Experience Is Important In E-commerce
Why Customer Experience Is Important In E-commerce
Online business is booming. It is fast, it is convenient, and it’s only getting more popular.
But it is not as simple as throwing some products on a website and watching the sales roll in. A successful online business needs a lot of contributing factors to align.
Firstly, you need to make sure you have a great brand for your customer’s to connect with. Then, you need a great e-commerce website that is able to convey that message as soon as anyone lands on your Home Page
But it doesn’t stop there.
For an e-commerce business to be successful and sustainable, you have to invest in your customer base at all stages of the process. That means before they have bought anything, while they are buying, and after they have made purchases.
Let’s look into how you can deliver the ultimate customer experience for your current and prospective clients.
What Is Customer Experience?
Before you can nail the concept, you have to know what it is!
The “customer experience” encompasses many things, but it essentially means the end-to-end process of dealing with and buying from your brand – and the impression it leaves on a customer.
It includes things like marketing to potential customers, how functional and easy to use your website it, how helpful your customer service staff are, how simple the purchasing process is, how much you encourage return business and how well any issues are remedied.
Why Is It Important?
A good customer experience is vital for e-commerce because it is an incredibly competitive market. If a customer doesn’t have a good experience dealing with your brand, they will quickly and easily move to one of your competitors.
People want to do business with people. Even if some of your processes are automated, you still need to have a good human element to them. Research from Forbes found that over half of customers returned to a company due to good customer services reactions – so it’s worth getting it right!
Keeping your existing customers happy and ensuring return business is key to building your business. You also need to think about preserving your reputation and how it might be impacting your potential customer base. 95% of customers will tell others about a bad customer experience, and 58% will recommend good companies to others. You definitely want to be among the good ones!
Customer service should not be taken care of by just one department or team. From management, to developers, to tech support, to front-line sales – companies with a holistic approach to their customers are the ones who become leaders in their fields.
How Can I Improve My Customer Experience?
Make it meaningful – the interactions with your customers are more than just transactions. The quality of an ecommerce customer experience impacts on the loyalty people will have to your brand. This means you need to get to know your customers and what their purchasing habits are. You can then build empathy, anticipate their needs, and be authentic with them.
Enhance your website – is your website adequately meeting your customers needs? Is it fast enough, does it contain the right information, is it easy to navigate? If it’s been a while since you have updated your site, use customer feedback and input to redesign it in a way that works for them.
Get mobile – more people are doing more things on mobile devices that ever before. Smartphones and tablets need to be a part of your game plan. If your website is not mobile-friendly or optimised for mobile use, you will be losing out on a lot of potential sales. Plus, search engine giant Google is starting to penalise any websites that aren’t optimised for mobile usage. You don’t want to damage all your hard SEO work by not being mobile friendly.
Be available – No one likes having questions that they can’t find the answers to. Having multiple customer contact channels is important to cater for different communication preferences. Your customer service should be spread across email, phone, and social media as a minimum. If resources allow, it is also becoming more popular to use live chat or self-service portals. Even a well-designed automated chat bot can really help with human connection.
How your customers perceive your business and the interactions they have with it are vital for growth and sales. Nailing all aspects of your customer experience can be tricky, so why not let us handle the e-commerce side?
Here at Creative Web Designs, we are Shopify experts that can ensure your customers navigate through a well functioning and easy to use e-commerce website. Contact us today for more info on how we can help you take your business to the next level.