Digital Shopping Trends Are Here to Stay. But, what Does It Mean for Your CX?
The craze for online shopping is nothing new. Online shopping has been booming in leaps and bounds over the past several years.
And now, with the COVID-19 pandemic, online or digital shopping is here to stay. Over the last few years, digital shopping has taken over retail shopping because it saves more time and, of course, offers better and cheaper deals.
With the e-commerce industry becoming more dominant in recent times, shoppers have become better acquainted with this digital trend.
Hence, it’s imperative to constantly analyse the customer experience and develop ways to improve it. Customer experience in this regard holds immense importance, as more people resort to online shopping.
Let us discuss what a good customer experience looks like and what are the various ways to measure the same.
Here’s how you can create a stronger customer experience for digital shoppers
A good brand speaks for itself and so does a product. But amid a pool of such brands and products, how would an e-commerce site ensure the customer’s loyalty hook to their products? Several factors can help in enhancing the customer experience.
1. Product information: Adequate product information is key to selecting and choosing a product. Sufficient information will always help a customer make a decision rather than surfing through other websites and videos to learn about the same details.
2. Fast shipping: A delivery within three to four working days is always a hit among shoppers. The product’s fast and timely delivery retains a customer’s loyalty because who would not like quick customer service?
3. Omnichannel communication: Omnichannel communication ensures ease of access to a company in case of any delay or query. In such a setup, the customer can route through their preferred mode of communication without worrying about getting the message across.
4. Trusted customer support: Easy communication of grievances is imperative for any business to build itself successfully. Generating feedback from customers is very important for any business to earn the trust of its customers. Prompt response to a customer’s complaint following any grievance is the need of the hour in the world of digital shopping.
5. Friendly sale representative: Sale representatives who often connect with customers for feedback or communicating any new deal, should be well-behaved and patient. In the absence of face-to-face communication, the tonality of communication is very important. How a representative approaches a customer is very important. Rudeness and impatience have little space in the world of enhancing customer experience.
Measuring Customer Experience
Ensuring maximum customer satisfaction is a significant challenge and an essential skill to master. One such way is to measure customer experience and improve it accordingly. There are several tools that can help understand and track what your customers are looking for and how they find the experience.
There are software, metrics, and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that provide a company with the data to evaluate the customer experience.
If the company uses unified communication systems and software integration models like cloud telephony, CRM or help desk software, they can easily track and tally the customer experience. Automated survey software can be added without much trouble and make it hassle-free for customers to provide feedback.
The three most popular metrics for evaluating the customer experience are the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Rate (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).
Let us have a detailed look at this different software and how they help the company in evaluating customer experience:
Net Promoter Score
Called NPS, this is the easiest indicator of evaluating customer experience, where you ask your customer a simple question like, “How much did you like the product,” “How likely are you to recommend the product to a friend,” and so on.
On this note, you put a scale of numbers, ranging from 1 to 10. If a customer rates between 1-6, that indicates the customer experiences detractors. Similarly, a rating between 7-8 indicates passive, and between 9-10 means customers will act as your brand promoters.
Now to find your overall rating, subtract the percentage of your detractors from the percentage of your promoters.
Customer Effort Score
CES is an indicator of the interaction between the customer and your brand. It’s usually done by asking a couple of questions and scaling the responses into categories.
The key idea behind CES is to understand how much ease a customer can purchase and scan through your products. For example, ask your customer, “How easy was it to access and browse your website?” and then divide the responses into 7 points:
1. Extremely easy
2. Very easy
3. Fairly easy
4. Neither
5. Fairly difficult
6. Very difficult
7. Extremely difficult
To get your CES score, the sum of the scores has to be divided by the number of people who submitted responses. And low scores mean you’re doing great.
Customer Satisfaction Rate
CSR must be used to understand your customer’s satisfaction level with your website and products. And the measure for the same is very easy to do. You ask your customer one simple question, “Are you satisfied with our product?” Like CES, you divide the responses into parameters:
1. Very unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied
And to get the percentage score, divide the number of satisfied and delighted customers by the total number of responses and then multiply by 100.
Why and how you can retain a good customer experience?
Rendering good customer service alone does not help a business strive in the market of digital shopping. While customer service should be well-curated, ensuring that it enhances customer experience is just as important.
In today’s market, it’s crucial to have a data-driven, customer-oriented system to boost your e-commerce platform. One must know that more people resort to online buying, and it’s a prime medium for many businesses to grow. Hence, it’s imperative to remember that customer experience is the new normal.
There are more ways to succeed in this new normal, and one of them would also be implementing the right call centre strategy in your business model. Here are a few pointers as to how you can ensure call centre success:
1. Ensure that the business establishes and monitors the KPIs
2. Keep checking for the quality of the product and assure the best of it
3. Publish meaningful and helpful content in FAQ formats for easy understanding
4. Invest in a system that will organise customer inquiries and grievances
5. Provide customers with multiple self-service options
On the other hand, to ensure top quality customer service, the call centre has to be built for emergency and critical periods. Hence, certain points must be kept in mind while creating a contingency plan:
- A clear communication with call centre agents around the set of expectations
- A team must be assembled to supervise the plan execution
- A rigorous test of the contingency plan
- Identifying a backup plan
- Shortlisting and prioritising responsibilities to boost business
Wrapping it up
Setting one’s digital plan right is very important to have a customer-centric approach in the world of new normal. And if you’re yet to create a digital shopping action plan for your e-commerce business, now is the time.
Author Bio
Kritik Verma is a marketing enthusiast with a specialization in digital marketing. He is currently working at Servetel, a leading cloud telephony provider offering cloud services like IVR Solutions, Toll Free Number, Virtual number, Click to call and many more to boost business success. He enjoys reading about the latest digital marketing trends.
