Customer Experience
Welcome to our guide to eCommerce customer experience! As conversational commerce software, we know that fostering an excellent customer experience is a vital factor in creating eCommerce brands that succeed.
In this guide, we'll cover everything you need to know about eCommerce customer experience, from understanding your customers to measuring your success. So, let's dive in...
Customer experience is the overall feeling customers have when interacting with your brand. From the moment they discover your products to when they receive their order in the mail- eCommerce, customer experience includes that entire journey.
This includes everything from browsing your website to making a purchase and receiving their order.
But why is eCommerce customer experience so important?
Well, for starters, it's a key driver of customer loyalty, which affects the overall success of the business and its profitability. Customers who have a positive experience with your brand are more likely to become repeat customers and recommend your products and services to others.
In addition, a good customer experience can differentiate your business from its competitors and increase customer lifetime value (LTV).
This all starts with -
The first step in improving your eCommerce customer experience is to understand your customers. This may sound logical but it's not often practiced.
Many times, Founders fall in love with the product that they created - and they should. They had a vision and they made it happen. But, in order to make sure that the product is successful in the marketplace, you need to get inside the head of your customer to understand their needs and solve their problems.
This will help you grasp how the product fits their life, which makes selling it much easier!
Here are some tips on how to do that:
Start by identifying your target audience. Who are your ideal customers? Why are they buying your products? What are their demographics, interests, and behaviors? What are they afraid of - or what do they aspire to?
Understanding your target audience can help you tailor your marketing messages and create a more personalized shopping experience.
This is where conversational commerce by Humankind can begin to have a huge impact on your customer experience... But before we get into that - what is conversational commerce? and how can it help you create amazing eCommerce customer experiences?
Conversational commerce is the intersection between humans and technology to facilitate a transaction. In other words, it's using technology to have conversations with customers to understand their needs and provide a personalized experience.
Humankind begins every interaction by collecting rich data from the shopper so that a personal shopper or remote concierge can begin to understand the shopper’s needs and motivations. This data will help you serve your customers better and shape your ideal customer profile (ICP) to better personalize and tailor your eCommerce experience to their needs.
Next, analyze your customers' behavior on your website. What products do they "add to cart" and then abandon? What pages do they visit? How long do they stay on your site? What products do they browse? Do they ever bundle certain items together?
Humankind is the shortcut to this, as you saw in the previous section - the platform enables a personal shopper to interact directly with the consumer and ask direct questions to understand their behaviors.
But overall, analyzing your customer's behavior can help you quickly identify areas for improvement and optimize your website for a better user experience.
Nailing the "ICP" is the goal. Understanding your customers at such a deep level that you can accurately predict their actions and preferences.
Creating customer personas can help you do this. You should build your customer personas on the data collected from analyzing customer behavior, as well as demographic, psychographic, and purchase history information.
This way, you'll better understand what content to create for them, how to connect with them on social media, and which products they'll be most likely to buy.
As we mentioned before, Humankind can help you quickly get the data needed to create customer personas. With our conversational commerce platform, a remote personal shopper or concierge can ask customers questions and collect rich data to better understand them... but I digress.
Finally, use data analytics tools to gather insights about your customer's behavior. With this data, you can more accurately predict how they will interact with your website and what they are likely to buy.
Data analytics tools such as Humankind can also help you understand customer sentiment. By reading through conversations, analyzing customer conversations, and reviewing feedback, you can quickly spot trends in customer opinions that can guide product development and future initiatives.
This is how you understand your customers better so that you can create an incredible experience for them... now let's talk about actually creating those experiences.
Designing a visually appealing site that's easy to navigate is one of the first steps to creating an incredible customer experience.
Many customers are not nearly as technical as we are, so having an intuitive, mobile-optimized, high-speed store is a powerful way to instantly increase your e-commerce customer experience.
A visually appealing website can make a great first impression and keep customers engaged. To make your website visually appealing, be sure to use high-quality images and clear typography, and maintain a consistent color scheme throughout.
Keep it simple, including lots of "Whitespace" (also known as negative space) as this is appealing to the eye.
Then, find a store builder like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento (now Adobe Commerce) that allows you to create an intuitive user interface that is easy to use and navigate.
Clear communication is key. Use clear and concise language, organized categories, and an easy-to-use search bar to create an intuitive user interface.
