Finally, this stage of the ecommerce customer experience involves the actual processing of the purchase taking place. Once a customer has made a purchase, your work is done! Instead of patting yourself on the back for converting yet another prospect, your focus will now shift onto keeping your new customer engaged and coming back for more. Overall, your goal will be to get your customers to continue buying more , and buying more frequently from your company.
Once an individual gives you their money, you should consider them a customer for life. That said, a huge part of delivering a superb ecommerce customer experience is knowing how to continue piling on the value as time goes on. While ecommerce customer experience refers to everything that occurs between the customer and your brand, user experience refers to the functional structures and aspects within this overall experience. Even the slightest hiccup along the way can be enough to derail their experience completely.
Ecommerce customer experience management, or ECX Management, is the process of gaining and maintaining full control over the experiences your ecommerce customers have with your brand.
Looking at this another way, a proper approach to ECX management ensures your team will never be scrambling to deliver as expected to a customer in need. Going a step further, optimizing your approach to ECX management means always being able to go above and beyond for your customers — no matter what that may entail. Here, ECX management is about putting structures and failsafes in place to support your customers as they stretch toward their goals. In other situations — such as when your customers face a challenge or a setback — you actually may need to take control of the situation.
To craft a good customer experience also referred to as CX , every interaction matters — from the emails you send to the customer support software you use and from your engagement on social media to how customers experience your online store. You probably already have a pretty good idea of why delivering a top-notch ecommerce CX is so important. Creating a valuable overall customer experience is key to building trust amongst your target audience — which is necessary to keep them engaged as time goes on.
Note that all of this falls under our definition of the overall customer experience. But, by delivering consistent value and then some at every touchpoint, you give your customer every reason to continue engaging with your brand on a regular basis. The big difference between merchants typically comes down to customer experience — the eCommerce merchant who creates the best experience for the customer wins.
The list of ways you can make this happen is limited only by your creativity. On the financial side of things, consistently delivering an excellent experience to your customers comes with a number of benefits , such as:. And, again, your loyal customers will be more than happy to pay a bit more for your products or services — meaning even more profit for your business, overall.
The purpose is to create value for stakeholders — money and profits follow. Looking at the big picture, you can then reinvest these additional profits into your business, allowing your organization to ramp up their efforts across the board. And, once you achieve those goals, you can set your sights even higher…and higher…and higher…. Financially, your success translates into success for your suppliers, influencers, and any other business entity you partner with.
In helping your customers succeed, you set off a chain reaction that positively impacts all who have an investment in your business. First and foremost, your team needs to become data-driven and customer-centric. This will require you make a shift in how you conduct research , make business decisions, and take customer-facing action. The idea is to move away from simply using data to rationalize a decision after the fact, and to instead rely on your customer data and other information to make these decisions for you.
There are a number of factors to consider here, including:. This preliminary work will serve to identify any glaring areas in need of improvement throughout your ecommerce website from your homepage down to your product pages, and can also help you create a better balance between aesthetics and functionality. Tactics such as brand monitoring and social listening can help you identify comments your target audience members have made about your brand, your competitors, and your industry as a whole.
This will give you an idea of where you might need to focus on when digging deeper. That will provide you the blueprint to make every customer interaction with your company memorable and meaningful. Every industry and business are different so research will be critical. Your existing customers will have a lot of insight to provide about their various experiences with your ecommerce site.
In some cases, you might choose to blast a survey to your entire audience or a segment of it. You can also look to your brand new customers to start learning more about their needs and expectations from the get-go.
When surveying or soliciting feedback from your customers, you want to try to be as open-ended as possible. While there are times when a more succinct response will suffice, you also want your customers to be able to explain themselves whenever they feel the need.
In certain cases, you can take things a step further in terms of soliciting feedback from your customers, using projective techniques to dig a bit deeper into their psyche. Again, this open-endedness allows for more exploration into their perceptions of your brand. You can also circle back with respondents to get more specific information as needed — in turn making practical, laser-focused improvements based on what was initially rather abstract information.
Every step requires a distinct approach as buyer requirements are specific to that very phase. Understanding where a customer is lets you create targeted experience strategies, understand the most appropriate ways of keeping up with their expectations, project future actions, and more. Still, when it comes to optimizing ECX for the modern consumer, there are a number of things brands in any industry can consider doing to make it happen.
When it comes to UX and site design, there are three key areas to focus on. With customers using multiple devices throughout each path to purchase , ensuring they can do what they came to your site to do, regardless of device used, is a must. Optimizing your ecommerce site for mobile can cause a massive spike in sales and conversions. An intuitive site architecture is crucial for ensuring your visitors can navigate your site with ease.
