Return on Customer Experience

Return on Customer Experience

Your customers ultimately make the final call in terms of purchase and overall satisfaction with a brand. When it comes to ensuring enhancing your client and customer experience before and after BFCM, the goal to maintain sustainable, long-term loyalty with customers – longstanding and new. The key here is trust, every step of the user journey.

When it comes to building trust between stores and customers one needs to strike a balance between the back-end store personalization, and ensuring that your responsive website is seamless and “compressed”.

80% of customers are likely to switch companies after poor service.

Hubspot, 2022

Not only does the merchant bare responsibility of customer accessibility and safe and secure checkout, the pre- and post-purchase experience is also key to ensuring that customer satisfaction is measurable with both the e-commerce and logistics experience. 

Return on Customer Satisfaction

When thinking about customer loyalty and trust, merchants need to know how to prove the ROI of customer experiences.

60% of customer-centric companies make more revenue than those customers who don’t place focus on customers.

Forbes

Improving customer experience in e-commerce can be challenging. “Personalization” does not require adopting new technology like AR. Rather, it includes seamlessness from the moment of viewing adverts all the way to the end of the user-journey: e-commerce logistics.

Every step of the e-commerce customer and merchant journey has ways to maintain customer loyalty before and after BFCM, and we’ve outlined every step for you, with some added tips to ensure customer satisfaction.

Merchant Services: Personalization behind the scenes

1. The merchant decides to open a store: The merchant has identified something sellable to the customer.
   
2. Merchant chooses between various platforms depending on their UPSs. These platforms include Shopify, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce, OpenCart, and PrestaShop.
   
3. Merchant uploads their product information onto their chosen platform: This includes a products specific attributes, high-quality images, categories, tags, and custom fields.
   Merchant or developer designs the website
   
4. Merchant needs to test their e-commerce store. This includes customer usability, accessibility, and the cart process.
   
5. The merchant’s store is live and ready to get selling!
   
6. At this point, the merchant needs to locate ways on how to find customers and increase sales. The merchant then decides to apply Saas apps for their stores.
   
   Having seamless channel management software helps brands stay on the top line on their chosen Marketplaces and channels. Feed management for Shopify, WooCommerce (and more), like ShoppingFeeder, is integral in ensuring a clean and optimized product feed.
   Moreover, ShoppingFeeder is introducing a back-end, automated bolt-on which handles customer discounts dynamically using machine learning and individual shopping habits. 
   
7. The merchant now has to consider various marketing strategies and channels in order to expose their products to their audience.
   

Customer Journey and Personalization

1. The customer is inspired to make something, wear something, try out something new or get a gift for someone else.
   
2. The customer searches multiple channels to find what they are looking for. This includes drawing inspiration from Pinterest, browsing social media like Facebook Ads, scrolling through marketplaces like Takealot.com, or simply, relying on Google Shopping to see what’s in stock. 
   
   • One thing the merchant needs to take into account here is how the customer searches for particular items and products. The keywords here are intentional and known to the customer and therefore the merchant needs to actively stratify how these search terms are written. 
     
   • A second thing to keep in mind is where the customer likes to hang out. If they’re on Pinterest often, it might be useful to integrate your product feed onto Pinterest advertising and combining this with another larger channel like Google ads. On the other hand, if your audience is Gen-Z, it might be useful to consider TikTok shopping’s reach.
     
3. Purchase. This is the most important part of what’s known as “compressed e-commerce”, the ultimate goal of what the merchant and the customer are trying to achieve. The process from search to purchase should be seamless, simple, navigable, accessible, and with one or more payment options for the customer. Here are some ways to prevent cart abandonment:
   Having a responsive website for mobile and desktop: Responsive website design greatly influences the customer/user experience and social proof helps to solidify trust in a brand.
   
   • Good SEO to make your store searchable
   • Seamless checkout
   • Multiple payment options
   • Reviews (this is social proof)
     
4. Post-purchase. This part of the customer journey falls part of compressed e-commerce too, in terms of the timely manner in which customers search, purchase and obtain their chosen product.Here are some things merchants need to consider at this point of the customer journey:

• Order confirmation. The customer needs to know that their chosen product order has been confirmed.
  
• Tracking information. Either, you can take advantage of a tracking system on your Shopify or WooCommerce store, or you can take advantage of personalized tracking via email and Whatsapp
  
• Speedy delivery. Customer expectations in terms of delivery is increasing. Customers want delivery to be quick, convenient and under 24 hours.
  
• A solid returns policy. This is an important part of the overall e-commerce journey and really adds to restoring faith in the store. E-commerce logistics forms part of the last-mile in the transaction process, and if at this point the customer is unsatisfied with the product, or if the product is faulty this may result in a lack of trust for the store and overall customer experience – even if product faults are unrelated.

Conclusion

By dissecting each point of the customer and merchant journey, one can see how every-step has a particular impact on how the customer journey is personalized from inspiration, all the way to purchase.

With personalized commerce, alongside compressed e-commerce and a solid post-purchase experience, one can maintain, restore and ensure customer trust before and after BFCM.