Customer Experience — How To Keep Up in Today’s Ecommerce Environment

Customer experience (CX) comprises all customer interactions with your brand, whether or not a customer makes a purchase.

For ecommerce brands, this means managing as many steps along the customer’s path as possible — from marketing products to drawing potential customers to the website to the completion of a purchase. Customer experience also stretches well beyond that, encompassing the service and support a brand provides for an individual, and the further engagement and retention tactics that turn one-time shoppers into loyal customers.

What is customer experience?

Fun fact — brands that prioritize CX grow their revenue 1.7x faster than brands that don’t.

From customer service to loyalty programs, the opportunities to derive more value from your customer experience are massive, whether that’s by boosting customers’ lifetime value, attracting new customers to your brand, or helping support agents work more efficiently.

With the right tactics, such as proactive chat and customer loyalty nurturing, you can start seeing the customer experience’s impact on revenue.

Building a mature, profitable customer experience

Studies show that if your brand provides an excellent customer experience, customers will return for more and purchase additional products. However, providing the memorable and personalized experiences today’s consumers expect can be challenging.

The first step is ensuring that common issues, such as inefficient systems or a lack of agent training, don’t hinder your service team.

Discover the issues holding your service team back

While responding to customers’ requests and questions is essential, more than reactive customer service is needed. When the onus is put on customers to ask for help, minor issues may become big headaches.

Brands looking to rise above the competition must leverage a balance of both reactive and proactive approaches to deliver an A+ customer experience.

Learn more about reactive and proactive service

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As brands mature, their operations will evolve to serve a wider audience. These companies will develop multiple products and support offerings, invest more in marketing efforts to attract the desired groups, and more.

What often gets left behind as a company matures, however, is its customer experience capabilities — namely, its customer support teams.

Companies that treat customer experience as an afterthought might struggle with maintaining consistency in their messaging, miss out on providing recurring value to loyal customers, and more.

The four stages of customer experience maturity

In today’s marketplace, customer acquisition has become more challenging than ever. With a multitude of retailers to choose from and the deprecation of third-party cookies, savvy companies have shifted their sights to retention. Customer loyalty is the new gold standard for ecommerce brands, but it’s far from guaranteed.

At the core of the loyalty challenge is sub-par CX, the tolerance of which is at an all-time low. So, where can companies make the most significant impact on customer experience to inspire customer loyalty? By investing in customer service and enhancing the customer experience.

How to improve the customer experience

For CX leaders, measuring the customer experience and satisfaction is always top of mind. One way to gauge whether a customer is happy is with customer satisfaction surveys (also known as CSAT surveys) that are composed of questions used to measure satisfaction with the product or service, the customer’s interactions with your staff, and more.

While the customer satisfaction survey determines the CSAT score, other methods exist to evaluate facets of customer satisfaction, such as collecting the Customer Effort Score (CES) or the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Different ways to measure customer satisfaction

At the heart of any great customer experience is a brand’s ability to actively listen to and respond to the needs of its shoppers. To develop those capabilities, your ecommerce company needs a strong voice of customer (VoC) strategy that effectively gathers customer-provided data and then uses it to create more holistic experiences. With the right resources, a voice of customer strategy refocuses your brand to be truly customer-centric.

Creating your ideal voice of customer strategy improves your ability to meet customer expectations and ensures your entire organization performs customer-centric tasks at a high level, demonstrating to those shoppers your brand is worth returning to.

Creating a voice of customer strategy

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It’s no surprise that to create a good customer experience, brands need to think about the end-to-end customer journey — from when the customer is first made aware of a brand to the care they get post-purchase.

An excellent customer experience requires the above, plus the ability to make sense of and leverage your company’s data. However, some businesses find it challenging to lead with data because they’re not sure where to start — the sheer volume of data available can be overwhelming.

Learn how to stay one step ahead of customer expectations and deliver personalized service that makes your customers feel special.

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Companies have historically relied on purchasing third-party data because first-party data can be challenging to collect and requires user permission. However, with the deprecation of third-party cookies, companies are turning to first-party data to build positive customer relationships.

