Today’s consumer is fickle and expects the world. Whether looking to purchase a new car, winter coat or a holiday, each individual or business customer has a unique process to identify the right product and a long list of demands that the delivering brand needs to meet for them to make the sale.
These include offering value, trust, best price, easy purchasing experience, customer service, and engagement with relevance.
What can ecommerce businesses do to enhance their customer experience?
Understand your customer
Brands need to understand every aspect of the customer and have a comprehensive ecommerce strategy that will give their customers not only what they want but what they expect. So brand managers should be collaborating with the ecommerce team to develop an aligned strategy to provide the best experience to customers on all channels. Look at both the internal digital multichannel options and also how the company is working with its external resellers, distributors, partners, etc to ensure all are run most efficiently to meet customer expectations.
Use technology and analytics
Companies should focus on developing an integrated digital platform that is well understood and used by the entire organization, across brand and geographies. To gain a competitive advantage by creating greater value for the customer, brands need to develop a commerce strategy focused on customer behaviour across channels.
Analytics is a key ingredient when it comes to understanding behaviour and the insights taken from consumer data can help multiple departments, from sales and marketing to supply chain, to make educated decisions that could positively impact future business and the bottom line.
Its important to use key performance indicators to monitor and improve your business. Determine which ones are relevant, and make sure they are readily available to you. There are dozens of KPIs that may be important to an ecommerce business such as Unique Visitor Traffic, New Visitor Traffic, Referral Sources, Cart Abandonment, Checkout Abandonment, Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate, Page Views per Visit, Time Spent on Site, Average Order Value, Gross Margin, Open Customer Support Cases, Open Orders, and Return Rate.
Don’t forget price
With consumers are spending more time online, researching and reviewing products and prices before making the final decision it makes it even more important to ensure your products are competitively priced, particularly if you sell products that are available from other web sites or retail outlets.
If a company’s commerce roadmap isn’t up to par with a customer’s expectations, the brand could encounter a drop in loyalty, a loss in sales, or negative comments on social media that could impact further purchasing decisions.
