You’ve done everything right; your ecommerce business should be flourishing, but instead, it’s reached a stand-still. We’ve heard this story before––your product offering is fantastic, the prices are fair, and your website is easy-to-navigate––but your conversion rate is waning, and you’re not meeting your sales goals. Don’t worry, you’re not alone.
Ecommerce businesses, once lauded for their convenient shopping experiences, are now facing the reality of an increasingly crowded marketplace. And to add insult to injury, brick-and-mortar establishments have once again entered the chat, with physical retail growing more than ecommerce in the US in 2021 for the first time ever.
That’s not to say ecommerce growth has plateaued, but with the stakes this high, setting your ecommerce business apart from the competition is vital for growth. And more and more, this comes down to the experience you offer your customers.
Speaking of experience, it only takes three negative experiences max to make 73% of consumers stop doing business with your brand. But with close to half of people rarely (or never) complaining directly to a business, you may have no idea when you’re losing out — or why.
That’s why it’s crucial to continuously work to improve your customer experience and to develop checkpoints along the way to ensure you’re aware of any gaps or issues.
3 CX Strategies to Grow Your Ecommerce Business
1. Take the Hyper-Personalized Route
Once upon a time, it may have been okay (or at least acceptable) to treat customers like numbers, but those days are long gone. The power of personalization is clear, with 80% of consumers more likely to buy from a brand providing highly-personalized experiences.
Many ecommerce businesses claim to offer a personalized customer experience, and then still use ticketing systems to structure their customer support. By their very nature, ticketing systems force customers into a numerical order — presenting them as issues to be ‘closed’ rather than as opportunities to connect. Taking a personalized, conversational approach to customer service allows you to offer human-centric support and turn negative customer experiences into positive outcomes.
Implementing a channel-agnostic setup, which ensures seamless conversations across all channels, will give your business an edge that your competitors who rely on old-fashioned ticketing systems won’t have. Besides ensuring customers receive the same level of service across all your channels, giving agents instant access to the customer data they need to personalize interactions will also give you a leg up.
But personalization in ecommerce goes beyond customer service––if you’re not offering a personalized shopping experience driven by data and automation, you’re missing out.
Introducing conversational AI to your website will help you tailor each and every customer experience with on-site personalization: offering customers the convenience of online shopping combined with the personal touch of a helpful sales assistant.
2. Optimize Your Customer Journey (And Then Do It Again… & Again)
How well do you understand the different touchpoints, pain points, and gaps in your overall customer experience strategy?
Mapping your customer journey is a fantastic place to start; creating a visual representation of your ecommerce customer experience will provide you with a clear idea of how users interact with your business.
The better you understand the needs of your customers, across all segments of your audience, the more efficiently you’ll resolve issues. Forrester research found that customers are 2.4x more likely to stay loyal to a business that solves their problems “more quickly,” and 2.7x more likely to increase their spending when companies communicate clearly.
High-quality communication is vital for positive interactions: Dixa’s own research has shown that 87% of customers emphatically dislike having to repeat themselves when dealing with agents. That’s why agents need access to customer data from within their customer service software, allowing for instant context in all interactions with customers.
And don’t underestimate the power of qualitative research when it comes to understanding your true customer experience. Ask customers for feedback based on their own experiences — and then act on it as soon as you can. Identify where you need to make changes and implement them. And don’t forget about your agents. After all, they know your customers best and can provide context to the most common customer frustrations and help prioritize improvements.
3. Implement an Intelligent Knowledge Base
Everyone should be given the tools to do their job well, including agents. Arming your team with an intelligent knowledge base that anticipates their needs and provides automatic prompts based on the content of customer questions, will allow them to answer questions faster and with more accuracy.
Agents can relax knowing they’re providing customers with the most up-to-date information, and you’ll see improvements in the quality of your customer experience with customers receiving consistent and correct answers, no matter which agent they interact with. Plus, with agents better equipped to answer questions themselves rather than escalating to a superior, you’ll see an improvement in your First Contact Resolution which can have major implications for metrics like customer retention and lifetime value.
Creating a knowledge base eliminates the need to scour documents, or the Internet, for answers in the middle of a conversation. An integrated knowledge base, powered by machine learning, will automatically prompt agents with the details they need based on the customer’s query. A system with cutting-edge AI can also assign tags to conversations to help agents understand the nature of the problem straight away.
Introducing a knowledge base to your organization will help you fast-track an approach to knowledge-centered service, making knowledge-sharing one of the pillars of your customer support organization, and implementing a continuous loop of feedback and action that ensure knowledge always stays fresh.
Boost Your Business Growth
Growing your ecommerce business comes down to offering a stand-out customer experience; only then will you build customer loyalty, retain your competitive edge, and cultivate a positive reputation.
If you want to learn more about satisfying (and exceeding) customer expectations, check out our report, Reconnecting the Customer Experience.