Commentary
10 tips for creating amazing online retail customer experiences
Ben Nimmo, co-founder and CTO at Orlo, offers insight on how retail brands can create amazing online experiences for customers and inspire positive emotions, influencing behavior at scale.
March 5, 2019
By Ben Nimmo, co-founder and CTO, Orlo
If the Information Age is over, we're now living in an Experience Age where emotion drives behavior. If retail brands can be there instantly, effectively and meaningfully when customers need them most, those same brands can create amazing online experiences for customers and inspire positive emotions, influencing behavior at scale.
By harnessing emotional connections with customers, retailers can make 2019 a success for them and, using these 10 tips, a positive experience for their customers:
1. Linking conversations future-proofs CX
Ninety-four percent of companies across Europe agree customer experience is a key part of business strategy in 2019, according to research we carried out in late 2018, with larger organizations of 1,000-plus employees placing the most focus on customer experience next year. Against this backdrop, responding quickly to customer queries is no longer enough for a truly future-proof CX strategy.
With over 3.2 billion people worldwide actively using different social media channels, sales and marketing teams need to mirror consumers by moving easily between online communication channels and conversations, while retaining linked records of those conversations — putting savvy brands ahead of the competition and providing greater levels of personalisation.
2. Don't aim to eliminate the human element with AI
With customer support channels are multiplying and dynamic shifts in consumer, AI is making contact center roles easier work by automated repetitive, low value tasks, leaving humans to handle more complex, niche situations.
With technologies like AI and chatbots transforming customer experience, the perceived risk is that they may isolate consumers who require a human interaction. However, not everything that can be automated, should be automated. At the heart of every great consumer experience is a perfect synergy between human empathy and digital engagement.
Simple inquiries such as checking on the status of a delivery are prime candidates for a self-serve chatbot. However, a discrepancy with your bank account requires the reassurance and empathy that only an empathetic, customer service agent can provide.
The challenge for brands will be achieving the perfect balance between ruthless efficiency and meaningful engagement.
3. Ensure customers feel valued
By creating powerful experiences and inspiring positive emotions with customers, brands can influence behavior at scale. Digital winners are experience-led but with deep human focus: Airbnb, Spotify and Pinterest, for example. Digital economies have reset the balance of power between brand and consumer and, as consumers continue to adopt technology at a fast pace, the barriers to switching allegiance are becoming more non-existent – all it takes is one bad interaction.
Focusing on CX in 2019 will enable companies to turn valued customers into advocates — when customers feel valued, 87 percent become advocates and 74 percent remain with the brand Forrester's 2018 CX Index reports.
4. Make digital channels visible
With a sole focus on exceptional customer service, online-only supermarkets like Ocado have found that making web chat their channel of choice helps reduce customer effort when contacting the retailer, increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. The aim is to have the vast majority of web conversations end positively.
Customers are more interested in getting their issue resolved, rather than using their preferred channel. As web chat is the easiest channel to resolve most queries, making this actively visible to customers provides an effortless experience. While web chat is live conversation, it allows agents time to source the correct information without the immediate pressure to say the right thing compared to a phone call.
5. Provide clear customer support options
The next step is to provide clearer guidance for customers to self-serve, and find the right channel for queries where, for instance, web chat is not best suited. Over the last three years, it has seen a customer driven channel shift, with web chat outstripping social media as the communications platform of choice, and also reducing the number of calls, emails and social media queries. With web chat being the cheapest, labor costs could be saved alongside increased customer satisfaction.
6. Recognize the social impact on business outcomes
Brands that can't keep up with the proliferation of data and communication channels risk being left behind or rendered obsolete as others undergo digital transformation. So, 2019 will see businesses increasingly focus on customer experience in their social media strategies, with over 75 perent of social business strategists rating it as their number one priority.
Gone are the days of measuring social media success in terms of just ‘Likes' and ‘Shares' — organizations are focusing on how social initiatives impact their bottom line and key metrics like brand perception. Social networks influence 74 percent of consumer buying decisions, while 75 percent of B2B buyers are influenced by information found on social channels, 55 percent of customers have a more favorable view of brands that respond to questions, praise, or complaints surfaced through social media, and 62% of top salespeople attribute closing more deals to leveraging social technology.
7. Use technologies that support holistic CX
Conversations and data need to be interlinked (and not lost) which, hugely enhances customer understanding, satisfaction and value. Internally, this helps customer service and marketing teams to work in tandem, producing a better digital experience for the customer by breaking down internal silos in favor of a more joined-up approach.
8. Build an emotive CX strategy
Our recent research study showed that 86 percent of large EU brands regard emotion as highly important to online CX. The research also revealed key emotional triggers that create positive customer emotions and powerful online customer experiences include having confidence in a brand (67 percent); simple, stress-free interactions (57 percent); and feeling safe and secure (52 percent). Respondents also highlighted key benefits in creating positive customer emotions — with 63 percent recognizing high customer satisfaction, 61 percent customer loyalty and retention, and 53 percent building strong relationships as core benefits. Harvard Business Review 2018 stated that 95 percent of purchase-making decisions are made subconsciously, so keeping customers happy is essential to any bottom line.
9. Empower your business with the right social data
Resolving an issue as quickly and easily as possible is of a far higher priority to customers than resolving the issue via their channel of choice. Web chat has grown significantly but organizations are using social media to better connect with their customers, listening to what customers are saying, engaging with them, and leveraging broad social data sets to gain insights that can be used to support customers. Social is a great way to keep the pulse of what your customers are saying.
When customers are using all social channels to communicate with any organization, employees must have the ability to respond using those same channels. Almost every person in any organization can benefit from the rich data available from social media.
Social data includes understanding what topics are popular among customer conversations about the brand, studying competitors, gleaning insights about feature requests and customer frustrations, or taking a quick pulse check to see if other customers are encountering similar issues to the one they're working on. The right social data helps employees do their jobs better.
10. Measure social value in terms of real return
Social media presents some measurement challenges, and it's difficult for most businesses to establish precisely the ROI of various social media efforts. In fact, many ignore the tough challenge of measuring their efforts in terms of business value in favor of focusing on vanity metrics: likes, comments, shares, retweets, and posts. Encouragingly, global leaders are starting to measure social results in terms of real return, using it to answer questions like: "Are we increasing customer satisfaction?" "Are we increasing revenue?" "Have we improved customer retention?" Gartner points out that over 80 percent of their clients use vanity metrics to determine social success, when they should be focused on measuring the true business value derived from their social strategies.
A retailer's website, app or social media accounts all have the ability to leave a lasting impression on a customer, and whether that impression is good or bad depends on a lot of factors. Understanding how and why your users interact with your digital asset is key to providing a greater experience. Using data to help customers navigate to information in as few clicks as possible, analyzing heat maps to see the most used areas of your app, or scrutinizing social media data to understand which advert to serve to your customers and when, are all useful and relevant applications that will improve user experience today, and in the future.
