Reasons Why You Should be Tracking and Measuring Customer Experience as Part of Your eCommerce Strategy

Has your eCommerce company been in business for some time and is offering a killer product yet waiting to thrive? Have you ever wondered why?

Undeniably, the offerings have a huge impact on the future success of the business but it isn’t enough! Product quality alone can’t attract, engage, and retain your eCommerce customers.

In fact, product quality is no longer the main reason consumers will prefer to do business with a certain brand. By today’s standards, it’s much more vital to deliver a valuable overall experience to your eCommerce customers.

You can witness a bulk of eCommerce strategies on the internet but what do you find to be the most effective one? Among all, customer experience is the one that’s talked less about. Nonetheless, it is akin to the silent dogs that bark only when approached. Building customer experience and investing in customer services is the next normal taking shape. Especially, when you are in a competitive world of Shopify that’s trusted by billions of businesses, 1.75 million+ merchants with an average uptime of 99.9%.

Big brands like Nestle, Unilever, and Budweiser have stores on Shopify. Do you wonder what makes a brand so big? Customer Experience is the answer. As a small store owner on Shopify, you might provide the same services but the customer experience is what separates you from these big brands. You would ask why customer experience? The answer to it is just three words, Customer Satisfaction! Customer Retention! and Sales! Let’s see how customer services can benefit you and then we shall move towards how and why you should be tracking customer experience as part of your eCommerce strategy.

What is an eCommerce customer experience?

The term eCommerce customer experience talks about the sum of every touchpoint, engagement, thought or feeling that happens or is exchanged between the customer and your business — as experienced from the customer’s point of view. The customer experience besets everything that happens from the moment an individual hears of your brand, to the moment they actively decide to stop doing business with your company.

There are various factors such as shipping time, easy website navigation, live chat support, help desk support, and more that enhance your customer’s experience. If you are looking forward to increasing your sales with better filters & search options for your shopify store then we would recommend you to use the apps like sparq.ai to enhance your customer’s experience while navigating on the website.

Customer Satisfaction

A recent study on customer experience shows 45.9% of the businesses supporting customer satisfaction to be their top priority in the given 5 years followed by 20.5% pricing and 33.6% product.

A satisfied customer can be an asset to your company. In fact, statistics show customer experience can lead to increased customer loyalty and satisfaction. Making your customer satisfied can be an important aspect of business growth as the great American business author, Michael LeBoeuf says, “Satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all”.

Customer Retention

What is customer retention? The ability of a company to retain its customers over a period of time is referred to as customer retention. You might wonder why is it an important term in sales? Well, this has a simple reason, boosting sales.

Despite its importance, customer retention is often ignored. The eight-week retention is below 20 percent for most industries. Statistics show amazing trends of businesses relying on email marketing by 80%, 36%, and 44% on organic searches, and social media respectively for customer retention.

For 61% of companies, customer retention is the biggest hurdle in sales. Well, to everyone’s surprise, researches show 54% of US customers ask for improved customer experience while 73% of US customers admit customer experience to be a major factor in their purchasing process.

Boost Sales

You would wonder how customer experience can aid in the sales of your eCommerce store. Well, this has a simple relation. The better customer experience the more likely are the customers to purchase more or to even make a repurchase.

Just remind your permanent offline stores. Which stores do you prefer the most? I hope the answer would be the one where the shopkeeper talks gently, gives you plenty of time for shopping, and helps you in the decision-making process. Moreover, who gives you a personalised treatment? The same is the case with your online Shopify store.

A study shows 80% of the customers are more inclined towards making a purchase from a store that provides a personalised customer experience. Also, investing 3 years in customer experience can help a company that makes $1 billion annually to make up to an additional $700 million.

Reasons Why You Should Be Tracking Customer Experience

To understand levels of customer satisfaction

Tracking customer experience by using customer data helps to identify user behaviour. As a Shopify merchant, you can do a customer satisfaction analysis which will help you to identify the reason behind user dissatisfaction. You can further use this data for improving your system of functionality.

Bringing a new customer to your eCommerce store can be 5 to 25% more expensive than retaining the one who’s loyal and increasing customer retention by 5% can increase the profitability up to 25% to 95%. But how can one retain an old customer? Tracking customer experience and making adaptive changes is the key to the answer. As a budding Shopify merchant, you should follow the path of tracking customer experience as a part of your eCommerce strategy to get a better understanding of the levels of customer satisfaction.

To make informed decisions

Making informed amendments aids in increasing the company’s potential benefits. An informed decision might ask for the fulfilment of the following steps:

• Determine issues and complications in the system
• Gather customer and company data
• Thorough research of the available options
• Considering the outcomes with patience
• Making the decision
• Tracking the outcomes of the changes made
• Consult for personal experience of the companies, customers, and employees to get a better understanding of the impact of your decision

Shopify itself invests a major chunk in providing better customer services including 24/7 customer services. What are you waiting for?

To increase the scope of further improvement

Continuous improvement requires systematic evaluation. Tracking customer experience can help to figure out what’s working for your eCommerce store and what isn’t. Nonetheless, to make your brand reach public, you must allot a team to improve and track your customer experiences.

You can figure out new pathways for improving customer experience with the help of a multi or omnichannel presence, improving feedback procedure, and investing more in customer care.

Here’s How You Can Measure Your Customer Experience

Multi-channel presence

Your multi-channel presence acts as an aid to measure your customer experience. Today, 55% of merchants use multi-channel presence for increasing and measuring customer experience.

A user feedback

Being a Shopify merchant, we would share the same line on the importance of user feedback. You can make effective use of user feedback by following the steps below.

Step 1: Take feedback from users

Taking feedback is a tough task. People usually make a purchase but forget to share the feedback. Here, reminding them via emails, personalised messages, and personalised interactions can be a good option.

Step 2: A team for analysis

You’ve won half of the journey once you’ve got the user feedback. Setting up a team of analysing the user feedback will open up the new scope of improvement.

Step 3: Find the loopholes

Your team may analyse the user feedback to find the drawbacks. The further steps would require you to collect data or even interact with customers to get a clear point of view for what your user wants and expects. Finding the loopholes in the systems is an important step in the process.

Step 4: Amendments are important

Once you know the loopholes, your team shall now proceed to chart out suggestive approaches for filling them. Remember, filling the loopholes is far more important than finding one. Further, take calculative steps towards improving and changing the pre-existing rules.

Using the right CX Matric

A bulk of customer experience metrics are available on the internet. Which one should you choose? Here’s a list of top CX Matrics that can make your task easy.

• CES: Customer Effort Score
• CSAT: Customer Satisfaction
• NPS: Net Promoter Score
• Customer Retention Rate
• FCR: First Contact Resolution

How about a one-on-one communication

What can be better than one-on-one communication with the user? An online store owner on Shopify can build a team for customer interaction. This would help you to know your customer better and will also give an offline touch to your online store which might help in bringing more customers online.

Do your customers make a repurchase?

Hey! There’s a question for you. Do your customers make a repurchase? What’s your customer retention rate? If your customers are likely to switch companies over time, there’s a need to overview the functionality of the team dealing with customer experience. A low retention rate might be an indication of low customer experience.

The Bottom Line

Over time, customer experience has been one of the most important eCommerce strategies to follow. 80% of frequent buyers of a brand mark customer experience as the reason behind their repurchase. Make it a part of your eCommerce strategies and take your brand to the next level of perfection. Also, you can comment down what eCommerce strategy is your personal favourite, we would love to read, respond, and help more.