As a business owner, one of your top priorities should be to make your customer as happy as possible with your products and services.
There is no great wisdom behind this, happy customers come back more often, and they tend to spend more money.
On top of that, if you manage to provide a great customer experience, you can rest assured that the customers will tell their friends about your business, and they won’t hold back on sharing all the important details.
But how can you provide an amazing customer experience when you run an eCommerce business? Is the process a bit different when the business and its operations are online compared to brick-and-mortar stores?
Let’s take a look.
Understand your customers
The first step towards a better customer experience is understanding your customers’ needs. Knowing and understanding your customers should be one of your goals in the preparation stages before building your business.
As an eCommerce business owner, you should be prepared to respond to changing trends and adjust as the ideal customer profile changes.
There are a few things you can do when working on this:
- Provide opportunities for direct feedback. This is important for customer engagement, and you can get important customer data out of the feedback you receive.
- Pay close attention to any metrics that you can pull regarding your customers’ behavior. In particular, try to see what ads they respond best to and where they drop off in the buyer’s journey.
If you can’t think of a way to get more feedback from your customers, you could simply ask them how they feel about the relationship with your business.
Feature a feedback survey on your website, encourage customers to leave comments and reviews through post-purchase email communication. This is how you can get more important details about the overall customer experience and fix what’s wrong.
To know better about your customer’s satisfaction, you can create surveys and get real-time feedback about your product. Surveys are known to be an engaging way for knowing your target audience’s needs. So make sure to have one on your website. The best option for you can be the Survey Plugin for WordPress. With the help of the Survey Maker plugin, you will be able to create surveys with various question types.
The plugin also offers you to make the surveys anonymous so that the participants will feel free to share their honest opinion with you.
The products have to be easy to find
When a visitor comes to your online store, they should be able to find what they are looking for in a matter of a few minutes. That is why you need to make your products easy to find, as this is a strong factor that is directly related to customer experience.
A customer should be able to find a product at your store quickly and easily, and that is why you need to have a clear homepage along with all category pages. This is especially important when you consider product categorization and filtering.
Product categorization
Product categories are groups of your products arranged according to a certain characteristic. To make a good categorization, you should know what customers think about and how they shop for the products you offer.
For instance, if you are selling clothes, try to figure out if your customers search by type of clothing item or by occasion. It often happens that you’ll want to structure your online store so that shoppers can explore products either way, depending on their intent. Keep in mind that this can vary from niche to niche.
Product filtering
When a customer picks a category to explore, product filtering paves the way to further refine product results by attributes such as brand, price, color, and size. This is done to narrow down the number of search results.
It is often easy to suffer choice overload when faced with several pages of product results. And even though it may seem counterintuitive, it is better to leave your customers to decide among fewer choices.
Build a business mobile app
Having an app for your business nowadays can make a world of difference when it comes to customer experience. The major benefit of business apps for mobile devices is that they provide convenience to users.
A decade ago, convenience was just a nice feature that set a brand apart from its competitors. Nowadays, however, it is a necessity that is built into every business’s offering. Consumers don’t only appreciate the convenience, but they expect it from your business.
Mobile apps provide that convenience and everything a customer needs, right there on their mobile device in the palm of their hand.
Customer service can be dialed with a single tap and orders made in a matter of seconds.
So no matter how large or small your store, use a virtual phone service to route your business number to ring on any phone. Don’t miss out on those sales!
And while a website might provide information to prospective vendors, journalists, and so on, mobile apps are specifically geared towards customers.
As a result, apps only provide the features and information that the consumer needs, streamlined, and optimized solely for the customer.
Therefore, if you still don’t have an app for your business, start developing one. Start learning about mobile app design, functionalities, platforms, and mobile device users as soon as you can. This will be of great importance and give you a competitive advantage in the days to come.
Implement a customer service knowledge base
A customer service knowledge base is designed to enable customers to self-serve their own answers to the frequently asked questions. This reduces the high costs involved in extra workload for customer service representatives, and it also reduces the bottom line for businesses and helps retain the customers.
When a confused customer wants to find an answer that would resolve their issue, a customer service knowledge base can play an important role as it allows customers to get the right information however, and whenever they want it.
However, customers are not the only ones that will benefit from a knowledge base. Your employees will feel positive effects too. Your customer service agents will be relieved from answering simple questions, and customers will get quick responses that are actually quick and easy fixes.
To enjoy these benefits, you need to build your own knowledge base. Luckily, you can do this using knowledge base software solutions, which will help you improve the customer experience on your eCommerce website.
Also, adding real-time chat will help build trust and will connect the customer directly to you, thus humanizing the buying experience. A great solution for implementing that is AtomChat.
Streamline your checkout process
There is a reason why a whole separate field of eCommerce is called checkout optimization. Many eCommerce business owners face cart abandonment as one of the biggest issues, and that is why you should work on streamlining your checkout process regardless of what you are selling.
Make the whole process as simple and as smooth as possible to reduce the chances of customers leaving the store before finalizing a purchase.
A useful tip is to reduce the number of fields in the form instead of bombarding customers with too many form fields once they start the checkout process. Only ask for vital information and details and make it quick, so customers have little to no time to overthink and abandon the cart.
Furthermore, make the whole process only a few steps long, ideally three steps, to avoid your customers’ frustration.
Final thoughts
Having happy customers means having customers that always come back to spend more money at your online store. However, this also means that you should try to do everything you can to make them as happy as possible.
Adopt a can-do attitude and start working on your eCommerce website’s weak points. Hopefully, you will be able to use this mini-guide to improve the customer experience and grow your organization.
what a nice thought! Nicely written!