As an eCommerce business, you run on the factor of how well you satisfy the customers that reach you. You need to know how the customer conducts business, what they want from the business, and their preferences, and use this perspective when setting up strategies to enhance their purchase experience and engage them.
Without a solid customer experience to offer, the chances of a business succeeding are very little. This is why you need to work on setting up strategies to engage customers and improve the experience that you provide.
Here we will cover all the major strategies to have in place and the key expectations for a great customer experience.
Major Ecommerce Customer Experience Trends Based on Shopify Reports
Knowing how your customers carry out their online purchases and understanding their preferences, is your first step in crafting the finest customer experience. Here are some of the top Customer Experience trends in eCommerce you need to know as an eCommerce marketer.
Customer Service:
It’s not much of a secret that customer service is one of the major tools in running a good business. Following the same logic, it’s evident that customer service becomes very important for an improved eCommerce customer experience. Simply put, customers need to know that you are dependable and that they are cared for in the best way possible.
You need to provide service options on all channels that you use to reach your customers. This is so that your customer support will always be efficient on any of these channels, be it on the website, Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp.
The eCommerce customer service experience needs to be seamless and smooth. Statistics show that 72% of customers expect that the support team already has insight into them and their purchases. For you to access this information, a great way is the inclusion of customer accounts. This way each customer who creates an account, lets you track their name, order history, contact details etc.
For the finest eCommerce Customer service experience, there are certain points to keep in mind. These are:
- Consistency: Your business’s customer support and services should be known for being consistent, dependable and efficient.
- Faster Responses: Customers often expect responses to their queries within 24 Hours. The earlier the better.
- Human touch: Automations are great for assisting your team with support issues, but you need to ensure that your customer support system still maintains a friendly human quality.
- Support Over Multiple Channels: You should provide different support channels like social media, phone, email, live chat etc. so that your customers can easily get to you from their channel of preference.
- Easily Accessible: Features like your support info on socials, or pop-up live chat windows on your websites, will make it easier for customers to contact you.
Your brand has to respond and take action immediately when a mistake happens so the discomfort felt by the customer will soon be put far behind. Having poor customer service could make your existing customers stop using your brand.
Privacy Laws:
Data from cookies are very important for brands to have an insight into their customers and provide a more personalized user experience. Browser cookies store visitor data and information on the website making it easier for websites to personalize the experience.
In short, customer data is the gold mine that will aid you in providing an exceptional eCommerce customer experience.
But there are privacy laws in place to ensure regulated and consensual access to customers’ data. With laws like CCPA and GDPR, customer data or cookies can only be collected, stored and used by websites with permission.
Letting your buyers know that your website is collecting cookies, and providing them with a link to your privacy policy is one of the first things to set in place for using data for personalizing the customer experience. Usually, some websites send out a tiny notification alerting you to accept cookies, when you visit them for the first time.
But that’s not all. You need to plan ahead on how you are protecting the data and for what purpose you are using it. Shopify’s data shows that 28% of technology decision-makers think that customer data and privacy regulations could have changes that could affect growth this year.
With such major changes, your customer should be fully aware of what their data and information are used for. For example, if they provide you with phone numbers, make sure you let them know you will be using it to provide SMS Alerts and so on.
Customers should have the key to their own data, and brands can get to it only by earning trust. Using first-party data and direct quizzes is great at providing you data which customers willingly give away to have a personalized customer experience.
Security Standards:
The next major point to focus upon in your customer experience strategy would be your eCommerce business security standards. Online fraud is unfortunately very common. Customers are doubtful of approaching brands that are new to them, and rightly so. 74% of global online shopping scam victims lost money in 2021.
Security and trust go hand in hand, and this could make or break your business’s perception. To grow your brand’s reputation and garner trust, a secure online shopping experience, with safe payment methods, is a must-have. You need to have a secure way for customers to conduct transactions before anything, and only then, can you concern yourself with making the customers feel safe.
You can make your customers feel secure about conducting transactions by providing a disclaimer that the payment is safe and secure at check-out or state that on the website’s payment page like how Flipkart does.
Accessibility:
Accessibility means that you are aware of customer needs and are taking the necessary steps to address them. It is obvious that your eCommerce business website has to be as accessible and functional as possible to provide an inclusive eCommerce customer experience par excellence. This has to be the case for every customer.
Customers with any disabilities or impairments should not feel any hindrance while using the website. Some good practices that can be followed are:
- Add Alt tags to your images. Alt tags are descriptions of images on the website, which will greatly help customers who are visually impaired and use a screen reader.
- Make sure your CTA buttons are descriptive and avoid simple ambiguous lines.
- Have text or messaging alongside colors to aid customers that are colourblind.
- Use form field labels to assist people using screen readers.
- Localize your website so that customers all around the globe can easily access it from different languages.
- Use automated accessibility tools and guidelines to create the best customer experience.
