Product, placement, price and promotion may have been the holy grail of marketing, but in the digital era, customer experience now tops the list. It is critical for all types of businesses, retail especially, to provide a positive, meaningful and engaging digital experience to its customers and prospects or else they will take their business elsewhere. In fact, a recent Salesforce survey found that 76% of consumers felt it’s easier now more than ever to take their business to a brand that better matches their expectations.
Before e-Commerce, sales associates provided in-store service (and still do) to ensure customers are having a positive shopping experience. They would do so by visually understanding customers’ reactions — be it engaged with a product or frustrated they can’t find their size — and catering the customer service as needed. Store associates can easily alleviate confusion or frustration by visually observing body language — both on an individual level and for the broader audience. They can help someone find the right shoe size after watching them sift through several pairs, or offer a dressing room if their hands look full. Taking a macro perspective, if the arrangement of the clothing racks leads to people constantly asking where to find items, or cause the flow of traffic to be dysfunctional, a visual merchandiser might be asked to readjust.
In today’s e-Commerce world, the same level of service must be provided digitally. But online, understanding those confusions and frustrations is not as simple.
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As e-Commerce continues to grow at an unfathomable rate, marketers need to provide the same empathy and experience for shoppers online as they would in person. To reach this level of behavioral knowledge and mirror in-store customer service for online consumers, marketers should change their mindset and best practices.
1. Take offline behavioral knowledge and apply it to online strategies
In a digitally-driven world, marketers must understand the “why” behind online shopping behavior at a deep level — far beyond the “what” behind traditional, quantitative metrics. Take the following anecdote that everyone can relate to:
- A shopper scrolls through a web site for an hour, opening tab after tab, trying to find the perfect pair of sunglasses and finally makes the choice;
- Excited, she presses the checkout button, but it malfunctions and results in an error page instead of confirming the purchase;
- The user becomes extremely frustrated, feeling that she wasted her time and exits the web site;
- The retailer doesn’t understand the real reason why the shopper left the page after being so close to making the purchase, attributing it to cold feet or going elsewhere for the purchase, and as such continues targeting her with ads for the sunglasses; and
- These taunting ads make her more frustrated, and the improper and uneducated response from the brand ultimately costs them her customer loyalty.
In an industry with endless choices for nearly every type of product, marketers need to be equipped to identify when an issue arises and show empathy to quickly alleviate it, as they would in-person. To reach the level of real-time intelligence required to best understand and connect with consumers, retailers need to take what has long been done offline and apply the same practices online.
2. Read between the clicks to understand behavior
Measuring online behavior to improve and manage the customer experience is no easy task. Traditional subjective metrics, such as Net Promoter Scores or surveys, no longer provide marketers with the full insight required to note what works versus what makes someone run to another brand. To understand state of mind and gather objective, qualitative data, reading and tracking digital behavior is key. And fortunately, similar to in-store shoppers, online consumers provide warning signs of an issue through digital body language.
Every engagement and gesture made on a web site or app — what happens between the clicks — represents digital body language. Being able to understand and address behaviors such as those listed below are critical to analyzing and benchmarking the brand’s success.
- Multi-click indicates user frustration; when a web link is broken, or a confirmation button is slow or unresponsive, users might click repeatedly until the link works.
- Bird’s nest identifies user frustration, too; a jumbled mouse trail from a user clicking around rapidly, resembling a bird’s nest, might occur when a page is unresponsive or poorly designed.
- Mouse reading behavior refers to when a shopper directly follows the content they are reading on a website with their mouse, denoting engagement.
3. Address confusions and frustrations to build lifetime loyalty
To understand and address the pain points that customers face on a web site, marketers must be able to read online behavior as seamlessly as they would in person. Building an understanding for digital body language indications over time lets marketers quickly intervene when a user becomes frustrated, thus solving the issue for the individual while also offering an opportunity to fix the problem for any future shoppers. This is critical to not only ensure an ongoing positive relationship but also to benchmark and improve online performance over time.
Without having the ability to pinpoint confusion or frustration, it is impossible for marketers to create a positive, personalized experience. Attaining this intelligence and alleviating issues will ultimately increase the user’s perception of the company, enabling them to return and build the relationship. Acquiring new customers is not cheap, nor easy, so in a world where consumers can leave one brand for another in the blink of an eye, retailers that will win in the long term are those that focus on creating loyalty with existing customers over time.
Ben Harris is CEO and co-founder of Decibel, the leader in Digital Experience Intelligence. Having started a London-based digital agency in 2002, Harris became increasingly aware of the gap between traditional web analytics and the ability to make informed decisions to improve web site performance, so he set about creating marketing technology company, Decibel. His vision for Decibel was to make customer experience an objective science; reinventing the approach companies take to create, measure and optimize digital experiences in ways that are obvious, compelling and actionable. Now Harris helps the world’s leading retailers — such as LEGO, River Island, CVS, TUI and British Airways — leverage machine learning that automatically measures and understands how customers feel when interacting with web sites and apps so the organizations can create better experiences. Harris has worked for over 20 years in the delivery of digital projects for clients including Microsoft, NYSE, Nestle, Nokia and Citrix.