This means strategically categorizing your product catalog and accompanying product pages, and making the other parts of your site just as easy to access. Similarly, a fully-functional search feature will allow your visitors to quickly find the products, content, or information they need.
You can supercharge their efforts with real-time search suggestions via AI-powered ecommerce plugins, too. Finally, you absolutely need to streamline the purchasing process for your online customers. The easier it is for the prospect to get what they need, the more likely they are to engage further with your brand. With regard to the five senses, ecommerce obviously has some shortcomings; smell, taste, and touch are essentially out of the question.
Augmented reality and virtual reality technology can also help you bring your digital experience to life in the eyes of your customers. The best product pages will strike a balance between providing all the information potential customers want about the product to ultimately help push them towards making a purchase — without overwhelming them with information.
Look at making use of lifestyle and textural images along with visuals showing your customers using your product to help potential customers visualize how your product could be of benefit to them. Basically, if your customers expect your brand to be active on a specific channel, well…you need to be active on that channel.
Missing the boat on these updates e. Rather, they want to be able to pick up right where they last left off. This will ensure your CRM and other integrated tools stay up-to-date at all times, and will minimize the chances of delivering a redundant experience to your customers.
As with all areas of ecommerce, your ability to personalize the ecommerce customer experience is continuously evolving. Simply addressing your customers by name and providing basic product recommendations — while important — are now just table stakes. Moving forward, ecommerce personalization is focused on delivering tailored content and promotions to individual customers , throughout the customer journey, based on their individual actions and circumstances.
In marketing, timing has always been everything. Many ecommerce businesses are also building personalization into the actual services they provide. Stitch Fix, for example, delivers handpicked fashion products to their individual customers based on their preferences and engagement history.
As artificial intelligence technology evolves in its ability to a analyze customer data, and b facilitate personalization itself, it will only become more important for you to tailor your ECX accordingly as time goes on.
In both cases, your goal is to deliver whatever it is the customer needs to take the next step in their journey. For example:. Conversely, not delivering these prompts essentially leaves up to chance whether the individual will proceed or not. It is the goal for an e-commerce customer service team to provide a pain-free, digital shopping experience for consumers.
An e-commerce business should look at all the ways a customer would interact with their brand and provide assistance for them throughout the digital customer journey. The ideal e-commerce customer service experience means customers are never left hanging — no matter what. According to HubSpot Research , the most frustrating thing about interacting with an e-commerce brand is having to repeat their problem to more than one customer service representative.
You can prevent this from happening by incorporating an omnichannel communication strategy that allows a customer service agent to see all the ways a customer has connected and interacted with your brand. Customers often dread having to reach out to a customer service agent. They prefer to find the solution to their problem on their own before having to interact with someone. Some of the cheapest ways to improve the customer experience is by providing more self-help and FAQ documentation for that customer.
This is an area where you can really stand out from your competitors. Reach out to them, offer to make it right, and let them know you value their opinion no matter what. It can be hard to stand out from the crowd and grab a bigger piece of the pie in the e-commerce market. But, good news. E-commerce customer service is one of the last bastions where small absolutely crushes big. In the US, 10 companies now control Somewhere between half and two-thirds of product searches begin on Amazon.
And by , fully With trillions in their war chests, the big names have conditioned customers to expect one- to two-day turnarounds, unlimited inventory, and rock-bottom prices. But, expectations are meant to be exceeded. Especially when it comes to e-commerce customer service. Are the behemoths really that good at catering to the customer? Do they provide personal support at scale? Are they innovating with the customer in mind?
Simply put: No. Every major online retailer tracked year-over-year declined. And take one guess which category ranks second to last. While still getting more done. E-commerce customer service provides the framework for supporting shoppers via e-commerce platforms and throughout their life cycles. Support for online businesses must account for the unique challenges involved with serving digital consumers:.
Amidst those concerns, customer experience reigns supreme. Your service team is tasked quite literally with being the voice of your brand—the one human touchpoint in an otherwise transaction and digital world. For early stage companies , the fear of disjointed voices may not be as pressing. Likely because the people talking to customers are the same people who started the business. And this is where the big e-commerce stores fail. They accept this as an inevitability and focus on process rather than emotion.
Choose the best customer support software for your online store to create a solid foundation for customer service. Start by evaluating the tool agents use the most: The inbox. A shared inbox allows your team to keep up with customer requests and stay organized. Tracking and collecting all the interactions a customer has with your brand in one place will pay dividends.
An integration with your e-commerce platform allows support reps to see a total customer breakdown: Recent purchases, previous chats or calls, links to social media accounts, etc.
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