With stiff competition for online shoppers, most ecommerce startups are finding it difficult to cope. Businesses will do anything to attract, acquire and retain customers. Creating a great customer experience plays a critical role in making more sales and staying ahead of the competition in the digital landscape.
Notably, improving customer satisfaction and experience with your brand and online store is only possible when you find out how the target customers interact online, what product they like, what pages they visit when they come to your site and more. Customer feedback can also help you know exactly what you should do to improve your brand and conversion rate.
Here are some tips to improve the digital customer experience for your target audience.
1. Follow the Data Trail
If you want to improve customer experience with your brand, you should look into the metrics and data pointing at how customers interact. Use available data to find out where your customers go and what they do whenever they visit your website.
Evaluate all the cross-channel actions on your online store. For instance, if you realize that most customer calls are about their personal information falling into the wrong hands, you should make your site SSL certified or invest in solutions to protect your data to keep your business data secured.
Visit your online store and open an account to find out what your customers enjoy and where they are getting stuck. It may be a good idea to hire an SEO consultant to identify your website’s weak points, and how you can improve client usability and experience on your platform. Always focus more on critical touchpoints like payments and the checkout process.
Instead of waiting to get complaint calls and reacting after the complaint has been made, you could use a voice broadcasting system to create personalized telephone polls with customer satisfaction questions that your clients can answer right through their phones. This way, you’re adopting a proactive approach that can help improve your customers’ satisfaction.
Reduce such calls on product usability and online security by strengthening your customers' support and improving the user experience.
Related Article: How Brand Trust and Customer Loyalty Are Won and Lost
2. Know Your Target Audience
Ideally, the best way to improve the digital customer experience is to find out your target audience. Ensure you capture feedback from the right audience. This way, you will be able to provide customized products and services to meet your customers' specific needs.
Also, for those customers who interact with your site on multiple platforms like desktop, physical store and in-app, find out all of their pain points and focus more on correcting that. These customers can share more with you on how it feels to walk into your physical shop and online store. It makes it easier to know what you need to improve in your store when you engage with your real customers.
3. Make It Easy For Customers to Give Feedback
In improving the digital customer experience, customer feedback is a very crucial factor to consider. Provide your target customer and users with different options to reach you and give their feedback.
“You want to ensure your customers have a place where they can give their feedback about your products and services,” said Jeff Romero, co-founder of Octiv Digital. “The platform should meet their unique preferences and meet them when they are available.”
You can achieve this by always presenting a customer feedback tab on your website or including a website chat function. For instance, WatchBox, which specializes in pre-owned luxury watches, provides — via its Contact Us section — options to phone, text, email along with a live chat option.
Learning Opportunities
Related Article: Not All User Feedback Is Equal: Here's How to Put it in Context
4. Listen to the Experts
If you want to meet your full potential as a startup, you should use experts. Consult a usability expert to help you meet customer experience and expectations in the right direction. Most experts will help you look beyond creating the best shopping and buying experience for your customers.
When you reach out to a customer experience specialist, they examine website navigation, create customer trust with your brand, and help you choose the best brand presentation. They don't only focus on the final sales you make.
They will help you know if your site is easy to navigate and whether it converts a visitor to a buyer. Your objective is to make a customer choose a product on the shelf and checkout as soon as possible. With expert analysis of your website and online store, you can get there quickly.
5. Unify Customer Experience on All Platforms
Not everyone will visit your online store on a desktop or PC. Some people prefer shopping on their smartphones. That said, you should make your website or online store accessible on PC, mobile and other devices. Establish a mobile-friendly website, and above all, make sure it takes less than 30 seconds to load.
You want to ensure your customers' experience is uniform across all platforms they use to interact with your business. Ensure the information you present to your customers is similar across all platforms and touchpoints.
Use the insights you get from customer interactions to create the best customer experience and a helpful digital brand experience for your target customers.
The Most Important Element in All of This? Your Customer
If you want to improve digital CX, you’ll need feedback and proper planning from all the stakeholders in your organization.
You’ll need the best CX solution to meet both yours and their needs.
But most of all, you’ll need your customer — to find out what they like and dislike about your brand and business at large. Remember this isn’t about you, it’s about them and their experience.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.