An Ultimate Guide for an Awesome E-Commerce Customer Experience in 2020

May 15, 2020May 15, 2020 by IP_Alternativepayments

Did you know that more than 80% of people stop doing business with a company only because of poor customer experience? Yet it seems that we can hear the term “customer experience” very often, and plenty of people are very much unsure of what this term actually means. Every interaction between a customer and a brand, either in store, online, or via phone during their relationship is called customer experience. Everything that you, as a company, or an e-commerce do, falls into “customer experience”. Every contribution – starting from a simple “Hello” from your side to the products that you sell can tell a lot about your company and about the way that you deal with your customers.

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
– Jeff Bezos

What about CXM?
Customer experience management stands for the measurement process on how a company is interacting with their customers across every channel, either physical or digital, and ideally improving it.

Here are 10 Alternative Payments Q/A suggestions on what you should focus on while building relationships with your potential customers and what you can improve:

1. How well do you know your customers?

It’s estimated that there will be over 2 billion global digital buyers in 2020 and that the overall global retail market will top $26 trillion in the same year.

It is said that preparation is half the battle, but we are living in an ever-changing world, and adjusting to the customers’ needs and trends is something that retailers have to have in mind while creating the ideal customer persona. These are the things that you should focus on in order to understand your customers better:

Customer’s feedback: One of the most important things is constant mutual interaction. This will help you in the long run by showing them that you care. Increase retention and collect valuable data that will help you improve your product and services.
Observation: Observe how they behave and what they do, not only what they say. Metrics via various marketing tools can be very useful in order to see where they drop off in the buyer’s journey.

AP Tip: Include surveys on websites, open communication with direct questions through social media, and encourage them to respond with a comment to increase engagement. Every insight is valuable!

2. Speaking of navigation, are your products easy to find?

Visitors often leave the website in the first 10 seconds, unless a page provides a clear value proposition that will attract them to stay longer.

The best advice on what you should do is to try and put yourself in the shoes of the shoppers. How much time would you like to spend browsing around? Probably not a lot, and that is why you need to make your customer journey as smooth as it can be, by designing a header that is tailor-made to their wants and needs. It should be simple, clean, attractive, and on top of that it should be divided into categories in order to create the user-friendly look that all shoppers like. The product categorization doesn’t only depend on the nice, but also on your target audience. What they think about the products that you offer also matters a lot.

Grouping relevant products together will make it easier for your potential customers to find what they are looking for. As for the hierarchy, there are two types of categories:

Parent Categories
Subcategories

AP Tip: Even if you decide on what you think will be the most important elements in your header, at the end of the day it is all about your end-users and their experience. A/B testing is highly recommended before deploying your website.

3. How to build a product page that stands out?

On average, only 2.8% of e-commerce website visits convert into a purchase.

Product pages are where you should differentiate your product from your competitors. What do you need? Unique descriptions written with concise copy. Be helpful, do not try to sell something in an obvious way. Focus on the benefits, give them information that will actually provide your shoppers with things they actually care about. Show them how it works or what experience they will have from using it.

Populate it with awesome product photos – high-quality, custom made with detailed views. All photos should be consistent. Give them context, show their use in real life.
CTA, buttons such as “Add to Cart” should be easy to spot and you should also include the option of adding the product to a cart with just one click.
Try to avoid bad customer experience by paying attention to the loading speed and responsiveness of the page.

AP Tip: Product pages can make or break your customer experience. Hiring and investing in a professional user experience (UX) design team, constant testing and identifying the main pain points of your customers is the key to increased conversion rates.

4. How can your customers’ feedback or review increase sales and conversions?

More than 77% of customers read a review before making a purchase.

Nothing is more powerful than the “word of mouth”. It’s not that shoppers don’t trust marketing and advertising in general, it’s just that someone else’s personal experience gives that extra credibility to the product or services. Referrals are the best inbound advertising that is completely free, they increase engagement, loyalty, and give you the opportunity to acquire new customers. Even though that the price comparison websites influence the buyers’ decision in the early stage, the recommendations are extremely important in the purchase process. Maintaining relationships with clients can decrease the churn rate. The fact is that acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining current ones.

AP Tip: Actively asking for feedback from your clients can give you better insight into how to improve your product or services, and responding to their opinions can create relationships that make the purchasing process more personal.

5. Should you invest in content marketing and how does it affect customer experience?

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3x more leads.

Gone are the days of traditional marketing and one way of communication. Apart from that, pitching services or products to prospects and customers are less and less effective. Now, how does content marketing work? Providing relevant content for end users and bringing value and how they can solve their issues through each of the steps in the sales funnel should be the core of your business. Some of the benefits of the content strategy are a direct impact on sales, decreased cost of advertising, and a chance to build authority, reputation, and sustainable brand loyalty amongst end-users. What are the important things to have in mind?

Social media marketing: Before the development of your social media strategy comes a content marketing strategy.

SEO: There are no tools that will reward your business better on search engines unless you publish quality, consistent content.

PR: Your PR strategies should be focused more on addressing issues of the readers, not their business.

PPC: Great content scientifically increases conversion rates.

Inbound marketing: Without content there is no traffic and generating leads is becoming almost impossible.

AP Tip: If you are not investing in content marketing, start doing it today, as you are already behind. With the creation of an educational hub around your brand and how it can help end-users will push your business one step closer to making a long-lasting relationship and better customer experience.

