James & Paul discuss CX strategy for ecommerce retailers, explaining how to measure & report on CX and sharing practical ways to improve online customer experience, including which tools to use.
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We’re expecting the tough trading conditions from 2023 to continue into the first half of 2024, perhaps longer in some markets. Retailers are under margin pressure as discounting bites and CPAs have increased in many digital marketing channels e.g. Google Shopping. At the same time, customer support expectations are increasing, so a focus on delivering the best possible customer experience with the resources available is important.
In this ecommerce podcast, experienced ecommerce consultants and strategists James Gurd & Paul Rogers give advice on how ecommerce retailers can measure and report on CX, and take steps to improve the online customer experience using proven techniques.
Key discussion points
- Making sure you measure & report on CX:
- What OKRs (objectives and key results) do you have that are customer focused?
- Qualitative feedback also
- NPS is most commonly used: survey on order conf page & send via email / SMS – resend after delivery to monitor changes in satisfaction (Census, Surveymonkey, Hotjar)
- The role of 1st party data, why it’s so important:
- Building a better experience and improving on-site personalisation
- Direct from your customers, so you own it
- Opt-in forms & post opt-in data enrichment
- Use browse abandonment data – target PDPs that get disproportionally high rate, use exit prompts to find out why (JustUno is a good tool but can also program this using GTM if you have the developer resource)
- Customer feedback loops:
- Persistent surveys
- Customer panels: crowdsource product feedback, help with roadmap prioritisation (House of Fraser did this well)
- Reviews, use the data to make improvements e.g. Dr Martens identifying returns issues and addressing it
- Mining data using AI e.g. ChatGPT
- Customer self service & MyAccount proposition:
- Lots of surveys show customers want to self-serve, rather than wait to talk to someone
- Survey from Intercom found 68% of support teams planned to invest more in automation to manage support costs in 2023
- Lots of ways you can do this: #1 is provide as much useful info as possible via the account, such as order status, loyalty info, returns info etc.
- Better info on key pages e.g. contextually relevant FAQ blocks, did this for a luxury jewellery brand and measurably improved onpage metrics
- Let people initiate processes online e.g. start a return request
- AI chatbots play a key role in answering FAQs such as order information & enable speedy ordering (US research indicating consumers are ready to spend more than $400 purchasing goods from a chatbot)
- Sephora uses Kikn in US, provides makeup tips and uses short quizzes to make product recs
- H&M also uses Kik
- eBay has ShopBot that uses Messenger which answers questions and provides links to listings
- The role of loyalty & referral schemes > we’re going to do a focus episode on this:
- Loyalty needs to reward people for positive behaviour, not just discount products
- Tiers to encourage people to progress e.g. VIP for most valuable customers (based on frequency & AOV)
- Referrals: use this for loyal customers who are happy, don’t push referral to everyone who buys e.g. if someone isn’t happy, they don’t want to refer! Incentivise both referrer and referee
- Using CX indicators to change how you market to customers:
- Flow based marketing tools like Klaviyo & Ometria essential here
- Starting point: personalise the post purchase experience for 1st time buyers based on what they buy (or just have a simple flow for all 1st time buyers)
- When 2nd purchase is made – reward people e.g. auto-enroll into loyalty tier 1
- If a VIP / loyal customer has a bad experience e.g. complaint / failed or bad delivery / leaves negative review > path to escalate for CSA call
Want to suggest a topic or guest for a future episode? Contact us via the website or on LinkedIn.