Establish a Baseline Understanding of the Customer Journey

Before exploring how to improve the ecommerce customer experience, we need to define what CX is. In essence, customer experience (CX) is the sum of all interactions a customer has with your business. This means first identifying these interactions or ‘touchpoints’. For example:

• A customer lands on your website through a PPC Google ad.
• They visit a blog post or two, then subscribe to your monthly email list.
• They might not buy right away, but they’re becoming familiar with your offerings. Later, you might send them another ad via email marketing, leading them to a new landing page.
• This page convinces them to sign up for a free trial, eventually paying for a monthly plan.
• The customer experience continues as the new buyer uses your product, interacts with more of your content, contacts support when they need help, and so on.

Every single one of these interactions matters, not only for the initial conversion, but for retaining the customer, keeping them happy, and ideally, turning them into a brand advocate. Therefore, you should identify and contextualize these touchpoints by mapping out customer journeys with your business and tracking the results.

How To Improve the eCommerce Customer Experience (5 Key Tips)

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and envision the ideal customer experience.

Does it involve a smooth checkout process, helpful post-purchase support, a well-designed landing page with a clean UI? Putting the customer first is paramount when trying to convince people to buy online. If there’s a gap between what you want to offer and what’s currently happening, you need to bridge that by learning how to improve the ecommerce customer experience for your unique audience.

1. Create a Unified Support Experience Across All Channels

Embrace an omnichannel approach to customer service. Customers expect to seamlessly transition from phone call to email to live chat as needed, without having to repeat information or start from scratch.

Connect all your support channels to the same place. This can be achieved using a shared inbox feature provided by customer service helpdesk software, specifically designed for the needs of small ecommerce stores.

• When all buyer data is in one place, your support team can save time and ensure continuity. For example, smart routing might assign a service ticket from a customer who reached out through social media to the same agent who dealt with them via in-app widget.
• Customer service helpdesk software funnels all communications into an inbox where you can easily organize, assign, and resolve them.

If a customer reaches out via phone, integration with a phone system creates a service ticket. It assigns that ticket to the right customer profile and synchronizes all the data the support agent will need, allowing them to focus on providing a quality experience with full knowledge of previous conversations, customer history, and so on.

Similarly, if your customers prefer instant messaging, customer service helpdesk software allows you to create and embed a live chat widget on your website or in-app. Round robin assignment ensures that these inquiries generate tickets in your inbox and assign them to agents based on pre-selected conditions.

The key is to make sure every method you use to communicate with buyers is interconnected.

2. Simplify the Purchasing Process By Reducing Necessary Touchpoints

Every step required to make a purchase gives the customer an opportunity to change their mind. So you’ll want to minimize the amount of mandatory touchpoints required to move from awareness to decision.

• In B2C ecommerce, you can reduce friction by creating a single-page checkout form. Once a customer adds a product to their shopping cart, they should be able to complete the purchase in minimal clicks.
• In B2B ecommerce, the decision-making stage often takes longer. But you can still reduce the necessary touchpoints needed to transition from consideration to purchase by offering easy free trial signups.

Forcing people to make too many clicks to get from point A to point B is a quick way to scare them off. Keep in mind that this applies to a lot more than just the purchase process. Every customer interaction point should be evaluated to make sure it’s as streamlined as possible, from requesting help to cancelling an account.

3. Leverage Data and Feedback for Targeted Insights

The majority of buyers, whether B2B or B2C, expect a highly personalized purchasing experience. Collected customer data can be leveraged to create more compelling content designed for specific audience segments.

This means digging into buyer purchase history, account usage, behavior, activity, and demographics. A lot of this data can be found through analytics tools for your website platform, in your ecommerce customer support helpdesk, and via free tools like Google Analytics.

• Review popular or underperforming content, to see what your readers are interested in.
• Find out where customers stop scrolling on important pages. This enables you to strategically place CTAs based on how customers navigate.

With customer service helpdesk software, you can get direct feedback about customers’ experiences with your support.

• You can view metrics like customer satisfaction, first response time, and resolution rate.

When it comes to data, no one number tells the full story. It’s important to gather as much information you can about customer behavior and then contextualize that with direct feedback, to identify exactly what touchpoints are weakest.

4. Create an eCommerce Website With UX In Mind

Customers are much less likely to purchase your product or service if they find your website cumbersome. Since your ecommerce site represents the majority of touchpoints, and contains the purchase process itself, this is a key element to get right.

Your website should be designed with UX in mind, starting from the very first impression. Your aesthetic should be unified across all channels, including your website as well as social media platforms, and it should match your niche and goals.

• Is your product intuitive and minimal? Your website’s UX should reflect that focus, with a design and messaging that’s clear, concise, and free of technical jargon.

The goal is to make sure buyers immediately feel at home on your website. Everything should reflect your products and their interests, so they know they’ve reached the right place.

5. Improve the Customer Service Experience With Proactive Resolution and Empathy

Customer service is the backbone of the post-purchase experience. All the little interactions your team has with customers add up. They represent your brand and create long-term impressions (positive or negative).

• Empathy (respect and patience) and responsiveness (speed and accuracy) are two necessary components for delivering better ecommerce customer support. Most people are reasonable and don’t expect your product to be perfect. But when there’s a problem, they do expect you to show compassion and act fast.

Let’s take a look at an example of proactive resolution. A customer has posted a negative review online about a bad experience they had with your product. They also mentioned that your customer service team did not want to assist them with their concerns. In the review, they mention that they’re a regular customer, but were denied help due to being outside of your return policy.

It may seem like the customer experience has already failed here, but you can bring it back. Here’s what that might look like:

• You respond to the review promptly, directly on the platform it was posted to. Your response addresses their concerns in detail, and offers a solution, such as credit for the product.
• You leave your name and contact details in the review, so the customer can reach out to you directly if they want to.
• However, you don’t wait for the customer. You use the provided information to find the customer profile in your helpdesk and send a personal follow-up to take action on the resolution.

Through quality customer service, you can highlight the value your product or service provides, especially in an overcrowded marketplace. It takes time to master this part of the buyer experience and it requires a team effort from everyone involved.

Don’t leave the results to chance! Work with your support team, such as by providing empathy training. Investing in training doesn’t have to be a financial burden and it has a wide-reaching impact on both hard and soft skills.

Your customer service team is your number-one resource when it comes to delivering an exceptional customer experience. Invest in your support team, provide them with the right tools, and ensure they are well-equipped to handle any situation.