6. How does mobile first design approach affect customer experience?

Longer mobile page load times drastically increase bounces, and users having a negative experience on a mobile website are 62% less likely to purchase from that business in the future.

Did you know that more than 82% of smartphone users consult their devices when making an in-store purchase? Add in the number of sales made exclusively on mobile devices and the importance of mobile optimization becomes unavoidable. Any online business must prioritize a positive user experience on devices like smartphones and tablets, as the number of these users is growing every day. By making your website design responsive to various screen sizes, adjusting the content in accordance ensures that your customers get an equal experience as if they were using their desktop.

AP Tip: When it comes to mobile first design, the strategy behind it lays down in that you need to adapt your website design process starting from sketching and prototyping for the smallest screen sizes first and then continuing that process all the way to the largest screens and monitors out there. With each version and device trying to deliver the best user experience possible and continued flow.

7. Why is creating a personalized customer experience important?

On average, 52% of online stores have omnichannel capabilities.

Customer experience personalized within omnichannel is the practice of providing customers with real-time information and the ability to do it across all channels – website, mobile, email, SMS, etc. Personalization makes customers feel special and improves their shopping experience and that translates to loyal customers and higher conversion rates for your online store. But how to do it?

For example, the first step of personalization could be addressing your customers by name in your email communications, or if you have a regular customer provide him with a new recommendation that will suit his interests.

Abandoned cart follow-up emails have an average open rate of 45%.

According to a recent report by Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to buy from companies who remember them and provide relevant offers. Further, 83% of them are also willing to share their data in exchange for a personalized experience.

AP Tip: By collecting data from all marketing channels and personalizing efforts, you as a brand will be able to offer a better and more uniformed omnichannel customer experience. You can understand each interaction as part of an ongoing relationship between a consumer and a brand.

8. What makes a great customer experience with the checkout process?

69% of shopping carts are abandoned, and the number one reason is unexpected extra cost.

Most cart abandonments occur due to complicated, long, and tiresome checkout process. A good checkout process is simple, short, easy to understand, and quick. When online buyers land on your store to buy products, it is your responsibility, as the store owner, to make their online shopping experience easy and joyful, and creating a well-thought-out, simple, and easy checkout process will give them the confidence to purchase more But how can you make that possible? Here are some things to take into consideration when designing your checkout page:

Narrow down your lengthy and long checkout steps into a single-step checkout by asking your customers to fill only a single form with few required details.
Avoid hidden costs – nothing gets the customers more upset then finding out, at the checkout stage, that there are additional costs to their purchase. Clearly mentioning the total cost of the products with no hidden charges wins customers confidence and gives an honest feeling about your brand.
Make the navigation during the checkout phase easy. Customers will find it very helpful if they can go one step back and edit the information they entered.
Do not force your customers to register in order to buy a product. Allow them to check out as guests. If you don’t force them, they will surely be back for more.
The checkout process can be a bit intimidating for first-time buyers. To make this step as easy as possible for them, provide guidelines during the whole checkout process. This will increase brand trust and honesty.
Make sure you provide all the trusted payment methods – see below for more information

AP Tip: Consistent conversion rate optimization of your checkout process is an ongoing process that should be followed. Developing ideas, making changes, and testing how it affects sales can really pay off.

9. How to wisely choose payment methods for your e-commerce in order to increase conversion rates and overall customer experience?

E-commerce payments are not limited any longer to card payments as it used to be in the early days. Generally, any payments other than credit and debit cards were considered as “alternative”, but hundreds of “alternative” methods are redefining the mainstream. Today we have a wide range of payment methods for online shoppers, and consumers enjoy secure frictionless checkout experiences. E-Wallets are accounting for more than 35% of global eCom spend, accepting a broad range of eWallets is essential. Also, bank transfers are growing in popularity, with a lower cost, and regulatory changes like PSD2 put bank transfers as a payment method on the rise.

AP Tip: Buy globally, shop locally.

👉 Check out our portfolio of local payment options. You name it, we have it! 👈

10. How to provide timely and effective customer support to improve customer experience?

Consumers are most likely to trust a business that makes it easy to contact people at the company.

Good customer support service varies from company to company, but what stands for great customer service for B2C, the same applies to B2B, as well, and it includes the following:

Rapid response time on requests and responding to all customer feedback, either positive or negative.
Omnichannel support, as your customers should contact you easily no matter which medium they are using.
Providing unique solutions to customers’ issues and solving their problems.
Constant analyzing and improvement of customer experience based on collected feedback.

AP Tip: Provide business contact information on each page of your online store so that your customers can easily contact you. Consider including a chatbot (try to make the conversation as personalized as it can be). Engage with them on social media channels, open conversation. Start a community. A great example comes from Drift. Before they launched a product, they have created a community collecting all the valuable assets on how they can improve their product.

Conclusion

With all the following in mind, never forget that every customer has a cost of acquisition and you want to convert and keep them into happy customers. There is a viral saying on the internet that data is the new oil, and there’s no doubt that there is some truth behind it since all data collected either from your website, app, direct from your customers or from their behavior can be used to improve and develop better customer experience. All processes can be automated for data collection and measurement purposes and by filtering and qualifying businesses can make meaningful changes. Include multi-question surveys targeting specific aspects of the customer interaction. For example, for e-commerce you can include customer support experience, delivery, product quality, etc. Monitor the customer churn rate and measure overall loyalty how you’re performing.