A business with an extremely personalized and tailored customer experience certainly has a great competitive advantage over an enterprise that doesn’t care about it at all. With a great CX (customer experience), you can easily beat any competition regardless of its budget, market presence, or revenue. A perfect CX is your way to a successful eCommerce transformation.
It’s noticeable that the journey of a customer from skimming through a product to making a purchase is full of hurdles. However, a personalized customer experience can help you evade all these hurdles and convince your ideal prospects to make a purchase. Here are some stats to support this statement:
- In a survey conducted by PWC, 86% of potential buyers are readily available to purchase expensive items for an engaging customer experience.
- Segment’s survey concludes that 49% of buyers are prone to make an impulsive purchase after getting a highly personalized experience.
- According to a report, by the end of 2020, customer experience will dominate product and price as the core brand differentiator.
The figures never lie and they’re shouting that customer experience is your way to success in the overcrowded eCommerce cult. With a simple API-based eCommerce platform, you can establish an unparalleled CX that’s certainly not possible with a single-vendor monolith or SaaS. Before discussing any more of the Why’s, let’s have a look at what is CX in eCommerce.
Customer Experience – What’s This from an eCommerce Standpoint?
CX describes a customer’s point of view on how a company communicates with them. A lot of entrepreneurs seem to confuse CX with customer service (which is totally different). Even though customer service is an important part of CX, it’s not the whole thing (and definitely not interchangeable). Customer Experience is more about knowing how a customer engages with your eCommerce website and what are the emotions invoked by it. Here’s a list of some core elements of the experience:
- Is the customer able to find what they want easily?
- Is the website appealing and user-friendly?
- Are the product details understandable, compelling, and easy to read without any technical jargon?
- Is the checkout process quick and simple?
- Does the customer face any pain points while shopping?
- Are the customer queries and complaints resolved promptly?
- Does the customer find customer service advocating?
The end goal with CX in eCommerce is to provide an extremely amazing shopping experience to customers that they never bother to even look at your competition. The experience should be effective in that customers believe in your business and get more sales for your business with their word of mouth.
Why Does It Even Matters for Your eCommerce Business
The desire to make a super-focused shopping experience is only to build credible brand loyalty. If your customers feel like you genuinely care for them and have an amazing shopping experience, they’ll definitely count on your business when they need to order the same product again. It’s certainly a game-changer for businesses that deal with replenishable products.
Referral business can be another major consideration too. A lot of businesses are running with their customers recommending them to their known ones. There’s a great deal of trust in a recommendation from a family member, friend, or even a co-worker. In a similar manner, a bad shopping experience for a customer can have very adverse effects on your business.
Moreover, it’s a no-brainer that eCommerce simply doesn’t exist without customers. Although it’s always possible to gain a new pool of customers with the help of PPC and SEO, brand loyalty is the thing that provides you a sustainable growth opportunity. The best part about CX is that you always have the chance to improve the features of eCommerce in many fields like,
Brand Reputation
The way technology and digital transformation are driving customer experience, it is helping in increasing value delivery and brand loyalty day by day. A good customer experience helps to build brand memories and encourages brand loyalty.
Providing a top-notch experience to your customers gives them a sense of commitment from the brand’s end, which helps in building trust. As the services and products are good, the ratings given by customers will improve which will further impact the decision of consumers visiting the brand.
Personalized Interactions
From the outside , it feels like an easy piece of cake thinking to personalize the experience but just including names and few responses but in reality, it is not sufficient. Personalization is knowing the customer, their buying history, suggesting them the products, and offering the best rates among others.
According to a report by Segment, 71% of people on overage express some level of frustration when their experience is impersonal. Despite many cases of data breaches in recent years, an increasing number of customers are willing to share their information with companies to gain benefits for themselves.
Customer Satisfaction
As discussed in the above paragraph, having customer experience strategies and getting feedback from the customers is the most important step for self-improvement and customer satisfaction.
One way to measure and evaluate customer experience is through NPS (Net Promoter Score). NPS is the score given to you (your company) by the percentage of your customers who say they’d recommend your store to someone else through survey questions.
NPS lets you know how strong your customer experience is, how to improve it and how they may help in increasing conversions. It helps you know the customer insights, such as why there is a gap between the customer and your product, what can be done to improve customer experience, and so on.
The New Era of Digitally Aware Customers
Technology such as mobile applications, automation, and machine learning allows your ideal customers to get what they want exactly at the moment they require it.
On top of that, the adoption of new digital technologies has gradually transformed the expectations of your customers. The end result is a modern buyer who’s constantly exposed to technology, app-natives, and knows what can be done with the technology.
Due to the opportunities and advantages that take place with the help of modern technology like augmented reality, AI, etc., customers are now rating the organizations based on their digital customer experience. The way digital transformation is driving customer experience, you need to rethink how you interact with your ideal prospects.
- In context with a B2B sales team, you need to replace cold-calling with social selling. The ideal prospects of your business are active on social media and you need to make sure you’re too. Moreover, you don’t need to wait for customers to reach out to you. Instead, you need to contact them, build a relationship, and educate them. This can also be done by sharing your expertise and relevant content that solves their major problems.
- Talking about the customer service teams, you don’t have to wait for the landline to ring or the mail to receive. Instead, you need to be proactive to help your customers with the help of a wide range of channels such as review sites, social media, communities, forums, and so on. They’re all a part of the customer service ecosystem now.
- Marketing teams have a quite different approach to digital-first. It requires you to reduce your expenses on offline marketing activities such as billboards, TV ads, and direct mails. The ideal customers of your business are expecting to receive highly targeted messages that can be easily achieved with the help of a data-driven marketing strategy.
To serve the new, Generation-Z buyer, you (and your business too!) need to think digital-first.
The Takeaway
As customer experience is a concerning part of the success of an eCommerce platform, it’s a no brainer that digital transformation is driving customer experience. This makes it extremely necessary for you to know and follow a certain set of principles to manage your customer experience at an exponential level.
About the Author!
Smith is a very creative writer and active contributor who loves to share informative news or updates on various topics and brings excellent information to readers. His priority is to cover up new technologies and techniques for his audience. Smith has come out with many interesting cases and information that attracts readers to unravel his write-up.
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