How to Deliver the Best Online Customer Experience in 2022
- Mar 31, 2022
- By Rajeev Nar
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes, 30 seconds
Are you an online merchant whose priority is customer satisfaction? Or you have just opened an online store and are searching for ways to get noticed? Perhaps you’re simply looking for extra tips to incorporate customer experience into your digital marketing strategies. Please sit down and let’s dive into this trending topic.
First and foremost welcome to 2022 and we hope it goes down successfully for you. In 2021, as eCommerce accelerated, online merchants were faced with the dilemma of how to swim through the fierce online competition. Out of stock notices, ‘404 page responses’, slow loading pages, slow checkouts, to mention but are few were some of the challenges online businesses had to tackle.
Although such situations brought about a few obstacles in meeting customer expectations, there are a few eCommerce developments such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR) and automation that have helped merchants up their game. If you wish to grow your online customer base, increase sales and ROI, you need to offer the best experience and this is how.
Customer Experience ‘CX’
Customer Experience is how a customer feels after an encounter with a brand. And by ‘brand’ we mean product or service. CX involves every nature of interaction that a customer engages in during their buyer journey. However long or short-lived a customer’s interaction may be, the inner and outward reaction signifies the derived experience, i.e whether good or bad. Altogether, the impression that a customer or visitor walks away with is what defines the customer experience.
When is Customer Experience good or bad?
Good customer experiences are simply seamless interactions on an eCommerce interface or any digital marketing platform. Take an example a shopper lands on your eCommerce site, clicks on a product, gets clear information about it, likes the item and then finalises the checkout, this means a good customer experience.
On the other hand, when a visitor or a customer fails to get what he wants or finalises the entire process after some hiccups, this brings about a bad experience. It could be due to a slow loading site, irrelevant content, unclear calls-to-action etc.
Approaches to ensuring the best customer experience on eCommerce Websites
Running an eCommerce website isn’t easy as you must satisfy customer expectations and deal with fierce competition. But, depending on your business strategies and what you already deploy, we believe a few tips here can help you run your eCommerce website smoothly or provide a quality customer experience. Here we go;
1. Understand Your Customer
Delivering an excellent customer experience primarily requires a retailer to understand the targeted audience. You must know who your customers are; whether they are regular, new, or returnees. What their preferences are, what they do when they get to your site and how long they stay. With a clear view of who the targeted buyer is and what customer experience means a merchant can easily tailor digital experiences.
2. Invest in a Good Website
Online retail requires a sleek and user-friendly interface, search engine amiable, and accessible. It was a good idea that you chose to take your business online, but you must remember that it’s another battlefield and highly competitive. You must ensure that people who search for you must find you online 24/7. You must assess how competent your content management system is, your website design, and how reliable your hosting solution is. Precisely, your website must be fit to represent your brand image and as well ease up on marketing efforts. Ensuring accessibility can also help online merchants impact the site’s traffic effortlessly.
3. Check your website Speed
Customers love fast loading websites and so does Google. Fast loading sites produce better customer experiences whereas slow loading sites are a ticket for poor customer experience. More to that, a website that takes 3 or more seconds to load, experience a higher bounce rate compared to a site that loads in less than 3 seconds. Apart from offering an excellent user experience, faster loading sites rank better than slow-loading sites. Even Google considers site speed as a ranking factor.
Some of the best ways to optimise your site speed include minimising landing page redirects, improving server response time, compressing files, optimising images etc.
4. Employ AR Technologies (Live Chat)
AR technology (Augmented Reality) helps accelerate eCommerce by enabling customers to make confident purchase decisions. It generally offers online users an immersive experience by allowing real-time interactions too. Precisely, it eliminates the gap between the business owner and the customer. Nowadays it’s easier to feel the gap due to the Covid-19 restrictions that limit some customers from visiting physical stores. So, allow customers to explore your site virtually.
Live chats are some of the best ways to interact with customers anytime and anywhere. Installing live chat software on an eCommerce site can help increase the conversion rate as prospects can easily ask questions and get immediate answers.
5. Empower Customer Engagement with Tailored Content
Content is still king when it comes to reinforcing marketing strategies! Unnecessary CTAs and cluttered content can hinder the overall customer experience. Offer precise descriptions to help your customers understand the products or services you are offering. SEO tools are a great way to improve customer experience and you can tailor promotional content more accurately. Other ways to go about your content are;
- Including customer reviews- Customers’ reviews are highly trusted by online users and if you showcase them on your site, it can help improve customer experience.
- Replying to comments- Dropping your feedback encourages customer interactions and helps them know that they are valued.
6. Personalise Buyer Journey
It should be noted that customers who make it to your site are at different stages of their buyer journey. Precisely, some are new and others are long-time customers. Others are simply browsing your site to know whether they can find what they are looking for. It is therefore essential to rely on website metrics to understand your consumer and visitors’ behaviours. Get to know who is new to your site and who is a regular one and then tailor promotional campaigns accordingly.
7. Adopt Omnichannel Customer Experiences
Modern customers are spread across social media platforms and this can help you deliver an omnichannel customer experience. If you aren’t present on social media it is time to be. Omnichannel marketing strategies can greatly improve leads and conversions. It also helps customers pick up from where they left off on the previous touchpoint. That being said, it is essential for a brand or business to ensure a consistent identity across channels with content that resonates with the customer and not the platform.
8. Offer Multiple Payment Options
Ensuring that your eCommerce store has several payment methods, especially those used by the majority help shoppers complete a purchase anytime and anywhere. There is nothing painful as failing to get what you want an;d when you exactly need it, most especially for an online shopper. It can result in a negative review that can even influence other shoppers negatively.
9. Ensure a Simple Checkout
Quite often online merchants don’t know how complicated their checkout processes are and this negatively impacts sales and a site’s revenue. Keep the checkout process simple with several payment options to improve online experiences. Also, offer free shipping if possible to encourage purchases.
Fixing eCommerce Experiences
To tackle eCommerce website issues that lead to poor customer experiences, merchants need to develop an effective online customer experience management strategy. A customer experience management strategy allows a brand to follow a well-defined approach to meeting customer expectations. Set up a live chat and ask them how you can help them accomplish their journey.
Several online customer experience management tools analyse, evaluate, and monitor digital customer engagements and interactions on websites. Such tools are great means of obtaining insights about the website performance, and hitches. However to offer usable insights, qualitative and quantitative aspects must be taken into count.
Conclusion
We have covered a variety of approaches through which merchants can deliver the best customer experience on eCommerce sites. We also hope they help meet customer expectations seamlessly. If you need help with improving your website’s customer experience this is the perfect place for you. A good web development agency like us can help you out, more so, if you want to set up a standout eCommerce site on any platform. Contact RVS Media LTD, a London-based and award-winning eCommerce development company for professional assistance.
