VINOD JANAPALA | October 13, 2020
Since the vocation of an e-commerce site is to generate sales on a recurring basis, it is logical to state that the customer experience largely conditions these results. Indeed, for Internet users who visit your site to be encouraged to purchase, it is important that they are satisfied when they browse it.
Moreover, satisfied customers will be easier to retain, and more likely to recommend you to others. These are all reasons why it is essential that you continuously optimize the experience on your e-commerce site. In the rest of this article, you will discover the best practices to observe for this purpose.
Interact with Your Customers with An Online Questionnaire: You must first understand that to attract your targets, you must necessarily establish a relationship of trust with them. Then, the strategy you put in place upstream to attract customers and encourage them to sell will have to evolve over time. Of course, it is a question from the start of ensuring that the strategy is as efficient as possible, but it must above all be flexible to be able to adjust to the feedbacks of your customers.
It is therefore essential that you establish a proactive exchange with your customers, and for this, the online questionnaire is one of the most popular tools. Indeed, the online questionnaire allows to bring the humanized side of your service, to create an interaction, to show that you attach importance to the opinions and comments of your customers, etc.
As part of your marketing processes, the online questionnaire can also constitute an element of reassurance that will be useful to you to support and direct your customers more easily in the purchasing process. Moreover, it is very easy to set up: you can create a quiz easily by clicking here and thus set up your communication and digital marketing strategy without further delay.
Finally, it is important to note that the effectiveness of the online questionnaire depends on certain elements, such as the method used to distribute it or the frequency with which it is sent. It is strongly recommended that there be a comments area there, so that customers can share their requests and / or comments with you at the end of the survey.
Make Sure Your Site Is Accessible On All Media: The report published by a magazine shows that 70% of online purchases will be made on mobile in 2020, figures which prove that from now on, it will indeed be a question of “ m-commerce ” in addition to e-commerce. Think with Google also shows that 77% of online shoppers are more likely to place their orders with their mobile device.
This convinces us that it is of the first importance to make it possible to read your e-commerce site on all screen sizes. It is not only a question of planning a responsive web design theme, but also of setting up an m-commerce platform to meet the requirements of your targets who increasingly use their smartphones and tablets to browse and buy on Internet.
Making your site accessible on all media thus consists of:
• Eliminate the Tabs That Weigh Down Mobile Browsing,
• Use A Dynamic Theme,
• Reduce the Size of The Images by Compressing Them,
• No Longer Provide A Sidebar,
• Remove Pop-Ups.
Offer A Personalized User Experience: For the customer experience to be optimized, it is also necessary to offer them a personalized experience. The importance of this factor is such that 33% of customers will give up buying from an e-commerce site if they feel that it does not provide enough customization options.
You must therefore ensure that your merchant site allows customization by:
• The Use of Geolocation to Indicate the Closest Physical Points of Sale,
• The Offer of Complementary Products in The Customer Basket,
• Virtual Testing of Products (Via Augmented Reality for Example),
• The Proposal of Recommendations Based on The Customer's Previous Purchases,
• The Use of Predictive Targeting (To Personalize the User's Home Page).
A Simplified and Secure Payment Step: To ensure the satisfaction of your customers when they browse your site, you must also make the payment step as easy as possible. In many ways, this step strongly impacts the conversion rate of your prospects, as cart abandonment is most often found at this time, when they feel the process is too tedious.
It is therefore imperative that you pay particular attention to the means of payment that you offer to your customers. In this context, setting up a secure payment service is the best solution to adopt, using an HTTPS protocol for example. Also remember to systematically inform your customers that the payment page is perfectly secure (with the padlock icon).
Finally, it would be wise to offer the online payment methods with which your customers are the most comfortable (to be determined by means of a survey or an online questionnaire).
Guide Consumers with A Chatbot: While it goes without saying that an e-commerce site must have available and responsive customer service, some may think that the chatbot remains optional. However, be aware that 45% of Internet users prefer to use the chatbot to communicate with customer service. More importantly: 47% of e-commerce website users express their motivation to buy using this technology.
This is explained by the fact that the chatbot makes it possible to inform visitors more easily and quickly. With a simple message, they can know your general conditions of sale, your return conditions, your delivery times, etc. The chatbot is therefore a tool to be adopted urgently to optimize the customer experience on your site. Remember, however, that it does not replace real customer service!
It will nonetheless bring an increase in speed in the processing of your customers' requests, and above all, will provide the most relevant possible answers, as quickly as possible.
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VINOD JANAPALA | October 12, 2020
Servicing - It is the Keyword of all the keywords for businesses. Have you ever wondered the reason phrases like “the customer is always right” or “the customer is king” are often quoted by industrial leaders? The answer to this question is that increasingly, the customers have become the main advocates of selling your products.
