How to Create an Unforgettable Holiday Shopping Experience

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Your customers are the lifeblood of your brand and deserve to be treated like VIPs, especially during the holiday season. However, with stores closed, a shift to online shopping prevalent, and first-time online shoppers learning the ropes of shopping online, brands must be much more prepared than ever before to create an unforgettable holiday shopping experience.

So, how can you create a holiday shopping experience that feels like a warm hug this season? Here are five ways to make it unforgettable.

Create a Memorable Ecommerce Experience During the Holidays

This season, it’s important to have your ecommerce experience firing on all cylinders. You’ll want to make sure that every customer has a seamless experience on your website so they can easily make purchases and get their questions answered. Make sure you look at the following important aspects before the holiday shopping season starts:  

• Update product images on your site 
• Make sure your site is easy to navigate with intuitive menus  
• Ensure your common FAQ’s are easily accessible 
• Create options to reach you if customers are confused 
• Make sure you have a solid checkout process that makes purchasing as easy as possible 

Have your team go through your ecommerce site just like they would if they were shoppers. Pressure test every page and take notes on what needs to be fixed so you can make changes ahead of the holiday rush.

Make Your Customers Feel Known

Just because your interactions may not be taking place face-to-face this holiday season doesn’t mean you should lose the warm, personal touch you provide in your stores. When you know who your customers are and know their preferences, it’s much easier to help them feel at ease shopping with you. 

Consider empowering your customer support team to personalize each customer’s holiday shopping experience by making it easy for them to see and leverage key context and information about your customer. 

Allow them to pick up right where your customer last left off by unifying every conversation they’ve had with you—regardless of the channel it took place on—in a single thread. That way, your agents don’t waste time hunting down and merging tickets, and your customers feel remembered, while saving themselves the effort of repeating themselves. 

“Having every communication with a customer streamlined into one window has been extremely beneficial for the team and made their workflow so much easier. They also really love how all the information about a customer is just visible from the get-go.”

Rebecca Boxall

VP, Marketing, Channels, & Customer Experience at Native Shoes

Create Natural Upsell Moments

Even your best face-to-face salespeople will find it hard to make a sale without any context about a customer. By providing your agents a single view of a customer’s past orders and brand preferences, they can better understand the likes and dislikes of your customers to make more relevant, and authentic, recommendations over the holidays. 

Knowing a customer’s purchase history helps create personalized holiday shopping experiences that lead to authentic upsell opportunities. For example, if a customer calls in looking for a shipping update on a recently purchased pair of shoes—and you can see that they purchase shoes from you regularly, always in a particular style, and always in white—that presents an authentic opportunity to offer them the sneakers on holiday discount that you know they will love and likely want to purchase in that moment.

Turn Returns into Immediate Exchanges

By understanding a customer’s likes and dislikes, your agents can suggest alternative products they know your customers will love while in the middle of processing a return. That way, instead of paying the costs of shipping the return box, you can put that towards the costs of shipping a new item.  

Knowing a customer’s purchase history and preferences in the same view of the conversation also helps mitigate lost revenue from returns.  

For example, if a customer reaches out looking to make a return for winter boots, they just purchased that weren’t the perfect fit, your agents can offer a similar style from the winter collection that they know the customer will love—even offering a discount for the replacement item to make the idea of an exchange a no-brainer. 

Give the Right Strategic Holiday Discounts

During the holidays, just about everyone is looking for a sale. So why not use this to your advantage and equip your customer service team to give strategic discounts? 

If a customer is looking to return an item, instead of refunding them immediately, offer another similar item with a discount. That way you don’t lose 100% of the revenue in the process. If you have first-time holiday shoppers that come to your site and are chatting with you about their first order, you can welcome them by offering them a discount on their first purchase.  

It’s also worth pointing out that your existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products from you and spend, on average, 31% more compared to new customers. So, try giving your return customers, VIPs and high value loyal spenders more discounts knowing they will buy from you more frequently. 

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