More than 59% of your customers will walk away after one or two negative customer experiences. (PwC). That is almost 6 out of 10 customers. It goes without saying how difficult it is to win a customer. Losing a customer can be a serious problem for any business. The quicker this is resolved, the better it is for the long-term growth and sustainability of the business.
Turns out, Customer Experience (CX) can make customers stay. Customer experience is no longer a fancy frill to have, but a necessity to make customers feel attracted and remain loyal to your brand.
The sad part is, these customers won’t tell when they are leaving. It is easier for them to find another competitor who is offering the same (or better) product and services along with a better customer experience. The need to deliver a top-notch customer experience needs no more stressing.
In an online store, customer experience is best delivered through its website and mobile app. Which can be taken to exceptional levels via a Virtual Call Center facility for your customers. These are the virtual storefronts through which customers interact with the brand. That brings us to the question:
What truly helps deliver a good customer experience in an online store?
- Ease of use – Customers should be able to shop online easily and without any hassle.
- Convenience – The checkout process should be easier, requiring minimal effort
- Speed – The whole process should be swift, demanding minimal time
- The X-factor – Novel shopping experiences that will give a competitive advantage
There are several eCommerce features that help deliver a positive customer experience. These are features that have to be embedded at the time of designing the online store itself.
- Offer AI-powered search option
- Embed a live chat software
- Embellish the mobile version (Ensure consistency of experience)
- Quicken the checkout process
Offer AI-powered search option
Every online store has a universal search bar. It allows customers to input a search phrase and get product recommendations that are close to their expectations. This is a fundamental user experience element in an online store.
An AI-powered search option is far more capable and can give the user contextually relevant and personalized search suggestions. It basically allows them to find products that best suit their personal traits.
The AI-powered search engine takes into account the user’s geo-location, past search preferences, past purchases, and similar signals to populate the results for the current search.
This, in turn, enables the customer to find the specific product or suggestions that they have a high chance of buying. This can also be done easily by creating a product recommendation quiz for your ecommerce website, using theWP Quiz plugin. In a way, this also helps minimize cart abandonment as the search suggestions are close to customer wants.
Embed a live chat software
Live chat software is a program that interacts with website visitors with pre-programmed responses, a.k.a canned responses. They can mimic the conversation style and tone of a human agent when they are not available to man the real-time chat function.
In an online store, live chat software offers countless benefits, some of them including:
- Saves time and effort for the company to serve its customers without time constraints
- It can answer Frequently Asked Questions from customers spontaneously
- It can give deep insights into what customers ask for frequently
- It can give the online store a humane feel
- It can help reduce churn by providing self-service
There are still more benefits that live chat software can offer. However, the biggest of them is that it boosts the store’s customer experience. It makes the customer feel attended to at all times without fail.
PRO TIP:
If you want to elevate the quality of your customer experience, consider using advanced technology-based options for support. Video Chat Support Software is one of the great options to enhance customer engagement.
Embellish the mobile version (Ensure consistency of experience)
Almost 49% of online shopping is done through mobile devices (Brizfeel). At the current rate, it will continue to be the top platform through which eCommerce transactions are carried out. The massive proliferation of digital wallets, mobile wallets, and mobile payment channels have also given a tremendous boost to mobile commerce.
Now, here is the harsh truth. A huge population of online stores is built only for desktop experiences. They are still to embellish their mobile versions that will allow customers to shop from the convenience of their few-inch screens. And, this is a matter of customer experience.
Millennial customers want to shop anytime, anywhere. They do not earmark a specific time for online shopping. For them, it is more of spontaneous activity to ward off boredom. This makes it necessary for online stores to build their mobile experience lest they fall back on the mobile customer experience.
Quicken the checkout process
The checkout page is like the final leg in the customer’s journey. Unfortunately, it is also the juncture where most of the cart abandons happen. The checkout page is where the customer is made to rethink his/her buying decision. It is the page where the final price that they have to pay is highlighted in bold and large font. Too much thinking time and form submissions can make them skeptical of their spending choice.
Hence, the pressing need to quicken the checkout process. Quickening the checkout process refers to eliminating all unnecessary steps that hamper customer experience. This includes asking for information like customer name, delivery address, billing address, payment information, etc. which the online store could already have in its database.
The time and effort to input these details can make the customer wary of completing the transaction. In fact, chances are that they might abandon the cart instead of completing it after wading through the maze of details.
The Amazon 1-click ordering became such a roaring success owing to the fact it enabled users to complete the order in the shortest time frame possible.
In a nutshell: Delivering customer experience in an online store
Customer experience is an abstract concept. It means different things to different people. However, one thing remains constant — a positive experience is what makes customers stick.
In an online store, where the face-to-face interaction with customers is almost negligible, there are specific strategies that can help deliver a positive customer experience. They can make your customers feel closer to the brand and also valued by it.
Apart from what is already spoken, what else does your brand do to deliver a positive customer experience?
Author Bio:
Dhruv Mehta is a Digital Marketing Professional who works at Acquire and provides solutions in the digital era. In his free time, he loves to write on tech and marketing. He is a frequent contributor to Tweak Your Biz. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
