To succeed in e-commerce, it’s essential to look up from the computer and see the world through your customers’ eyes. Shopping has become more than a transactional activity for consumers. It’s about being engaged and entertained.
You can have a website selling one of the most in-demand products on the market, but if the consumers navigating your e-commerce store have a poor experience, you’re losing out on valuable sales.
Instead of buying from you, they’re going to a competitor or changing their mind about making a purchase altogether.
So what can you do to make sure you’re providing a great ecommerce customer experience that generates happy buyers and maximizes conversions?
In this article, we’re going to discuss what customer experience management is, why you need to pay attention to your existing customer experience, and how we make changes as a digital agency to ensure your customers enjoy shopping with you—even when it’s not in an actual store.
Regardless of the type of company or industry you’re trying to market, customer experience (CX) always has to be top of mind. And customer experience management (CXM) helps your team make sure of that.
In ecommerce, customer experience management revolves around the online experience that anyone finding and landing on your website or product page goes through, from the very start of the checkout process to the post-purchase confirmation email in their inbox.
(Well, as long as the experience is seamless enough that they make it that far.)
Why does customer experience matter? Let’s find out.
Seventy-three percent of consumers (outbound link) say that customer experience has a major impact on their purchasing decisions. In layman’s terms, that means almost three-quarters of shoppers would likely decide not to buy from a store (whether ecommerce or in-person) that provides a poor experience.
If you’ve never given your ecommerce customer experience a second thought, it’s time to make it a priority. We’re going to walk you through the top CX trends of 2022 to give you a starting point and help you understand how your customers prefer to navigate shopping with your online store.
- Customer service
- Privacy laws
- Security standards
- Accessibility requirements
- User experience
- Web design experience
- Social commerce
Short answer? Be everywhere your customers are.
Long answer? Customer service is a major part of providing a positive customer experience, and you should have some kind of service option on every channel where you reach customers.
When people reach out on Instagram, your social team should be trained on how to get the best, fastest support. If someone’s having an issue on your website, there should be an easy-to-find contact form or live chat window to offer help.
More than that, your customer service experience should be easy on your customers: 72% of them expect your support team to already have insight into who they are and what purchases they’ve made. This way, you can jump right into how you can help.
So what makes a great customer service experience? A few things to consider are:
- Timely responses. Forty-eight percent of consumers expect a response within 24 hours, and 18% expect a response within the hour.
- Consistency. Build a brand that has a reputation of solid, consistent customer service and support.
- Human element. Even if you have a chatbot to help with support issues, make sure there’s still a level of authenticity and friendliness with each touch.
- Omnichannel support, Whether a customer wants to get in touch via social media, live chat, email, phone, etc., you need to provide a number of different support channels.
- Ease of contact. Make it easy for customers to contact you. For example, have a live chat window pop up on your website or include support info in your social bios.