Overall Web User Experience:
The overall web user experience for someone who lands on your eCommerce website has to be exceptional, from the very beginning through various stages of their journey as they navigate your website. This is where you fine-tune the customer experience you provide to achieve better customer retention. Your website has to be fast and easy to navigate, ensuring a smooth customer journey. Here are the major areas to focus on when tailoring a seamless web user experience-
Mobile Responsiveness:
Your website has to be easily navigable on smartphone devices, as that’s where most of your buyers will be coming to you from. Design your website to be responsive and usable on smaller screens.
Cut down on Intrusive Market Tactics:
You need pop-ups and media to conduct business, but more than a certain amount of it will ruin the web experience and make your website cluttered. Make your pop-ups appealing, and use images or videos only when they are relevant.
Quality Product Pages:
Your product pages should take center stage for them to strike a chord with customers. In the online medium, the product page can be the place that retains the semblance and comfort of close and personal offline shopping up to some extent.
Offer clear product descriptions, high-quality photos and videos to convey the complete picture of products. Having a section for customer photos and reviews is also a great idea to enhance your product pages.
Easy Checkout and Flexible Payment Options:
Ensure that the checkout process is seamless, quick and simple. Using integrations, you can set up fast one-click checkouts, so customers can complete purchases within seconds after adding something to their cart.
Also, make sure that you provide customers with multiple ways for payment like Credit/Debit Cards, PayPal, UPI, COD etc. Using TrackiPal, you can further improve the payment experience on platforms like PayPal.
Web Design Experience:
The user experience of your website isn’t the only thing that needs to be amazing. A tasteful and visually satisfying design goes a long way in making the right impression on customers. These are some of the things you need to look out for when designing your website:
- Don’t clutter your website and make it confusing.
- Image sizes should not lead to longer page-load time.
- Fonts should not be hard to read.
- Design has to be professional and organized.
- Zara has one of the most appealing minimal web designs with very bold visuals doing all the speaking.
Social Commerce:
Social media has a great influence on affecting purchase decisions and considering how brands need to be where the customers are, social media marketing has huge potential. In the US alone social commerce sales are expected to reach $45 Billion this year.
This is why you need product catalogs on your social media pages like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook etc. allowing them to browse and make purchases from these platforms. Craft your social media storefronts to help customers reach what they are looking for. You can showcase your top-selling products, highlight your new collections and make the overall experience appealing.
Social media can be an alternative way to communicate with customers. Train your support team to handle queries through various social media platforms so that the customer experience will remain flawless.
Make Payments Easier:
Make payments simpler and easier with the help of payment platforms like PayPal. But to have maximum effect at improving customer experience with PayPal, you need PayPal order tracking enabled. TrackiPal lets you sync real-time order tracking info to PayPal, without having to type out order details one by one. Order details and real-time tracking can be called the perfect cherry on top, for your eCommerce customer experience strategy.
Metrics to Measure Your E-commerce Customer Experience Strategy
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is measured by customer surveys asking questions like “How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend?”. It is the measure of the percentage of your customers that would recommend your brand to others. The happier they are with their customer experience, the higher the NPS.
2. Customer Effort Score
CES or Customer Effort Score determines the amount of effort a customer needed to do a task, which in turn shows how smooth of an experience you have provided for your customer. You can ask survey questions related to ease of use and effectiveness of your brand’s support to know how satisfied your customers are.
3. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the ratio between the customers that visited your store and the customers you have acquired. It is a key indicator of how good or how bad your customer experience is.
4. Repeat Customer Rate (RCR)
RCR is the ratio between customers who have done multiple purchases to the total number of customers. This indicates the level of loyalty you are generating among your customers, which further shows how effective your customer experience strategies are.
5. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV is the total value that a customer spent on your store. It can be calculated as; Average Revenue per User x Gross Margin x Average Retention Time. The better the overall customer experience, the better the CLV.
6. Customer Satisfaction
This is simply the score calculated from surveys measuring customer satisfaction. You can send out surveys right after the purchase to understand if the customer experience was satisfactory or not.
7. Churn Rate
Churn rate is the percentage of your customers that would not make a repeat purchase with your brand. This describes how well you are doing when it comes to keeping customers happy with their shopping experience.
8. First Response and Average Handling Time
First Response time is the measure of the average time within which the customer gets their first response to a query. The faster you respond to their queries, the greater the trust you build with your customers.
Similar to the above metric, average handling time is the average time taken to resolve customer queries. The faster an issue or query is resolved, the better.
9. Reduced Returns, Cancellations, Refunds etc.
Reduced number of returned products, cancellations, refunds and chargebacks are also major indicators of improved customer experience.
Enhance Your eCommerce Customer Experience!
Your customers are the ones that define the success of your business. In a competitive market, the smoothest purchase experience can make all the difference.
And this makes eCommerce customer experience strategies no longer a “good to have” but a must-have. Enhance the overall customer experience of your Shopify website to earn customer trust and grow your business!
Take the first step to implementing a good ecommerce customer experience with TrackiPal.
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EL Mehdi
Co-Founder
Denise Ellison
Head of Sales
EL Mehdi
Co-Founder