Customer experience is essential to the success of any business. 64% of customers are more concerned about the quality of service than a brand’s prices, and that number is growing. As consumer behavior continues to evolve, businesses have to restructure their approach to sales and service.
Technology is rapidly changing the way we do business, and consumers have instant access to many options. To stay relevant and make sales, you have to build a brand that puts customers first.
If you want to make it easy for customers to buy from you, you need to create a structure that guides customers through every stage of the sales funnel seamlessly. From the start of research to checkout, creating an intuitive customer experience is important.
Building great customer experience with your brand is not a simple process but it’s doable. So, in this article, we’ll go over three important tips to make it easy for customers to buy from you. Ready to learn how to keep your customers coming back? Let’s dive in.
3 Tips to Improve Customer Experience
It’s ALL about customer experience! To make it easy for customers to purchase from you, focus on these three customer-experience-centric tips:
1. Frictionless Ordering
The attention span of the average online shopper is short, so you have to make the most of their attention with fast, simple solutions. Placing orders on your e-commerce platform should not pose a hassle to customers, or they will leave.
These three features can help to simplify the process of ordering on your e-commerce platform:
Advanced Site Searches
Many e-commerce platforms feature thousands (even millions) of product listings, so advanced site searches help customers to find what they need faster.
You could incorporate an image search feature, which allows users to upload an image of the product they’re looking for. The search bot then delivers search results based on the image.
Custom Product Filters
Product filters allow users to sort product search results by attributes such as brand, price, product ratings, or sizes. This feature also gives merchants a chance to display more in-depth attributes of their products, like fuss-free packaging.
This goes a long way because including thorough details on your product pages is so important. In fact, 88% of customers rely on detailed product information to make a purchase decision. If there’s not enough information about a product, it becomes more difficult to convince customers to buy it.
With product filters, you save users the stress of scrolling through thousands of product listings and make an impression as an easy-to-use, reliable merchant. It’s a win-win.
Easy Reordering Process
When it comes to customer experience, it’s the little things that count. e-Commerce platforms may not consider it important to add a ‘reorder’ or ‘add to cart’ option after a customer has already made a purchase. However, it is a function that simplifies the process of placing routine orders, so it will encourage repeat purchases.
And here’s the interesting part: getting a customer to buy from you once may be easy, but what’s tricky (and more important) is getting them to keep coming back.
Customer retention is like compound interest. Your odds of selling to an existing customer are between 60-70 percent, but for new customers, about 5-20 percent. Also, increasing customer retention by 5 percent will result in a minimum 25 percent increase in profit.
So, building long-term customer relationships makes for more ROI for your business, and it all starts with good customer experience.
2. Go Mobile to Enhance Customer Experience
Consumers now rely more than ever on digital devices, and Business Insider Intelligence predicts that mobile devices are likely to become the main shopping channel for online shoppers in the next five years.
If you are planning to run a profitable e-Commerce website, you must appeal to smartphone users and optimize your platform for their devices. Not doing so automatically excludes the bulk of your potential clients. Obviously, that could put you right out of business. The first rule of doing business is to position your brand where your customers can easily find you.
Going mobile with your e-Commerce (which would make it m-commerce) would require you to revisit your website design and optimize it for mobile search results. Your website’s User Interface (UI) would have to become mobile-responsive so that customers can access all the features from their small screens as easily as they would on a larger screen.
Above all, your mobile platform should offer users an experience that is superior to your competitors. There are most likely a lot of them, and they are accessible to your customer at the tap of a button (or the click of a screen). Accenture says businesses lose $1.6 trillion per year when customers move away from them. Don’t be the company that loses because your platform takes forever to load on mobile.
You want to optimize your website for swift load times, customized experience, and mobile-specific material, such as video, newsletters, and infographics. You can take advantage of mobile-specific features like location and camera to further enhance the overall customer experience.
3. Communication
As it is in any relationship, communication is key. Always keep in mind that beyond the labels and statistics, customers are humans, too. You have to bring emotional intelligence to play because buying behavior is largely influenced by emotion.
Whether your customer is a B2B or B2C shopper, their decisions are influenced by their reaction to and interaction with your business. Research conducted by McKinsey revealed that “70% [of customers] reduced their commitment” to a business when they experienced negative customer support.
Many businesses focus more on product design or ad campaigns than they do on customer care, and that’s counterproductive. While those are aspects that require attention, neglecting customer care negates their importance. You could have the best product on the internet, but if your customer service is substandard, you would still not make sales. On the other hand, if you have sterling customer care, customers could even put up with occasional shortcomings.
To maximize client-company communications for your business:
- Make it easy for customers to get in touch with your sales and customer service teams.
- If you’re not using a chatbot, provide customer service staff to respond to clients. Make sure to indicate what hours support is available if that applies to your business.
- If you are using a chat bot on your platform, provide the option to talk to a human customer support, as some buyer demographics prefer that option.
- Email response times should also be clearly stated for customers. A Forrester research states that 45% of US consumers will abandon an online transaction if their complaints or inquiries are not addressed on time. If you’re only available between 9 am-5 pm, make sure that the customers know, and ensure that complaints and inquiries are swiftly attended to during this period.
Conclusion
All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, brands they know, like, and trust. It’s as true for B2B customers as it is for B2C because businesses make decisions through their employees and they’re humans before anything else.
No customers, no business. Period. The brand that treats its customers best, wins.
HCL Commerce offers B2C and B2B starter stores that are mobile-first and responsive out-of-the-box. Request a demo here.
