Key considerations in delivering superior digital customer experiences
Digital touch points predominantly influence customer brand preferences. To positively influence a customer’s choice of brand over the competition, you need to examine individual touch points at a granular level. As websites have the highest ability to influence customer purchase decisions, it’s important to ensure that you offer top-notch customer experiences across websites that carry your products.
To measure and improve your digital customer experience more effectively, check if you are putting your best foot forward across these fundamental digital customer experience parameters.
Website discoverability
How easy is it for customers to find your brand website? Is your website optimized for search? Answering these questions is crucial especially since 42% of your e-commerce traffic comes from organic searches. Other ways prospects stumble upon your website are through paid searches, promotional emails, social media posts, and sponsored ads. Consistency in branding and messaging across all these channels is key in driving a strong brand recall. While it’s tempting to design unique campaigns for every media, differences in the messaging, tone of voice, and style will not only dilute your brand’s image but also distort the experience for your customers.
Next, to maximize visibility, a robust SEO strategy is critical. If not done right, it can translate to a loss of clicks, brand impressions, and sales. For starters, focus on understanding your buyer’s intent. For instance, a search term like “best laptop” reflects that the prospect is researching laptops. Such a keyword can be used to lead them to relevant content on your website or affiliate site. Whereas searching for a specific laptop model name suggests that they are closer to the purchase stage.
Check if you have the right keywords mapped to the right landing pages. Also, improving your site structure will help refine your customer’s navigation experience. Performing research to identify your rival’s keyword bids will also help uncover new and unique keywords to rank higher on search results.
Product searchability
When a customer lands on your website, how easy is it to find what they are looking for? Test your website’s internal search capability to see the quality of the search results. The idea is to ensure that customers find the products they are searching for with the least number of clicks.
A well thought-through product taxonomy, i.e. categorizing products based on customer-relevant product associations, is the first step to improving search quality. The next step is to enrich your product information with relevant tags (e.g. small kitchen appliances) and attributes (e.g. color or size) to further refine search results.
Prospects using on-site search are known to convert 4x more than those who don’t. By not optimizing this functionality brands stand to leave much on the table.
As a best practice, the journey from search to the relevant product information should take no more than three clicks. To achieve this, check if your search box allows customers to refine their search basis price, size, and key product attributes. Here’s where digital catalogs enriched with relevant product-centric keywords, attributes, and features help. Functions like autocomplete, autosuggest, and built-in spelling corrections go a long way in reinforcing overall user-friendliness.
Product information
Once your customers reach a product page, do they find the information they need to make an informed purchase decision? Does your content detail out relevant product attributes, provide a need-based description, and address queries raised in the product reviews? Unclear product content could result in up to 20% more cart abandonment rates and 22% more product returns.
So it goes without saying that great product content is a must for a smooth digital customer experience. The objective is to dispel any second-thoughts customers may have while shopping online. This means product content should align with their needs, while highlighting its competitive strengths. A content quality audit will glean out such strategic value gaps.
Think of product content as your sales pitch. What would you say to instill trust and prove exactly how your offering fits a shopper’s needs? While throngs of similar products exist online, authentic, and well-crafted product descriptions, combined with high-quality, zoomable, multi-angle product shots will make the cut. Content consistency and standardization in terms of visuals, background colors, product shot variety, etc., are other unmissable elements in motivating a confident purchase.
Product reviews
Customer reviews are important purchase drivers. Apart from reflecting on how a product is performing “on the field”, they also impact your brand’s online reputation. 94% of customers have changed their minds about a purchase after reading a negative review. Therefore, closely tracking reviews on each page for abusive and inappropriate content and weeding out unauthentic ones is imperative. So is ensuring timely responses to genuine product-related queries.
It’s important to keep a decent mix of positive and authentic negative reviews since no product is without drawbacks. By outsourcing this task with pre-defined guidelines to a competent e-commerce solution provider, brands can obtain a detailed review analysis along with actionable next steps to refine their digital customer experience.
Checkout experience
There’s a sense of great accomplishment and excitement that accompanies making an online purchase. More so when it’s a sale, or if stocks are limited. Customers often take pride in flaunting the fact that they were the first to bag a good deal or buy the latest version of a product. Amid this growing momentum, a long tedious registration form at the last leg of the journey will just put them off. In fact, 34% shoppers have exited a transaction midway because of this very reason.
Therefore brands must ask themselves – how many clicks does it take for a customer to complete their purchase on my site? Are we losing customers to correctable cart abandonment reasons like high delivery or other unexpected charges, extended delivery times, or out-of-stock scenarios?
Offering a guest sign-in option, compressing all transaction related details into a single page are some ways of catalyzing the checkout process. Also, ensure your customer can choose from a variety of payment options. They should be able to view their total cart value, along with your website’s security seals and badges at all times during this stage. The more seamless you make this step, the higher the conversion rates.
Customer care
At this point, you’ll realize it’s not all about the product but also about how you treat your customers. A McKinsey study reveals that 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated. 30% of shoppers expect a response to their email within an hour and on Facebook, 33% expect it within a day. This calls for an active response team that’s able to perform round the clock if you are serving a global audience.
Most shoppers don’t mind getting their queries on shipment delays, product returns, etc., addressed via chat/non-voice support as it doesn’t require long call wait times. Being transparent and responsive within minimal turn-around times will be key for brands to close the loop on an impressive note. Make sure you ask for feedback on your support. A simple CSAT survey will not only make them feel heard but also give you valuable insights to work on. As a thumb rule, aim to exceed your customer’s expectations in every aspect possible, leaving them delighted enough to inspire a repeat purchase or spread the word.
Netscribes helps brands delight customers at each stage of the digital customer journey. We offer a range of e-commerce solutions providing end-to-end support from product content strategy and execution to customer support, to boost conversions. To know how we can help your business, contact us at info@netscribes.com.
