Strategies for Online Retailer to Deliver Excellent Customer Experience
Over the past few years, we have seen online retailer making tremendous growth. For them, there is no slowing down phase or looking back! It is estimated that around 1.92 billion people are expected to shop online in 2019. The retail sales which were $2.84 trillion in 2018 are now expected to reach $3.45 trillion in 2019 and they will be influenced by the internet. This number clearly points to the fact that in the coming years if the online retail business wants to be successful it will have to do its best in offering excellent digital customer experience.
The major way a business can generate more revenue is through great customer experience. If the customer is satisfied with the overall experience he or she had at an online store, they expect to spend more money there. By having an idea of the best practices related to offering end-to-end customer experience on the online platform, the online retailer should take the time to assess the details.
With more number of customers tend to spend their time and money at online stores in 2019, let’s take some time to understand what drives best customer experience on the digital space and what key strategies the businesses should follow to achieve it.
Digital Transformation In Retail Industry
Anticipate customer needs
The business which manages to understand the needs of the customers tends to become successful. Instead of planning out new design trends for the online store, businesses should think about the needs of the customers into every decision they make. The online retailer can come up with products that excite customers by understanding their demands through useful analytics.
Ease and functionality is what matters
In any business, customers matter and so we always look for ways to delight them. If the website layout is not impressive enough or the site comes with poor navigation then there are more chances that your site will experience a noticeable amount of bounce rate. If the users on your website feel that it is not easy to navigate around and find it difficult to explore things around, they will instantly leave your website and will not go further than the homepage. There is no meaning in adding some kind of fancy functionality to woo your customers when you cannot get the basics right. So as a part of retail IT services improve the basic functionalities; only then the fancy ones will help you add value to your business website.
Instant gratification counts
We have seen how important it is to have ease and functionality for websites to delight customers. Similarly, instant gratification plays a key role in offering outstanding online experience as a part of retail industry IT services. As per one of the research, 47% of the online users expect the webpage to load within two seconds or even less. Now as the seconds keep on increasing the chances of website abandonment increases very rapidly. Now when we talk about mobile users, their patience level is far lower and they cannot tolerate delay in page loading at all. They can be easily distracted and may leave the website in a hurry.
Here, instant gratification is something more than managing to have faster-loading web pages. It is also about influencing the customer journey throughout the site. It can be more about offering personalized product recommendations by understanding the needs of the shoppers as well as showing effective and positive product reviews and client testimonials based on the purchase history. This is all about reaching the expectations of the customers in the fastest way possible. It can be like a simple checkout process with no hidden steps or collecting information on the last minute by understanding the one-click mentality of the users.
Bringing together the in-store and online experiences
Today a number of initiatives are taken up by the online businesses to divert the visitors towards physical stores. Users today spend much of their time to browse deals on their phones and online retailer are trying to capitalize it.
Click & collect has been introduced long back as a part of retail services in order to establish a connection between in-store and online store, but today new trends are getting designed to use the online browsing behavior into in-store numbers. The greater number of people will be diverted to the in-store, there will be increased chances of newer purchase opportunities.
Even though it may not be the fundamental trend to boost digital user experience but, such kind of trend has been liked by the shoppers looking for newer experiences. With time number of eCommerce sites will be seen implementing it in their online business.
Personal commerce
Today most of the online stores make use of cookies and the online shoppers are also aware of that and know what that means. So now brands should come forward and try to make the best use of the information that they gather this way and put them into use to offer a personalized experience to the customers.
You can gather information related to browsing trends, product information, customer reviews, tailored guides, and relevant media content. Such kind of information can work towards getting excellent satisfaction ratings and as a brand, the customer will feel that you are offering the service which is personalized enough to help them achieve their specific needs.
It is important for the business to stay sensitive and maintain a balance between offering service and getting sales. If a shopper is continuously passed through aggressive cross-selling and up-selling attempts, he or she will feel like more products are showered on them. The only way to avoid such a situation is to help the shopper to find the best product they would want to buy. The shopper will buy such a product and leave the site with complete satisfaction.
Deliver personalized product recommendations
The market is turning much competitive and so it becomes important for the businesses to look for ways in which they can keep on making new customers all the while retaining the existing ones. For shoppers, eCommerce sites offer them the easy way to search for products and find them while for the online retailer, eCommerce solution also offers them opportunities to improve and build the repeat customer base. One of the effective ways in which businesses can accomplish it is by building a complete customer history and offering a personalized shopping experience based on it.
In today’s market scenario, it is expected out of the online retailer to have a better understanding of the likes and dislikes of customers. Such kind of information should be passed on to the employees. This will help them deliver a tailor-made shopping experience to the customers based on their taste.
Conclusion
In order to offer outstanding digital experience to the retail services industry, it is important to get your hand on a large amount of data and apply analytics to it. The information obtained in such a manner can then be used to add value to the customer experience.