Customers have become one of the most primary marketing tools for businesses across the globe. As the buyers and potential customers are increasingly expecting more knowledgeable insights about the services and products offered by businesses, it is the customers whose advocacy matters the most.
Businesses are actively putting their happy customers at the forefront of their marketing campaigns and potential customers to present the value of their services and products. Advertising satisfied customers in creative ways like community marketing, testimonial videos, interactive stories, customer blogging, etc., has become as imperative as ever for businesses. Some businesses take it even a step further by participating in consortiums, communities, associations, and guest speaking at big events in the industry.
Hence, the marketing & sales teams and leaders across every industry have been trying to fill in the increasing demand for showcasing more customer advocates.
Now, the main question in mind for many people is how exactly to fill in this demand and capture more customer advocates? Is it through providing incentives to the customers? Is it some other way? Let us understand the crux of what makes customer advocacy a major draw and answer these questions along the way.
Customer Advocacy - The What and Why of Its Significance
The definition of customer advocacy is putting in immaculate focus on the needs and requirements of the customers. The customers in 2020 are smart and have many other alternatives to avail the services or products you are selling. Hence, the conception of pulling a fast one over any of your customers just to make easy money is not even an option in today’s age. In a marketplace with intense competition, businesses have no other choice than to provide exceptional customer services and experience.
It is no surprise that word travels at the speed of light in the age of social media, and any review can go viral worldwide in an instant. Therefore, customer advocacy programs have become such an integral part of businesses, providing them with a competitive advantage and acting as a secret weapon for increasing customer servicing standards in the industry.
Best Ways of Generating Innovative Service to Capture Customer Advocates
The paradigm shift in the demands of the customers in today’s age has urged businesses to dig deeper into customer insights and find the best ways to enhance their customer experience. To optimally achieve exceptional customer servicing, businesses need to be creative, intuitive, and innovative with their strategies, which would subsequently help them in generating customer advocates. Here are some of the best-proven ways to ensure peak service innovation:
Deliver on Your Promises and Acknowledge Your Mistakes: Many businesses lost sight of the primary goal of offering promises to their customers - They must be delivered on. An undelivered promise will leave a much worse taste in the mouth of a customer than lousy servicing. Hence, acknowledging your mistakes (if you make any) is a crucial part of generating customer advocacy, as it establishes trust within the customer of expecting complete honesty from a business. Building a solid foundation based on service, customer experience, responsive delivery, and in-person experiences are the main pillars of building customer advocacy.
Know the Problems of Your Customers: Market research is, perhaps, one of the greatest tools for gaining informative customer insights. An industrial leader once said that “The most important thing you can bring to a dialogue with me is knowing my problems”. This is the exact thing that the customers are looking for from businesses. Developing a customer as a viable reference requires businesses to know everything about their problems, their needs, and their expectations. Once a business knows all of this, they can excellently service their customers.
Customer References Should Be Put Together with Their Peers: Executives and managers who might be dealing with similar issues as the customers should relate to your firm for presenting a holistic view of their experience and expectations. So, how can your business connect these two forces you might be wondering? The most convenient way to connect them is via live events, the Internet, teleconferences, consortiums, and events. Here, they can not only connect, but also exchange their ideas while learning various new approaches to customer servicing.
Smartly Market Your Customers: Case studies and whitepapers are the primary sources of marketing for many businesses. Smartly incorporating customers’ achievements in advocating your business and their testimonials can pull in a much bigger number of prospects for businesses. Prospects are not looking for exaggerated descriptions of the services offered by your firm, but the real-life applications of them, which grounds the services and presents them with a real oversight of what to expect.
Coordinating PR Messaging along the Lines of the Customer’s: Customer advocacy has the word “customer” in it for a reason. Aligning your PR messaging with what the customer wants to convey about your business is very imperative. These customers will be providing their time to advocate for your business. Hence, it is important that the core takeaway of the PR messaging is properly aligned with what the customer wants to advocate about your business.
Success is a Two-Way Street: As mentioned previously, it is important to emphasize the fact that the customer advocates are devoting their time and resources for your business. Hence, their expectations for your business succeeding is for the obvious reasons. If your business falls in the category of an SME, then you are more likely to thrive for a longer time. If your business falls in the category of a large enterprise, then you are more than likely to invest your capital in product development and market research for enhancing the services your business provides. Therefore, do not feel intimidation in asking for legitimate reference support, even from your customer advocates.
Wrapping Up
Now that you are aware of how to implement innovative service for generating customer advocates effectively, all that remains is for you to practice the techniques. Businesses should understand that getting advocacy from customers is significantly different than getting purchases from them. Fresh value propositions, along with optimum future involvement, is the key to getting customer advocates. Embracing this is the most important step in realizing the true potential of the customers, and it can help your business in recording exceptional growth.
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