 1.9x higher average order
value, 1.7x higher customer retention, 1.9x return on spend, and 1.6x
higher customer satisfaction rates.”
Yet many ecommerce businesses lose their customers because they don’t focus
on creating strategies that improve customer experience. In this article,
we'll discuss seven proven ways you can improve customer experience.
Remember the last time you bought something online? Was that a good experience Yes? No? A little bit of both?
If I were to ask you if you’d shop from that particular website again, what will your answer be? You’d only go back to a website if you had a great experience before, correct?
According to a Forrester study, businesses that focus on customer experience "have 1.6x higher brand awareness, 1.5x higher employee satisfaction, 1.9x higher average order value, 1.7x higher customer retention, 1.9x return on spend, and 1.6x higher customer satisfaction rates".
Unlike brick-and-mortar retail stores, ecommerce platforms have become increasingly popular over the years, thanks to the many conveniences they offer. At-home delivery, free shipping, hassle-free returns, real-time customer support, and huge discounts are some of the most notable offerings of ecommerce customer service. All of this is what makes for a well-rounded ecommerce customer experience.
So it’s crucial to invest in your ecommerce customer service if you wish to establish a successful, sustainable, and profitable e-commerce business. And, if you fail to design innovative and actionable strategies to enhance and improve customer experience over time, you will lose your customers.
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While it may seem like a daunting task with the ever-rising competition amongst online businesses, here are seven proven ways that can help improve the customer experience for your ecommerce business!
1. Design a Fast-Loading, Easy-To-Navigate Website
Stats show that 47% of netizens expect a website/webpage to lead within two seconds, and 39% of people abandon a website or a webpage if the images take too long to load. Thus, optimising your website/webpages for speed is crucial. Needless to say, your website should be user-friendly and easy to navigate. Another essential thing to keep in mind is that your website/webpages should be SEO friendly as well. This helps you stay on the top rankings of the SERPs (search engine results pages).
You can make the user search experience smoother and more accessible by keeping your website design neat and simple. Also, you can categorise your products according to design, type, size, use case, gender, and other relevant classifications to help save a user’s time.
2. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices
Thanks to the rapid proliferation and adoption of mobile devices (particularly smartphones), more than half of the internet traffic comes from mobile devices. In fact, mobile e-commerce is all set to grow at a rapid rate through to 2021.
Source
So, what does this entail? It means that if your website isn't optimised for mobile devices, you are losing out on tremendous business opportunities. You can optimise your website to improve customer experience by following these simple tips:
- Adopt a responsive web design. This allows your website to adapt to the screen it is being loaded on intuitively.
- Make your website visually appealing with bite-sized pieces of information that’s easy to consume on the go.
- Optimise the images, infographics, etc. for different screen resolutions.
- Place the navigation buttons optimally for easy access on mobile devices.
- Optimise the size of your contact forms and ensure that they are autofill enabled.
3. Pay Attention to your Content
As an ecommerce marketer, your job is not only to sell and market products that can address the pain points of customers, but also to guide them in making the right purchase decisions. That’s where content comes in.
While potential customers browse your website to look for products that meet their needs, you can improve ecommerce customer experience by creating informative and engaging content.
How do you do that?
- Blogs, articles, listicles, and short videos are excellent ways to keep your customers informed about your brand (and the industry) and engaged.
- Also, you must ensure that all the product images, infographics, descriptions, etc., you use are relevant and correct.
The bottom line is that your content should be able to provide all the necessary information about your brand and products/services to customers.
4- Invest Your Time and Effort in Website Monitoring
Website monitoring refers to the process of checking and monitoring the health of a web app/website/webpage. It checks the performance, availability, load time, and functionality of websites or web apps to ensure that customers don’t suffer any unexpected downtimes while browsing through your website/web app or purchasing products on the same.
Thankfully, there are numerous tools to help you monitor the health of your website and web pages so that you can eventually improve customer experience. Tools like updown, StatusCake, Pingdom, Zabbix, Host Tracker, and Monitis are excellent website monitoring tools. These tools not only allow you to analyze your website/webpage data and get statistics charts in real-time, but they also help you identify bugs and remove them.
5. Choose the Right Tool to Provide Exceptional Customer Support
Customer support is a 24x7 job that can often get overwhelming. However, you cannot afford to slow down or lag on this front. You must always be ready to serve your customers. That’s the secret to building long-lasting relationships with them.
There are plenty of help desk software tools to ease the pain and troubles of your customer support executives. These can help you both streamline and manage your customer support workflows by providing:
- Round-the-clock resolution
- instant response
- Personalised support
- Reports and surveys to track the quality of the support process
6. Incorporate a Customer Review Section on Your Website
Authentic customer reviews and testimonials add credibility to your website. Since every brand/marketer claims that their product is the best out there, user reviews and testimonials are what offer a real insight into your products/services to potential customers.
While 92% of customers trust word-of-mouth recommendations from people they know, online reviewers have a trust rate of 70%. By incorporating a dedicated customer review/testimonial section on your website, you allow potential customers to see what other customers are saying about your brand.
7. Choose a Secure Payment Portal
After ensuring that all the pointers mentioned above are in place, you must choose the right payment portal for your website. The best payment gateways are those that are easy to use, secure, reliable, and offer multiple payment options to your customers.
While deciding on which payment portal is best suited for your website, you must consider the following things:
- Does it demand a setup fee or transaction charges?
- Do you need Automatic Billing support?
- Does the payment gateway support your CMS?
- Are you likely to serve overseas customers?
- How is the reputation of the payment portal?
- How is the customer support of the payment gateway?
Customer support and service is a long and continuous process. It demands extra efforts on the part of the marketer. In the rat race out there, whoever offers quality products and is willing to go the extra mile for customer satisfaction ensures their place in the market. The key is to devise ways to improve e-commerce customer experience continuously.
Are you ready to be one of them?