How to Deliver a Revenue-Generating Customer Experience for Online Stores

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What is the eCommerce Customer Experience?

The eCommerce customer experience (CX) encompasses all interactions a customer has with an eCommerce business. It includes everything from the moment a customer first hears about your brand to the point where they make a purchase.

Why is Investing in the eCommerce Customer Experience Crucial?

Here are a few statistics that show why investing in the customer experience (CX) for your eCommerce store is a good idea:

• CX has climbed to the top of marketing budgets, with 20% allocated to getting the CX right. (Digital Trends by Adobe)

• You can increase your revenue by nearly 70% by improving CX. (Temkin Group)

• 73% of customers confirmed that their overall customer experience determines whether they finalize or abandon a sale.

• 43% of all customers surveyed in the US stated they would pay more for an exceptional CX.

• 65% of customers considered a top-tier experience to be more significant than advertising and branding.

• According to another Temkin consumer report, investing in CX can double your revenue within 36 months.

Speed

When page load time increases from 1s to 5s, the probability of a bounce increases by 90%. The online shopping customer experience can be impacted by a speed change of just 0.1s. According to Deloitte, an improvement in speed of 0.1s leads to a 10% increase in customer spending. Additionally, 70% of consumers admit that page load speed influences their willingness to shop with retailers.

Mobile Experiences

Rising customer expectations and the increasing use of smartphones are driving the need for mobile speed. The competitive gap will widen between brands that provide excellent mobile experiences (mobile-first, lightning-fast) and those that fail to deliver them. Mobile conversions require a smooth, agile mobile experience. Slow loading times and a lack of mobile-first architecture cause mobile shoppers to spend more time on the site but spend less money.

Simple Shopping Interface

The lack of a clean interface with a visible shopping cart is usually one of the primary reasons for cart abandonment. For example, Amazon is a master of user interface design. The consumer is guided through their shopping journey—from search to checkout—by a minimalist and uncluttered design.

Visual Attractiveness

In addition to a strong focus on the shopping cart, shoppers gravitate toward attractive layouts. Adopting an integrated design is an emerging trend in mobile commerce. A growing number of applications rely on animation and card-layout design to persuade users to interact in every possible way.

Extensive Search

The more extensive your product catalog is, the more crucial site search becomes for your eCommerce business. While it's rare to encounter an eCommerce site without a search field, it happens even among some of the most well-known companies. The usability of search results is also key. Customers expect segmented navigation to allow them to further filter results by category, price, star rating, color, size, etc.

Clients' reviews

Customer reviews have been shown to increase conversion by as much as 270%, with the majority of customers (82%) looking for negative reviews. Word-of-mouth is essential. Customers seek it out and trust the opinions of other users.

Personalization

Given the amount of competition in the market, brands must stand out by delivering distinctive experiences. Personalized shopping, typically linked to social media, is becoming popular among online customers. Customers are attracted by product recommendations that are specifically tailored to their purchase history.

Payment methods

Offer your customers a wide range of payment options. Various payment methods, such as digital wallets from Apple, Google, or Samsung, are preferred due to their contactless nature. Also, the BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) alternative from providers like PayPal and Klarna is a growing trend in mobile payments. BNPL offers a more comprehensive payment solution for consumers on a tight budget who want to purchase expensive items.

Begin from the Frontend

The frontend is where the customer experience happens. Since customer journeys take place on your site's presentation layer, you need a super-fast, mobile-first frontend to boost conversions and revenue. The frontend of your site is where users directly interact with the website. It includes the overall layout, design, and user experience. Creating a smooth, intuitive, and pleasant frontend experience is crucial for keeping customers satisfied and ensuring they return for more (CRR - Customer Retention Rate).

Improving Website Performance

A high-quality consumer experience starts with fast page loading. To stay ahead, you need to boost your site's speed. Adopt a mobile-first approach and regularly improve your page load speed. Composable commerce solutions are a fantastic choice because they provide a performance-oriented architecture with a main focus on SEO (mobile and desktop) and conversion rates.

Utilize the Omnichannel approach

A brand communicates with customers using various channels. These include websites, social media, mobile apps, and various marketing channels. The omnichannel approach integrates all channels to ensure a cohesive customer experience regardless of the source the customer uses. A seamless omnichannel shopping experience reduces the friction associated with traveling between different channels, making it easier for the customer to complete the purchase process.

Implementing the MACH architecture

The MACH approach focuses on composability and allows for the creation of a robust IT environment that adapts to business requirements. MACH architecture enables the introduction of one modification at a time. This means you can address the most pressing issues immediately. And as the company grows and customer needs change, MACH architecture makes it significantly easier to integrate new solutions and procedures to further streamline the customer experience.

Providing Customers with Exceptional UX

The importance of User Experience (UX) in creating exceptional CX cannot be overstated. Customers are highly likely to move on to the next online store if they cannot easily interact with your eCommerce site.

Things to focus on when improving UX:

• Mobile Optimization.

Customers currently use multiple mobile devices during their shopping journey. Therefore, you must ensure that interaction with your site is possible regardless of the device type.