The good news is that your business has plenty of opportunities to gather first-party data. And with this information, you’ll be able to craft a plan that leverages how to use first-party data to upgrade your team’s quality of service and optimize the customer experience.

Learn more about first-party data and why it’s crucial to your business.

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As a company matures, the leadership team must be mindful of expanding at a rate that all departments can handle. The support team, in particular, tends to fall by the wayside with this type of planning, which could lead to company roadblocks.

So, how do CX leaders ensure that all facets of the customer experience are kept up at pace with the company’s growth? How can they hire strategically and expand their existing team’s technological capabilities?

Strategies for scaling customer experience

Customer service is about more than fixing customer issues when they arise. It’s also about anticipating customer needs before they reach out and finding ways to deliver surprise and delight — aka, proactive service.

Bringing proactive service to different channels improves customer relationships to meet modern expectations. Growing digital channels like SMS and email are tremendous growth areas for brands to explore proactive service. However, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions for implementing proactive customer service strategies — CX leaders should tailor tactics individually to SMS, email, phone, etc.

Key proactive customer service strategies by channel

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It pays to get personal. Companies with successfully implemented personalization efforts may expect a 15% increase in profits.

And while most companies identify personalization as essential to their customer engagement strategy, personalization continues to elude many brands, particularly in the ecommerce world.

Delivering personalized customer service is more than just a courteous agent answering the phone. Customers want to feel known and seen, not simply acknowledged. Knowing this can make the difference between a one-time customer and a life-long customer.

Personalization strategies to meet shopper’s needs

A popular misconception is that automation in customer service leads to less personalization.

However, AI can provide customers with more personalized experiences on a larger scale. For example, AI allows a customer’s complete history and profile to come into play, even with thousands of customers. The result is interactions that are much more individualized.

When it comes to personalization vs. automation, it’s not one or the other — they go hand in hand.

How AI can provide customers with more personal experiences

In an era when customer acquisition continues to get more expensive, customer loyalty is the new gold standard. But before brands can tap into these valued shoppers, they must learn how to create deeper relationships and drive long-term value through building brand affinity.

Brand affinity is the feeling customers get when they share a brand’s values. Customer service is essential to building brand affinity, including creating solid relationships and spreading word of mouth.

Start building brand affinity

Brands should focus less on spending resources to chase after new sales and instead focus more on retaining existing customers to unlock strong revenue growth. After all, studies have found that a mere 5% boost in customer retention can increase revenue by 25% to 95%.

The two-strike rule means that if someone has two poor experiences with your brand, they’re likely never to return. This rule alone signals to businesses that they must invest in customer retention strategies and high-quality customer service.

The importance of customer retention

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In 2022, millennial purchasing power reached its highest point in history, showing ecommerce brands the increasing importance of catering to this age group. While they’ve hit this point later than previous generations, like boomers and Gen X, the next generation of shoppers now spends the most in a single day, averaging about $200 and showing no signs of slowing down.

Now that millennials are stepping into their spending power, CX leaders need to focus on personalization and communicating with these shoppers on their preferred channels — particularly chat and SMS.

Millennial shopping habits

Gen Z represents a high-spending, fast-growing demographic of shoppers that ecommerce brands need to take seriously. This demographic and their combined disposable income surpassing $360 billion constitutes a significant business opportunity now and into the future.

To resonate with this age group, CX leaders must build curated experiences, focus on sustainability and building long-lasting products, and communicate with these shoppers on their preferred channels — particularly social media.

Gen Z online shopping habits

Baby boomers continue to hold strong financial dominance in the economy, forcing ecommerce retailers to understand their shopping behaviors to stay competitive.

Retailers must be mindful of how boomers shop, including their need for explicit guidance on product selections and expectations for high-quality customer service from respected brands. And although there is some hesitancy towards ecommerce, baby boomers’ online spending is increasing — with a caveat. They expect the online brands they choose to have the ability to recreate the intimacy of a brick-and-mortar experience.

Baby boomer shopping habits