Festive sales of 2020 had a lot to say about the importance and impact of Customer Experience. Enhanced customer experience has surpassed all the major factors that were prevalent until recently. Indeed, prospective customers are summing up their purchase decisions by repeatedly taking a glance at what your existing Customers have to share about you rather than what you as a brand have been boasting about yourself.
In fact, knowing your customers, their preferences and choices, and what they have to say about your services and then a bunch of action plans to be executed thereafter, is as complex as it gets. However, enhanced customer experience has become a cornerstone for a successful and long-lasting online business that cannot be neglected no matter what.
“Every day we’re saying, ‘How can we keep this customer happy?’ How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don’t, somebody else will.” – Bill Gates
Nevertheless, before we discuss in detail the golden rules to customer-oriented business model plan for this festive season, here is a run-through of the topics to be discussed herein:
- What is Customer Experience in simple words?
- Why is Customer Experience Important?
- The Evolution of Customer Experience Trends 2020-21
- What is Customer Experience Management and how to use it?
- 10 Customer Experience Optimization and Marketing Tips
- How can CedCommerce help Improve your Customer Experience this Festive Season
What is Customer Experience in simple words?
Customer experience is nothing but a long-lasting impression your customers carry in their minds after completing a small business cycle with you. In other words, what a customer has to say about your brand to their friends and family is what they have honestly felt while dealing with you.
Customer experience is determined by a variety of stages you allow your customers to go through. The journey of your customer starts right from landing on your brand awareness ad to getting a timely delivery at their doorsteps. All the while, it is you the ‘Seller’ who has to make a choice about how you want your customers to think and feel about you.
Why is Customer Experience even important?
When 86% of customers are ready to pay more for a great customer experience, who will not want to invest in anything and everything that meets up to their expectations?
Similarly, according to a report, 49% of customers have agreed to make an impulsive decision from the same brand after getting a personalized buying experience.
Astonishing facts as these, Customer experience is sure to hit the top priority list of any business to grow in the coming future. The impact of personalized and positive customer experience is multi-folded. Above all, it serves some best business purposes like :
Huge Revenue Generation
Good customer experience brings back your customer whenever they have to shop. Besides this, a good customer influences people around him and only adds up to your customer base, generating a good amount of revenue.
Minimized Churn Rate
Positive customer experience has led to a great decline in Customer Churn rate as reported by some of the big eCommerce empires. Why will a customer ever look away from you, if you always have something unexpected to deliver?
Reduced Path Length
Path Length is the various touchpoints your customers meet while completing their buying journey on your online store. Reduced path length clearly indicates that your customer is convinced to make a purchase with you in no time. To summarise, their confidence and conviction are a result of the buying experience that they have had previously with you.
Positive Social and Business Image
Your happy customers will do PR for you. The entire eCommerce world has seen a shift to how influencers, celebrities, and even common people sharing their opinions about different brands have transformed businesses. Truly, being able to retain such customers through unprecedented customer experience can help you grow very quickly.
Increased Customer Loyalty
Customers will be loyal to you if you are loyal in your business dealings with them. Many shoppers have been victims of fraud and frustrating online buying experiences. On the other hand, if you can deliver them exactly what they chose you for, you have won the battle.
In other words, by delivering a great buying experience to your customers, you can actually build a strong e-commerce empire of your own.
To illustrate, more than 50% of people who never shopped online, made their first-ever online purchase in the past two festive seasons. Certainly, consumer shopping behavior and trends have seen huge changes.
The Evolution of Customer Experience Trends 2020-21
Customer experience has evolved a lot over time. Subsequently, people have become aware, informed, experienced, and cautious with what, why, and from whom they are purchasing. In such complex eCommerce times, it is essential to know the current customer experience trends. Check down below –
Advanced Digital Shopping Experience
Companies have been investing a lot in adding up more innovative technologies like chatbots, Progressive Web Apps, Virtual and Augmented reality tools to their stores and selling strategies. The objective is to keep the prospective customer intact with the website and render their high-quality product information.
Efficient Customer Service
Customer service is a part of the customer experience journey. In simple terms, customer service is something that checks the drop-offs of the buying experience of a customer. As a result, efficient customer service builds a long-lasting customer-business relationship for most successful eCommerce businesses.
A Big ‘NO’ to Extra Hidden Charges
Consumers have become repulsive to hidden charges or costs. According to reports, people are highly inclined towards sellers offering free shipping and delivery services. Although these changes are obvious to you but not to your customers. On the contrary, it’s just extra money they have to pay for that simple stuff.
Customized and Personalized Approach
Imagine just landing up on a page or ad, showing the exact trousers you have been desperately looking for. Won’t that be a surprise for you? This delight to the prospective customer opens a sales pavement for you. In the long run, personalized content specifically designed for individual customers increases the Conversion rate multiple times.
Omnichannel Shopping Experience
As shown above, the eCommerce world has become competitive, and nowhere does it want its potential customer to turn away. Through Omnichannel, by and large, businesses have been able to attract, delight, engage and retain their customers anywhere and everywhere. Therefore, ensuring an integrated action funnel across channels and devices has enabled businesses to grow by leaps and bounds.
Business with Sustainable Goals
The newer generation is not just more tech-savvy but also socially and environmentally conscious. The recent pandemic years have shown people favoring businesses pitching sustainable and environment-friendly products.
To demonstrate, Carl Selby (an eCommerce business tycoon) has opened up a new marketplace called Dirty Hippies for ethical and sustainable eCommerce business in the UK.
What Is Customer Experience Management and How to Measure it?
