How to improve your eCommerce store’s customer experience
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When you visit your favorite retail store, you are typically greeted by a joyful salesperson who’s ready to help you select the best product based on your requirements. They will gladly consider your budget for the purchase and solve any query you may have during the process.
Eventually, you’ll make a purchase, leave the physical store feeling happy, and experience a highly satisfying offline customer experience. Long story short, customer experience is how a brand communicates with its clients at every step of the way during the buyer’s journey and has fast become a top priority for retail businesses worldwide.
Customer experience is an integral aspect of every business, and it doesn’t matter if your store is offline or online. You must be willing to make your customer experience exceptional if you want your business to succeed.
And for eCommerce stores, having a top tier customer experience becomes even more imperative than brick and mortar stores. With physical stores, there’s ample interaction with customers, so the customer experience is naturally fluid. However, with online stores, the lack of physical interaction elevates the bar of customer experience needed to dominate.
In this short informative article, we’re going to offer you smart ways you can use to improve your eCommerce store’s customer experience and bolster your business in 2021.
Flawless inventory management will improve the overall customer experience
Inventory management plays a vital role in exceptional customer service management. With access to data, you can match the right order to the right client and provide customers with correct information regarding inventory stock levels.
An eCommerce store’s main reason for holding inventory is to deliver to its clients what they want, when they want it, via the platform they choose to purchase from. This is where most of the problems with inventory management for online stores occur, and customers experience unpleasant shopping situations.
For that reason, it’s imperative to have real-time multi-channel inventory software that can manage multiple sales channels, divisions, warehouses, and suppliers. For example, let’s say that you have an old-school brick and mortar fashion shop, a website where people can buy apparel directly from you but online, and a Shopify eCommerce store.
If you don’t have software that can comfortably integrate with Shopify backend, you risk that someone will purchase an item on the platform you don’t have on stock. Chances are, those unhappy customers will never revisit one of your shops and quickly spread the word that your business provided an unpleasant customer experience.
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Therefore, positive customer experiences and customer satisfaction are hugely dependent on successful inventory control, so make sure that you address inventory management issues with the right ERP software to create exceptional customer service.
Consider offering free shipping
According to Statista, 73% of customers state that free delivery dramatically impacts their decision to purchase an item online. Free shipping will undoubtedly improve your customer service experience, as it’s a marketing tactic intended to compel the customer to convert. It influences consumer behavior on a deeply psychological level, adding a powerful boost to your average order value.
It’s been proven over and over again that free shipping greatly influences consumers’ buying decisions. Customers would rather spend more on items with free shipping than save on the product and spend more on shipping. Free shipping and exceptional customer experience go hand in hand.
To achieve this, you can seamlessly squeeze the shipping expenses into the original retail price of the product, so customers won’t be able to notice that you actually do charge them for shipping.
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Follow-ups are a must
As soon as your customers purchase a product from your online shop and leave the website, make sure to do a follow up on them. Chances are you are likely to turn most of your customers that buy for the first time into repeat customers if you follow up on them.
The basic idea here is to follow up on customers while the memory of you and your brand is still very fresh in their minds. Also, don’t wait until the end of the month or the quarter to send out dry promotions and general newsletters.
After the initial follow up, you can offer your first-time customers some great deals and mouth-watering offers like buy-two-get-one-free, super discounts, free shipping, etc. These marketing techniques are a great way to make your customer feel your customer service’s depth and make them come back.
Always provide enough information
Providing your customers with adequate information is an essential step in delivering a fantastic customer service experience. This comprises detailed information like a return policy, warranties, guarantees, or any information that could affect the customer experience.
And while there will always be disgruntled clients in every business, providing the right type of information beforehand can exonerate your business of any blame arising from improper use of your products or services.
Move toward an omnichannel shopping experience
Nowadays, the majority of consumers expect a smooth and streamlined omnichannel experience with a brand. So, instead of exclusively driving traffic to your website or selling channel, you need to bring your products or services to wherever your audience is.
Whether they’re non-stop browsing Instagram or looking to take advantage of their Amazon Prime membership – your eCommerce store needs to be there.
eCommerce entrepreneurs who provide buying options across websites, third-party marketplaces, social media, and physical retail stores usually offer the best customer experience. With social commerce being the fastest rising driver of online sales, it represents an omnichannel area that many retailers will need to concentrate on in the next year.
Set up great product pages
A user-friendly product page tells prospective buyers everything they need to know about a specific product without bombarding them with too much content. Graphics and images are a fantastic way to provide many details about your products without overwhelming your website visitors. Still, you should also include details about size, weight, color, material, model numbers, and expected shipping times.
Setting up great product pages can help get a sale over the line while also reducing negative customer feedback. The more a potential customer knows about a product, the more likely they will be thrilled with their choice.
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Final thoughts
Improving your eCommerce store’s customer experience should be high on your to-do list if you want to succeed. The above tips on how online shops can improve customer experience showcase how big guns do it. With the right application of these tips for eCommerce stores, your clients will stay high on your brand and always come back to shop.
