If you have an online store or you are thinking of opening your own business on the Internet, surely you do not stop thinking about how to improve the purchase process and offer a pleasant experience to achieve. It is necessary to have a good product, a website or application adapted to the user’s purchasing needs, but above all it is essential to have one capable of differentiating you from the competition. A good customer experience can become your best ally.
What is customer experience
The customer experience ( or CX) is the sum of all the experiences that the customer has with a brand through all its channels. It is the perception you have of your values, products and services from the moment you hear about them, know them, buy them, receive them, try them, decide to talk about them (good or bad) and buy them again (or not). ).
It is a broad, global concept, which implies aesthetic and functional considerations, but that goes beyond effective interaction. Excellent customer service is of little use if the delivery of the product fails. Shipping and returns are of little use if the purchase process is chaotic and cumbersome. Effective advertising is of little use if the branding strategy is not in tune.
Therefore, conceiving and designing a valuable customer experience for your business is an integral job that covers all the customer’s encounters with the brand, which requires knowing what he thinks, how he feels in each interaction, what motivates him, what his goals and capabilities are.
What does customer experience mean for your eCommerce
It is about understanding the specific requirements of your online store to focus the strategy on the customer and match your interests with those of the user: respond to your expectations, meet your needs and offer you what you are looking for at each stage of the path that you are going to travel together.
It is as important to offer you what you want to buy as the experience of buying it as you want: in a pleasant environment, comfortably, quickly, feeling that you have control at every step and that in this process you get closer to the greatest satisfaction of your needs with the minimum of effort.
Providing your buyers with the best experience will help you set the necessary strategies to achieve happy customers, enthusiastic, willing to repeat, to pay more, to share that experience and to recommend it; which in practice will allow to increase the average ticket, improve the conversion, swell the list of consumers and the income item.
That is why the customer experience in eCommerce is important, because it has a direct impact on many of the values that help focus the evolution of online businesses.
Where to start? How to manage and control the customer experience
Managing the customer experience can be complicated because it requires taking into account the emotions, perception and behavior of the customer in each interaction with the brand, product or service. It is a long process in which it will be necessary to establish some (Khey Performance indicator) to determine the before any direct or indirect contact with your eCommerce (purchase process, online payment, after-sales monitoring, advertising, activity on social networks, searches, criticism, reviews, recommendations).
The most difficult thing is to establish where the customer experience begins and where it ends, that is why it is important make an inventory of the voluntary and fortuitous interactions that can occur between the brand and the user to analyze to what extent they contribute to the overall customer experience.
Measuring this impact is essential to improve the management and design of the customer experience and improve your business experience.
- Start by establishing your business requirements and determining what your goals are.
- Get to know the end users in depth, create a product for them that meets their needs, adjusts to their wishes, and tests if it works.
- Choose the KPIs, in order to identify problems, make better decisions and reach your goal.
How to improve the customer experience in eCommerce
Throughout this story we have already suggested some practices that can help you improve the customer experience of your online business, but we want to offer you 6 bonus keys that summarize the opportunity that a strategy that requires description, design and control represents for your eCommerce.
1. The buyer’s journey: a useful, personalized and frictionless experience
The consumer process is a journey that should be known and understood in advance to provide at each stage an experience capable of satisfying your expectations. Focusing the company’s strategy on the customer will help make him see and feel that in your eCommerce he can get what he is looking for: valuable content, a quality catalog, and control in each phase of the process.
In addition, on this journey it is important not to lose sight of the increasingly habitual and passionate use of mobile devices among consumers. They know better than ever what they want, and they want it instantly. Google coined the term «» to refer to those unique moments derived from the use of mobile phones that represent an extra opportunity for brands to be able to meet consumer preferences.
2. Balance between interaction cost and value creation
We should not confuse user experience with customer experience. The first is essential for the overall consumer experience to be excellent, but by itself it will not make it unbeatable.
The key is to contribute to the user’s decision-making process by combining and seeking a balance between the cost of interaction and the creation of value. On the one hand, you have to manage the necessary investment to achieve the greatest number of interactions (clicks, purchases, recurrence, loyalty) but you also have to design and create the content that can enrich these interactions and complete the user experience with added value.
3. Relevant content
Content also requires strategy. , associated with the brand and products, created ad hoc to inform, motivate and communicate with customers through different channels: web, blog, social networks, . In each case it is essential to monitor the tone, the arguments and the design.
above the fold
The most outstanding and attractive content for your client and your eCommerce must be accessible on the home screen. The lower it is, the more difficult it will be for the visitor to see it. Any relevant attention call should be above the scroll line.
Delete information superfluous
Not just above the fold. All the content you create to present your online store, represent your brand and sell your products or services must facilitate navigation and the purchase process. Try to integrate them into the design, avoid excesses and adapt them to mobile devices.
Improve the product sheets
…and create a buying guide if you think it can improve the customer experience. Remember to include quality photos of the exact product. Choose several good angles. Characteristics, specifications, compounds, sizes. Do not forget the price, with VAT and without shipping costs. If the product lends itself, it offers associated extra content to give it value, a how-to video, a link with additional information… It has to be .
Effective email marketing campaigns
and improve communication with your users through clear and concise messages, without abusing new features. Select representative products or services that reinforce your image and strengthen the brand, that make your product catalog known and sold. Choose an image and a unique headline of interest to your client.
In each case, it is about defining solid strategies to facilitate interaction with the client, especially on social networks.
4. Data management
Online sales generate one to reinforce interaction with the customer. Useful not only for the magnitude but for the quality of the information that can be obtained from them once processed.
They must be identified, structured, provided with context and analyzed to know what works and what doesn’t, what users are looking for, how, in what terms, who buys, what attracts them, why do they go from visitors to customers or why do they visit your eCommerce but do not buy.
Data analysis offers practical answers about consumer behavior and it is important to have access to them through web analysis, customer service…
5. Design for the customer
And not directly for the type of screen. That will come later. The first thing is to determine what type of experience you want to transfer to the client, efficient from the point of view of interaction performancebut also pleasant pleasant, from the point of view of the utility of the product. Once defined, it will be easier to adapt it to different devices.
It is a priority to know how users interact with the web to develop a design that makes a difference when it comes to positioning the most functional elements in the best possible place and .
The design of the requires a visual representation (attractive and practical) of the interface, information architecture, usability, product design, interaction and organization of all online services.
- plan the design and integrate all the elements.
- make the navigation be comfortable and fun.
- The breadcrumbs always visible to mark the visitor’s location within the website hierarchy.
- Enables a purchasing process fast, simple and intuitive.
- The always viewable.
- Offers various .
- favors the describes all the options and the minimum necessary expense.
6. Continuous optimization: iterative and interactive
So that your eCommerce does not stop growing, constant review is necessary. Your project is in continuous evolution, always in development. It is important that this process is agile, that it takes into account the needs of the company, changes in consumer behavior and technological improvements in a context of digital transformation.
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