Designing the right funnel for the right customer is complex as it sounds. Designing the right strategy is an outcome of the complex Customer Experience management and measurement process.
Customer Experience Management is a detailed outline to assist customers on their funnel journey to reach your conversion event (Call To Action). At the same time, Customer Experience Management helps you to critically analyze the drop-offs of your buyer’s funnel. It comprises of firstly collecting your customer’s data; secondly organizing them, and thirdly, analyzing them to reach a conclusion.
Here is the list of 5 best metrics to measure Customer Experience
Big businesses use as many as 50 metrics to analyze customer experience. However, there are some popular ones that are a staple for any basic Customer experience analysis. Let’s dive in :
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
It is the score that shows how many of your customers would like to promote or recommend your brand to their friends, family, and relatives. Big businesses do it through a survey and count them separately in two groups of ‘Yes and No’. By subtracting the no. of non-promoters with no. of promoters, you get the result.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
It is another metric that helps you to analyze how satisfied are your customers with your products and services. You can create a customer experience form to rate your services between ‘not satisfied’ to ‘completely satisfied’ and examine the overall success of your marketing strategies.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
This metric measures the level of effort your customer had to go through to reach that final product they have been looking for.
This is how you can do it- Frame a question like – ‘Your journey finding this product has been easy and great?’ and ask your customer to choose an option from ‘Very easy’, ‘Moderate’, or ‘Difficult to find’. You can record many such responses and maintain data of your own.
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
To put it simply, it means the no. of problems/queries resolved by the customer call center in the first round of asking. These metrics show the efficiency of the customer support team to resolve the problem of the customers timely and efficiently. That’s how it is measured –
FCR = No. of queries resolved in the first attempt/Total no. queries * 100
Customer Engagement Score (CES)
The customer engagement score highlights the action taken by the visitor on your page or website. This is a helpful metric for online businesses than offline ones. No.page views, scroll rates, bounce rate, no. of clicks, etc, are certain criteria that can be considered under these metrics.
In the same way, there are many other important metrics like customer churn Rate, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition, customer loyalty, and the list goes on. However, the successful strategy is not to choose a lot of metrics but just the right ones that are valuable to your business needs.
As per a famous saying :
“Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” – Clare Muscutt
But the question is, ‘how to design it?’
Given these points, designing a successful outline is based on the hit and trial method. When the customer demands are changing every day, it is impossible to claim one strategy to be perfect for all seasons and times to come.
Nevertheless, there are a few sure-shot customer experience optimization and marketing tips that you can follow in the holiday season of 2021.
Proven Customer Experience Optimization and Marketing Tips
Simplify your Navigation Process
Reaching the desired product should not be a roller coaster for your customers. The navigation menu of your e-store should be simple, relevant, and easy to reach. This will be one of the major touchpoints for your visitor’s shopping experience. Therefore, carefully outline one.
Treat your Loyal Customers with the Best Deals
Your loyal customers are your trophies and your actual business makers. Treating them with special deals and offers increases your customer retention rate and customer lifetime value.
Keep Upgrading and Updating your Services
When the eCommerce world is changing and getting exciting and innovative every day, you will have to push yourself too. By upgrading and updating your services, you meet the rising expectations of your customers. By updating and upgrading your services, you are always in their sight and in their minds.
Value each Customer on an Individual Basis
As each of your customers is generating an individual financial profit for you: it’s your duty in return to bring them the best of products and services they are looking for. This builds a lasting customer-business relationship.
Organize Loyalty Programmes
Loyalty programs are relatively a new trend. Loyalty programs will enable you to directly meet your customers and get to know their choices and expectations in person. This is a personal approach that helps you sound more authentic, reliable, and trustworthy.
Invest in delivering Omnichannel Experience
Digitalization has engulfed every nook and corner of the eCommerce world. One cannot even imagine a life without smartphones, the internet, and social media. Creating an Omnichannel experience helps you to reach out to your customer wherever they are through multiple channels and devices. Such an integrated shopping customer experience is surely the greatest driver of prospective customers to an online shopping portal today.
Create a robust Feedback Mechanism
Feedback is important. In fact, it is very important. By asking your customers about their opinions and feedback, you give them direct participation in your business model. This empowers your customers.
Provide Efficient Customer Service
Good customer service builds a great customer relationship. If you can understand your customer you are sure to win their hearts. Customer Service helps to analyze and improve First Contact Resolution, the matrix that we discussed above.
Emphasize Post-Sale Services
The actual stage for Customer retention starts with your post-sale services. It involves easy return and exchange policies. Most of the customers drop a brand forever if they are treated badly in case of the return and exchange process. Respecting customers pre and post-sales is not just sweet but humane too.
Use best Customer Experience Tools and Software
Last but not least, use the best customer experience tools and software that can help you analyze your Customer experience performance quickly and accurately. Moreover, it enables you to timely look into the actual value and efficiency of your Customer Experience optimization and marketing strategies.
How can CedCommerce Improve your Customer Experience campaign this festive season?
CedCommerce is a robust eCommerce solution provider across multiple marketplaces and eCommerce platforms. Catering to thousands of sellers across the globe, CedCommerce has always prioritized upgrading its products and services through innovations and research.
Ranging from custom solutions, marketing automation, Progressive Web App, shipping extensions, POS, and payment solutions, the experts at Cedcommerce have brought an entire package of Customer-centric software for you.
Last but not the least, with easy installation, budget-friendly customization, 24*7 customer support service, and good deals on the best products, CedCommerce has never failed to deliver what sellers have asked for. To know more about our services, connect with us and get an opportunity to get a profitable business idea directly from our experts.