Enhancing the Customer Experience

Technology has changed so many aspects of our lives, from how we consume information to how businesses are run. While it generally makes our lives faster and easier, when it fails us, it can be a huge headache. This impacts the e-Commerce industry in particular. What happens if orders don’t get through? Are customers getting the information they need? What if you lose the sale and they don’t come back? These are all very real dangers should technology break and fail us. There is the expectation of reliability and ease with online shopping. Customer experience should always be a positive one lest they abandon your site in favour of your competitors.

We will be addressing how to improve customer experience over several posts on our blog.

Giving the best customer experience possible should be the goal of your webshop. After all, happy customers are a win-win situation. Your business gets more sales, customers, and revenue, as well as a good reputation. Your customers get what they want without any complications.

Let’s start at the beginning.

For a webshop, achieving customer satisfaction can be done through simple and intuitive navigation throughout the site and personalizing the shopping experience. We should think about the path we want potential customers to take through the webshop. These visitors to the webshop could be mission-oriented, meaning we have to make it easy for them to locate exactly what it is they want without sifting through unnecessary items. However, we don’t want to completely ignore the fact that these customers may be tempted by other product offerings.

It’s a bit of a balancing act to combine the two. We want to lead them through the site, hopefully with the checkout page as their final destination. This is the ideal path; making it easy for them to locate the information they seek while giving opportunities to browse. Will the link they are clicking take them too far away from the desired goal? Is it in the same webpage? Or is it easier to lead them to a second page so they can return to their original page? Perhaps a “quick look” feature is a good choice so you give them a look at a little more detail without them straying too far from the path you hope to guide them on.

With a customizable e-Commerce solution like Nav-to-Net™, we are able to create as many categories as we want. We can structure these based on how we want someone to navigate through the webshop.

Customizing the way you lead them through the site is the first step.

Next, we want to be sure to thoroughly test the webshop. What may make sense to us may not be always be apparent to outside eyes, meaning your potential customers. Get someone who wasn’t involved in the design to test it. Take notes on what they notice, what they do, where their eye naturally goes to. See if they can find particular items easily and without many clicks. You can gain a lot of insight with this approach. Getting customers in the beginning is the hardest part. But once you get them in, it’s time to move onto the other factors that affect customer experience.

Will you be employing any of these tactics? How do your grab a new customer’s attention?

Learn how our solution creates great customer experiences through our live webinars – Reserve your spot today!