“A happy customer is the best business strategy of all.” – Michael LeBoeuf.
Customers are spoilt with choice these days, so if you’re not delivering what they’re looking for, they certainly won’t hesitate to take their business elsewhere.
With new e-commerce businesses popping up every day now and the customer’s willingness to switch to other competitors, brands face considerable challenges in gaining customer trust and retaining their loyalty.
A report by McKinsey highlighted that 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated. To add to this, Saleforce found that 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services.
In today’s competitive world, customer satisfaction is crucial to ensure sustainable business growth and long-term success.
What is customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is based on people’s experience when interacting with your online store, which in turn, will influence a range of decisions.
Satisfying the customer is argued to be the most important aspect of business success. For e-commerce businesses, a customer-centric approach will help build trust, win sales, and retain more customers.
It’s all about helping the customer at every stage of their journey and resolving any problems they may face with the products and services that you offer. The more seamless the experience online, the more satisfied they will be.
So how can your e-commerce website make customers happy? Here are five ways you can optimize your website to improve the customer’s shopping experience:
How to boost customer satisfaction
1. Website navigation
When designing your website, your goal is not only to capture attention with an aesthetic look and feel, but it has to be user-friendly.
Humans have an average attention span of less than 8 seconds (and less than 3 seconds long when online!), so you need to be able to provide a clear, easy-to-navigate website for your customers to find what they’re looking for – pronto.
If and when possible, have a UX/UI designer help you strategically build your store’s customer journey. There’s a lot more to it than you might expect when creating a user-friendly and relevant interface. What type of experience do you want your customers to have? How will it support them in achieving their goals? The UX designer will help you navigate your roadmap and ensure all user touchpoints on your website serve a purpose and positive reinforcement for your brand and the customer journey. UX advice and expertise can help increase conversion rates.
2. Personalization and localization
Using a dynamic website is also highly beneficial for implementing your customer-centric approach, and the best thing about this is that everything is automated.
Progressive AI technology and business intelligence will enable your website to support customers proactively with product recommendations, predictive search capabilities, search dictionaries, and predictive sorting.
By leveraging leading technology and tracking customer browsing behaviors, you can obtain data that enables you to create a more tailored experience making the customer feel like you know them and care about them. Research from Econsultancy found that 93% of companies see an uplift in conversion rates from personalization.
Localization is equally as important. Have you ever found a product that you were willing to purchase, to find it wasn’t available in your country? By assessing the geolocation of your customer, you can translate your services into their native language, deliver culturally appropriate content for better engagement, and allow customers to make purchases on products available in that specific region in their local currency.
3. Integration
Having an omnichannel strategy is imperative for success; however, many e-commerce systems still work in silos. E-commerce websites can often be disconnected from customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.
Without these integrations, manual practices still exist, increasing the risk of errors like incorrect shipping addresses or inventory confusion. Problems like these can compromise the shopper’s experience. When your ERP is linked with your e-commerce website, they communicate with one another and can track new orders and fulfill them more quickly, much to the customer’s satisfaction.
By linking a CRM system to your online store, you will also be able to align your customer experience across your established online channels. For example, a customer may interact with your brand on your social media platforms. A few days later, they may wish to speak with someone to which you can pull up their record of the social media interaction to make sure you don’t repeat yourself, keep the messages consistent, or you are immediately up-to-date with the situation, ensuring you provide a positive experience.
4. Self-service customer service
Most of us prefer to solve problems by ourselves if it means saving time and not waiting to speak to a customer service agent. Would you agree?
Being proactive instead of reactive in your customer service is a great way to improve the customer experience. For example, featuring a comprehensive FAQ or Knowledge Base that provides sufficient information to answer any basic questions. In addition, many companies use chatbots to answer simple inquiries.
Powered by AI technology, chatbots are a conversational interface that allows users to interact with your brand through messaging platforms. You can set up automated popular responses to work in real-time that mimics the interaction as if a conversation were being held in a brick-and-mortar store. This functionality enables you to provide fast and reliable customer service, which also works in your favor as the merchandiser, saving labor costs and precious time to focus on the bigger picture. Customers will feel attended to and can resolve any questions they may have instantly.
To learn more about AI technology for customer service support, our parent company IMS shares more insight here.
5. Checkout
One of the main reasons carts are abandoned is because the checkout process is too complicated or challenging to navigate.
To simplify the process, you can:
- Display cart items clearly (including prices), with the ability to add or remove products at this stage. You can also take advantage of this opportunity by making recommended or recently viewed products visible for any last-minute decisions.
- Allow customers to checkout as a guest without having to create an account. To avoid filling out unnecessary information at this stage can cause frustration and put them off almost immediately.
- Make it easy to fill out shipping information – use checkboxes if the billing and shipping addresses are the same and allow them to select which shopping option they want.
- Be transparent with shipping fees and remove any surprise costs. The aim is to garner trust after all.
- Offer a wide range of payment options, so they can choose how they can pay. The aim is to make it as easy as possible for them to finish the payment transaction.
The key to excellent customer satisfaction is to begin with a customer-centric mindset.
By putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, you can determine what they are looking for and optimize your website to suit their needs. When a customer has a pleasant experience interacting with your online store, they are more likely to return in future and recommend your brand to others.
Does your online store satisfy your customers? Use this information or get Acuity’s all-in-one support to start seeing happy customers and stronger results. Contact us today.
