According to recent research by thinkJar, 66% of consumers switch brands because of poor service and that 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for an excellent purchasing experience. Research analyst house Forrester suggests that customer experience (CX) is how customers perceive their interactions with the organisation they are dealing with.

These interactions range from the overall relationship to specific customer journeys and touchpoints which can occur both online and in real-time. To offer excellent CX, business needs to build an infrastructure that supports the customer throughout their journey, providing information and answers when they are most needed, in the format that is personalised and bespoke to the individual.

There are four fundamental tools that form the basis of customer experience management:

  1. emailing tool
  2. abandoned cart recovery
  3. instant messaging service
  4. customer review

Ecommerce emails should be mobile optimised

Email is still one of the biggest ROI drivers in ecommerce, and newsletters form an essential part of CX. Referral schemes or email offers sent via newsletters can often start a new relationship with a business, or they can bring a lost client back.

Presenting new products and deals in the form of a newsletter can help to maintain a businesses’ relationship with current customers. All this comes with one giant caveat which is mobile optimisation. According to Experian’s Quarterly email benchmark report, 65% of email openings occurred on a mobile phone or tablet in Q4 2015, compared to 54% in Q3 2015.

Businesses that do not optimise ecommerce emails for mobile devices are jeopardising customer experience and potential sales. The recent study by Adestra on Consumer Adoption & Usage 2016 showed that 71.6% of consumers are likely to delete emails if they are not formatted for mobile.

So how should a good emailing tool look?

It must include all vital features such as customer segmentation, campaign testing, personalisation options and analytics.

Abandoned cart emails

With abandoned cart rates as high as 68.63% in 2015 (study by Baymard), more needs to be done to secure the purchase. Abandoned cart reminders can be an additional useful ecommerce tool. Recent SalesCycle stats show that more than 11.61% of cart abandonment emails are clicked.

With the average click rate for e-commerce newsletters at 3.77% (SmartInsights), cart abandonment emails really do offer a great opportunity to regain lost sales. Businesses can choose an emailing tool that offers recovery emails or opt for a dedicated abandoned cart tool. Key features of the tool should include, personalisation options, manageable targeting criteria such as total cart cost or page reached in the buying process.

The tool should be able to program at least two emails per prospect. A two or three stage recovery approach is the most popular; this includes sending an email immediately after cart abandonment or within 24 hours, and another up to a week later.

Instant messaging for customer service

Emails are an effective customer experience tool but being available in real-time is a proven way to accompany a customer throughout their buying journey. Instant messaging services are swiftly becoming the first choice for consumers to contact businesses.

This is not surprising as instant messaging apps play a big part in consumers’ everyday life. It is only natural that consumers increasingly want to engage with organisations on their own terms. WhatsApp handled more than seven trillion messages last year, about 1,000 per person on the planet, and Snapchat currently claims to have reached 100 million active users. Instant messaging services meet the rapid response expectations of today’s consumers.

Businesses can use them to interact with consumers at crucial points of the customer journey. An IM service should offer consumers a choice of how they interact with businesses including a click-to-call, chat or video option and should include a wide range of criteria to determine targeting rules, such as, number of pages viewed, time spent on site, basket additions etc. It should also deliver visitor navigation analytics for businesses to establish consumer patterns.

Online customer reviews

Utilising customer’s feedback can help improve all aspect of a business. Whilst the feedback is important for a businesses’ growth, development and Google rankings, it’s also a significant part of the customer experience.

Online customer reviews both matter at the start of new interactions with a business and at the end of their buying experience. According to iPerceptions 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews. It is a new norm that that 84% (Dunnhumby) of shoppers regularly look at reviews to help decide which products to buy. As 47% of Britons have reviewed a product online (Econsultancy) it is clear that consumers want to read and leave reviews on what they buy.

When choosing a review tool a business should look for, adaptable email sending settings, i.e. being able to send a review request after an order has been placed or upon reception, the number of items to review, a threshold amount for sending requests and personalisation options.

According to Wolfgang Digital's Benchmarking KPI Study, the average time spent on an e-commerce website is 3 minutes, 49 seconds. This is not long to guarantee great service, but with the tools mentioned above businesses have a much better chance of building exceptional customer experience, online and in real-time.

 

By Marc Schillaci, CEO and Founder of Actinic (Part of the Oxatis Group)

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