When shopping – whether it’s in-store or online – most customers expect a certain level of service. They want to be recognised, listened to, valued and cared for. Unfortunately these expectations are not always met - more so in online environments than in-store it seems - so what does it take to bridge the gap between the physical and online shopping experience?

Recognition: Digital platforms are available 24/7 so you’d think this would be a slam-dunk. In reality most ecommerce sites have ‘an average’ at best, customer service experience. Navigating through processes, FAQs and multiple contact centre paths, all lead to frustration. If you are lucky to be presented with a live chat option, you quickly find that the faceless agent is a generalist in a contact centre, often managing multiple sessions simultaneously - making the whole experience painful and slow.

Remedy: Brands and businesses should go online and walk through the current ‘customer experience’ - the flaws will reveal themselves rather quickly. Speak to both in-store staff and contact centre about topics that frequently get asked, and with this knowledge reengineer the ‘problem’ areas in the online world. Introduce category expertise and go beyond the clunky text input interface. Voice over IP (VOIP) offers the human touch and provides an attractive alternative to the loathsome IVR (interactive voice response) system. For the truly seamless experience, webcam enabled face-to-face interaction with a customer service representative as and when needed should be the norm.

Humanity: On an intellectual level we all know there’s a need to inject warmth into our online services and yet the cold, faceless interaction of pixels rather than people persists. Platforms fail to recognise when we get tired and frustrated, or trapped in comparison mode. In the physical world in-store personnel can observe when a customer is having difficulties and can react with a friendly face and offer assistance. When something’s gone wrong online, a site that does its utmost to keep you from contacting the company feels hostile and further increases annoyance.

Remedy: Set events in the platform that trigger easy to reach help. A user accessing the “contact us” section wants to do exactly that, so bring the options for a conversation front and centre. Using real world pictures of the Customer Service team creates the all-important personal and human connection. Never opt for the grinning, contrived headset-wearing call operators. Ever.

Product expertise: The domain where data is king, this is finally an opportunity for digital to outshine the real world you’d think. But product description pages often lack the story behind why ‘xyz’ is a great product, or how it’s genuinely different from that of a competitor. It requires a level of dialogue to understand the customer’s needs, concerns and desires.

Remedy: Product reviews, guides and detailed specifications is a given. Creating additional tools and services that enable customers to compare and shortlist with relative ease allows them to make the right choices without wasting hours of their lives attempting to figure it out themselves. This is the magic ingredient. Gathering this expertise and packaging it into a brand making it easy to guide customers to valuable content.

Problem solving: Oh dear! Something’s gone wrong. When this does happen, we want and expect a helping hand. A common approach used online is the back hole – a form that submits your query into the unknown. How does this deal with the anxiety and increasing anger? Usually it requires a phenomenal amount of chasing up by the customer, which too often concludes in swearing never to use the company again. It’s almost as if the process was designed not to help and in turn damage the brand.

Remedy: Setting out a clear returns policy, along with the process and timescales for how a complaint will be dealt with is crucial – as is the need to deliver what you promise. Once a ‘ticket’ has been created, it should be followed up by a named individual and the dialogue made available on the customer’s channel of choice.

The Future

Creating a seamless customer experience online is crucial as more and more customers turn to ecommerce platforms. The secret to a great online shopping experience is knowing how to weave everything together so that the customer can enjoy a connected and simple experience.

Staff aligned to expertise, not channel - Often purported to be the most valuable assets, it is the people in the business who are the customer experience. From product buyers to front of house sales staff – digital platforms are the place to share their knowledge, be named and be available for customers to contact.

Simple handoff - This is not about in-store vs digital. It’s about how we create as many connections as possible to make it easy to flit back and forth between the two, sometimes at the same time. Having your receipts as an email in a digital wallet, or a short code that passes complex configurations from your device to the retailer are two examples of how to make this happen in practice.

 

By Jonathan Lovatt-Young, Head of Service and Experience Design at Tribal Worldwide London. 

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