• Intuitive Site Architecture.

Ideally, you should strategically structure your product catalog to guarantee users easy navigation through your site.

• Fully Functional Search Engine.

AI-powered eCommerce plugins can improve the user experience by providing real-time search suggestions.

Defining Ideal Customers

The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) describes the environmental and behavioral characteristics of customers who are predicted to be the most valuable for a company.

If you’re unsure who these consumers are, you can identify them by conducting a simple on-site survey that asks visitors who they are, what they do, and how they engage with your products or services. Next, you can focus on the customers who make the largest purchases and spend the most money.

Once you have a general idea of your ideal consumers, you can begin to analyze more thoroughly and create user personas that will guide you through the remaining processes.

Identify Key Customer Touchpoints

Specific touchpoints require extra attention (even if your customers don't identify them as problem areas). For example, these touchpoints might include:

• New customer onboarding

• Lost transactions (or Abandoned transactions)

• Customer order cancellations

• First-time website visitors

Gather Feedback and Insights from Your Customers

There are various methods for gathering customer feedback and insights—here are three of them:

• Conduct Unscripted Interviews Interviews require more effort than simply setting up an on-site survey. However, talking to some of your ideal customers and listening to their individual stories can provide you with several insightful pieces of information. It's highly likely that you'll stumble upon unmet needs, motivators, and barriers to purchase.

• Examine Web Analytics Data Web analytics is used to collect, report, measure, and analyze website data. You can use it to map the entire online environment and observe general customer activity on your site. Web analytics will provide you with a wealth of contextual knowledge, but it's not about gathering input data. You can determine if customer experiences represent broader patterns by looking at Google Analytics page views, abandonment rates, traffic patterns, and traffic sources. For example, if one customer complains that ordering a specific product was difficult, you can check the order page to discover how many other customers abandoned their order there.

• Track User Sentiment Sentiment analysis can be used to determine how customers feel about your brand. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP), sentiment analysis can categorize public sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative at the most advanced level. The simplest form involves maintaining a spreadsheet log of received feedback (companies use dedicated software for this). You will analyze this data later to identify elements and operations influencing the customer experience.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is one of the simplest ways to evaluate the customer experience. While often used as a customer service metric, CSAT also offers insight into the overall customer experience, as support interactions are a critical element of CX. This simple survey determines how satisfied a customer is after interacting with your company.

For example, after speaking with a live representative via online chat, a consumer can rate the support agent’s response based on how satisfactory or helpful the solutions were. Alternatively, if a customer acquires a product or service, you can inquire about their satisfaction with it.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular way to assess customer satisfaction. NPS will tell you what percentage of customers love your brand, are neutral toward it, or dislike it.

The Net Promoter Score represents the percentage of customers who would recommend your brand to others. NPS can be measured by asking customers to rate how likely they are to recommend your eCommerce brand to others on a scale from -100 to 100.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score (CES) survey can be used to ask customers to rate their interaction with a company or its services and goods as easy, neutral, or difficult.

To calculate the CES, sum the customer effort scores and divide them by the total number of survey responses.

If customers rate a product as difficult to use, you should consider new approaches to make it more user-friendly. For instance, if your website's menu is hard to find, you will need to refresh it or adopt a cleaner template to improve the CX.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) indicates how much a single customer has contributed to the company over the course of the relationship, accounting for the revenue they generate versus how much they "cost" the company. The formula also considers how much the company spends on customer retention.

This is a valuable customer experience statistic because you can see whether a customer is satisfied and makes more purchases over time, or if they are dissatisfied and spend less.

CLV is calculated by multiplying the customer's value by their average lifespan.

Typically, the higher the CLV, the better the CX. However, if you notice that a consumer is spending less over time, you can find out why and develop a strategy to increase the CLV.

Customer Churn Rate

The Customer Churn Rate is the percentage of customers who abandon or do not renew their subscriptions within a specific time frame.

While churn is inevitable, it’s vital to understand why it occurs in your business so you can reduce it. To calculate the churn rate, choose a time period and sum the total number of customers you acquired, as well as the number of customers who left during that period.

Then, to get the churn rate, divide the number of customers who left by the total number of acquired customers and multiply that figure by 100%. This metric should help you determine why consumers are leaving.

Customer Journey analysis

Another method for measuring the eCommerce customer experience is to use analytics to examine the customer journey.

Customer motivations, needs, and pain points can be incorporated into the customer journey map. This will also help you understand all the touchpoints a consumer encounters during their journey.

To begin analyzing the customer journey, you should certainly gather data from social media, advertisements, the website, company events, product ratings, emails, and surveys. Then, on your customer journey map, add a page or tab dedicated to reporting touchpoint metrics to analyze the customer experience.

Customer Service Inquiry Trends

You can also analyze customer support tickets to identify trends affecting the customer experience.

Are there any recurring issues that are causing pain points for your customers? If so, try to address them as they arise. Based on the trends you find, you may decide that you need to provide simpler instructions, explainer videos, or even product changes.