Creating a customer-centric eCommerce experience is a sure way to attract and retain customers in a competitive market. A survey by Statista indicates that about 95% of customers are more likely to purchase again if they receive a positive customer service experience on their first visit. These incredible numbers make investing in a robust customer-centric business an important approach.
Effective customer-centricity will help you focus on customer behavior and emotions, generating better experiences and improving your business results.
Below are a few practical tips you can employ to boost the success rate of your eCommerce business.
Assess Areas of Improvement.
Building a customer-centric business begins with understanding how your customers feel and knowing what they want. To get started, identify and document every area of your brand-customer interaction. You can then check how your message boards, live and online customer support, social media platforms, and live events perform and collect feedback. If the feedback collection methods are insufficient, develop ways to improve them.
For example, if your customers’ main complaints revolve around your payment and clearance systems, you might want to find out why they’re not working. Could it be that you’re not already using a reliable, high-speed credit card scanner to help with the customer payment process? Or is it that your team isn’t efficiently trained to use the payment technologies at the clearance counters?
No matter the challenge, the best way to learn about it is by listening to customers’ feedback from all available sources. You can then devise reliable solutions to improve each area of weakness.
Personalize the Customer Journey.
Once you’ve had a customer for some time, you can learn what they like and use that data to personalize their experience whenever they buy from you. You can use tools like automated messages to guide your customers along their own personalized journeys. A practical way to do this is to send automated, customer-centric messages about your brand and why customers love your products to shoppers who:
- Recently browsed specific products on your website
- Recently subscribed to your email newsletter
- Left their carts behind without completing their orders
These personalized, automated messages can help improve the consumer shopping experience and distinguish your business from those that only send generic campaigns.
Optimize Intelligent Search.
An eCommerce website needs a search function that enables customers to find the products they need faster and more effectively. However, a normal search function alone isn’t enough. You can go the extra mile to incorporate an intelligent search system that improves the search process. Based on your customer’s search history, an intelligent search system helps predict related items your customer might be interested in.
This customized set of search results helps make work even easier for your clients and improves conversion rates. The more efficient, predictive, and quick your search function is, the less likely your customers will get bored and leave.
Train Your Team to Communicate Customer Needs.
Customer centricity means listening to and working closely with customers to meet their needs. You can accomplish this culture in your business by training your staff to speak the customer’s language. Every customer stepping into your store must experience the same level of attention and care, albeit personalized.
To achieve this admirable culture, have your teams routinely visit the customer support department for a day and learn a few things about the customers. They can learn about what customers ask for when they come into the organization and how important their input is in meeting those needs.
This way, every team player will play their part effectively to ensure each customer’s needs are met on time and satisfactorily. If customers ask for specific improvements, your customer support team should document those requests and pass them to internal departments for review and implementation.
Prioritize Quality Writing.
Well-written content offers a clear guideline to your customers as they navigate your brand’s sales funnel. Customers want to know more about your business; what it offers, how it operates, where it’s located, and many other details that can only be best captured in articulate writing. They also need to understand your product details and shipping and return policies.
When you communicate all these customer expectations through writing, they’re more likely to make decisions faster, even with their first visit to your website. While more established eCommerce businesses understand the importance of investing in quality writing, many startups ignore these skills until it’s too late. You can use an in-house content creation team or outsource to freelancers, training them on your business’s best practices regarding content production.
With so many eCommerce businesses coming up every year, the competition keeps getting stiffer. Running a customer-centric eCommerce business gives you an upper hand in attracting and retaining customers in a competitive niche. Customers will appreciate the convenience, familiarity, and care your team offers every time they shop with you.
