With the unexpected global events of 2020, many businesses are struggling to stay afloat, but one area that’s grown exponentially is e-commerce. For months, when people were unable to leave their homes for anything other than essential goods, digital became the go-to for businesses and individuals to survive.
As platforms are being flooded, overloaded, and often times struggling to keep up with customer demand, why does investing in the e-commerce experience even matter anymore? As long as you’re delivering your product or service to your customers quickly, is it really important if the CX measures up?
The short answer is yes, and, actually, more than ever. Brands will be remembered for their response during the pandemic and the experience customers had with them.
Businesses are dealing with customers who, for the last several months, are under enormous strain in their personal lives:
- They’re adjusting and coping to new working and living situations
- They’re making hundreds of decisions every day to best protect themselves and their families
- They’re fighting against things like panic and anxiety and they’re bringing all of those emotions and baggage to their interactions with brands
Simply put, brands cannot rest. Just because demand is holding steady, businesses can’t slack on the e-commerce customer experience as they try to overcome struggles in other areas, like supply and distribution – the consumer views it all as one experience, anyways.
If they want to remain relevant and earn trust, companies must double down to ensure the customer is having the best possible experience right now.
3 key points of the e-commerce CX
E-commerce is in a position to help navigate through these times of uncertainty. Commerce can serve as an ideal listening post to capture experience data and combine that with the feedback collected from other channels and areas in the organization, to create a 360-degree view of the customer and measure their satisfaction across the front office. You need to understand, engage, and deliver the right experiences for your customers.
Measuring the quality of experiences:
Company’s need to measure the quality of experience for every customer using feedback loops that intercept customers across digital channels.
By measuring experiences in a non-disruptive manner during the buying journey, companies can gather and analyze structured and unstructured data to uncover insights, such as customer intent and motivation.
Investing in changes:
It’s not enough to just gather the data; companies need to be able to turn this data into actionable insights. It’s crucial to have the right data to focus on, prioritizing what to address first, then investing in fixing experiences that have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction.
By leveraging smart routing of insights to the right system of action to allow follow up engagement, companies can make quicker changes in the areas that are impacting CX the most.
Delivering a better experience:
Once brands understand the underlying root causes for each experience and close the gap, they can deliver a better experience. Ideally, measuring and investing in experience management can lead to positive strategic change for your business and increased revenue.
Some actions will require deeper investigation and then strategic process changes. Others can drive automated corrective actions to improve the business and the customers’ experience.