More and more customers are using their mobile devices to shop online. To ensure your website is easily accessible on mobile devices, utilize responsive design and mobile-friendly features.
Humankind is a powerful tool for customers because it allows customers to text with their preferred personal shoppers and interact in an Omnichannel way. Beginning on the desktop or mobile device, and switching to SMS is seamless and provides a better experience for customers on the go.
A slow website can lead to frustration and lost sales - and let's be honest, there's no reason to have a slow site in 2023... Plus Google hates slow-loading pages and will decrease the placement in SERPs if your pages are slow.
Make sure your website loads quickly by optimizing images, minifying code, and utilizing caching and other techniques to keep site speeds high. By following these steps, you can create an incredible customer experience for your e-commerce store that will keep customers coming back for more!
Finally, make sure your website's navigation and search functionality are easy to use and secure. A big one here is your SSL certificate - make sure your site is secure and that customers can trust your security protocols when entering personal information and credit card data.
Next, assist customers in finding what they want on your site by employing clear and succinct labels for categories and products, and providing filtering and sorting choices.
The easier things are to find, the easier they are to buy...especially when your customers make high-consideration purchase decisions, impulse buys, or simply browse for high ticket items.
These are just a few of the steps you can take to create an incredible customer experience... now let's look at personalization.
Personalization is the next key to providing an excellent eCommerce customer experience. A more enjoyable and meaningful shopping experience can be achieved by customizing it based on the unique preferences and needs of each customer.
To enhance the experience, there are several ways to personalize, including using dynamic content, suggesting relevant products, product bundling, discounts, and sending personalized emails. The customer personas developed in Part 1 can serve as a guiding light in shaping personalization strategies.
Product recommendations are a useful tool for personalizing the customer experience. Leveraging data analytics, recommendations can be made based on the customer's past purchases, browsing history, and interests.
This is another area where Humankind can help you create tailored eCommerce customer experiences. Included in the rich customer data that's accessible to your personal shoppers and remote concierges is the customer's purchase history.
The conversations that your personal shoppers have with customers are one-of-a-kind. They’re personal, irreplicable by technology, and leave the shoppers feeling empowered which has a bigger impact on them than trying to navigate the workflow logic of a chat technology.
Have you ever been excited to buy something online, added items to your cart, and then became frustrated with the checkout process? You are not alone. A clunky and confusing checkout process can be a significant pain point for customers, leading to cart abandonment and lost sales for businesses.
Cart abandonment is a common problem for online businesses. According to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is nearly 70%. There are many reasons why customers abandon their carts, but a complicated and lengthy checkout process is one of the most significant factors.
To simplify the checkout process, you need to focus on the customer experience. Here are a few ways to streamline your checkout process and reduce friction:
Offer a Guest Checkout Option: Many customers do not want to create an account to make a purchase. Offering a guest checkout option allows customers to complete their purchases quickly without the added step of creating an account.
Minimize the Number of Form Fields: Long forms can be overwhelming for customers, leading to cart abandonment. Minimizing the number of form fields to only essential information can help customers complete their purchases faster.
Offer Multiple Payment Options: Different customers have different payment preferences. Offering a variety of payment options, such as “BOPIS” (buy online pick up in store), installment options such as Klarna, or payment options like Venmo, PayPal, and Apple Pay, can accommodate different customer preferences and increase the likelihood of completing a purchase.
Customer service is an area that I see a lot of brands do very well. Utilizing customer service platforms like Zendesk and Gorgias, you can ensure that customers can reach out with any questions or concerns.
Customers trust brands that do what they say and provide them with transparent experiences that deliver on their promises.
To optimize the use of customer feedback, here are some tips to consider:
Ensuring a positive eCommerce customer experience is crucial for any online business, but how do you measure success?
To improve your customer experience, you need to identify areas that require improvement, and the best way to do this is by measuring your success. Here are some tips on how you can measure your success in eCommerce customer experience:
Always take a curious approach to the customer experience - iterating and approaching customers with questions that will help you understand their wants and needs.
By understanding your customers, creating a user-friendly website, personalizing the customer experience, providing excellent customer service, streamlining the checkout process, leveraging an omnichannel approach, utilizing customer feedback, and measuring your success, you can create a more meaningful and enjoyable shopping experience for your customers.
To see how Humankind can help you create an excellent eCommerce customer experience through 1:1 human connection and better data, book your demo, today!
