Building a seamless customer experience isn’t as simple as launching an attractive website and filling it with your products. You may have everything they need at the very best price, but if the customer’s experience with your business and your website isn’t up to scratch, then you’ll struggle to provide a consistent, enjoyable journey that will keep them coming back, or making a single purchase.
Creating a customer-centric experience is an important cog in your eCommerce machine, and having the right approach, technology, and applications in place can help you create a seamless customer experience that will not only keep them coming back but also recommend you to their friends and family. Want to know more? Let’s explore some simple but effective ways you can achieve this.
Focus on a Seamless Payment Experience
Cart abandonment is a real headache for any eCommerce business. And if you’re struggling to get site visitors over the line, then your payment process could be the problem. Slow loading pages, an insufficient number of payment methods, doubts over site security and a clunky process could be driving your lack of conversions down and damaging the experience on your website. To build a seamless customer experience, get started with a virtual POS system. Using a virtual terminal to handle and process payments either online, on the phone, or even in person, you’ll be able to accept credit cards without traditional hardware or dedicated phone lines. This seamless approach to payments means that your customers and site visitors will be more comfortable making payments and can place orders quickly.
Focus on Site Navigation
How accessible is your website? When a website is confusing, difficult to navigate and simply too much like hard work to find what they need, visitors won’t hang around for long. Creating a seamless customer experience starts with a simple but eye-catching website design, one that is easy to navigate and understand. Unsure of where to begin? Check out your site analytics and explore your visitor behaviours. Take a look at the bounce rate to see which elements of your site are causing problems and make suitable changes. Order your menus strategically, divide categories logically with clickable links, ensure every image has ALT text for both indexing and inclusivity purposes, and check your site search feature works.
Take Feedback Seriously
A great example of proactive customer service comes from SpiritHoods, a well known apparel brand. During a Black Friday sale, they had noticed a few items required deeper discounts than originally advertised. Rather than reduce the price of the items mid sale and wait for customers who purchased at the higher price to notice and reach out, they issued partial refunds to everyone who had already purchased those items retroactively. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with many customers expressing surprise and gratitude for the transparency. While it resulted in a short-term revenue dip, the brand saw it as a long-term investment in customer trust and loyalty. An approach supported by their work with The Growth Operative, a consultancy focused on customer-centric growth strategies like this one.
Ensure Your Entire Team is on The Same Page
Whether you handle customers face to face, over the phone, via social media or chatbots on your site, ensuring that your entire team is dedicated to providing a seamless customer experience is key. Your employees should be knowledgeable about all aspects of your products, services, and business and adhere to a high standard of care.
Final Thoughts
Concerned about the journey of your customers? Consider the points above to put your customers first, make their experience seamless and drive your sales.
