E-COMMERCE
Every customer who visits an online store has his or her own story. In addition, they often have previous experience with online stores and, of course, individual needs. As an online store owner, it is your job to identify and meet these needs to create a positive customer experience. How else will your customers associate positive experiences with your store?
Customer experience, trust, positive experience; are these just more buzzwords? No; not one of them in particular. Customer experience analysis can help you identify the needs and challenges of your customers and take targeted action to improve the customer experience.
In this article, we will take a closer look at how customer experience can be represented and, more importantly, measured.
What are customer experience, customer journey, and touch points?
Imagine you come across an online store through an advertising campaign. You don't know exactly what you're looking for, but you have a general idea of what you need. You browse through the different categories and look at the products until you find one that interests you. You click on the product, read the description, check the reviews, and decide to buy it. From the shopping cart, it's on to checkout, and just 48 hours later, you receive the product, unpack it, and are thrilled. What happened? You've completed a customer journey, and the customer experience was positive - so positive, in fact, that you're likely to buy from the store again after you've made your purchase decision.
The customer journey describes the path a potential customer takes from the first point of contact with your brand to the last. The customer experience, on the other hand, describes the experience the customer has at each step. There are many touchpoints along the customer journey, and the experience at each point ultimately determines whether a purchase decision is made.
A good customer experience helps you increase customer satisfaction and build long-term relationships. This has a positive impact on customer loyalty and therefore on your revenue. At the same time, a detailed CX analysis can reduce your operating costs. How? By responding more effectively to your customers' needs and reducing acquisition costs.
How to optimize the customer journey
A prerequisite for any optimization is measurability. To measure, two things must be clear from the start: "What to measure?" and "Where to measure?"
The "where" is determined by the touchpoints along the customer journey. Which variables are measured depends on the touchpoint. We will come back to this later. Overall, optimizing the customer journey is a 3-step process:
- Step 1: Visualize the customer journey
- Step 2: Define the touchpoints
- Step 3: Analyze the customer experience at the respective touchpoints
There are several ways to visualize the customer journey. Flowcharts or timelines are ideal for illustrating the steps a customer goes through when visiting your online store. They reflect the logical sequence of when and where a customer interacts with your brand.
Where does the customer experience start?
The first touchpoint is often referred to as the website entry point. In reality, however, the first touchpoint is usually found beforehand and can be an online advertising campaign, a radio spot, or a customer review on a third-party portal.
The customer experience begins where a potential customer first touches your brand.
Possible touchpoints along an ecommerce customer journey:
- Social media advertisement
- Click on the advertisement
- Reaching the online store landing page
- Browse the product selection on the website
- Reading product descriptions and customer reviews
- Selection of the desired product
- Click on "Add to cart" or "Buy now"
- Forwarding to checkout
- Filling in the necessary information for the order, such as name, address, email, phone number, payment method, etc.
- Order confirmation by the customer
- Receive confirmation email from the company
- Shipping confirmation by email when the product is shipped
- Delivery of the product by courier service
- Opening the package and checking the product
- Use of the product
- Evaluation of the product and feedback to the company
For visualization purposes, the next step is to draw, for example, a timeline over which the individual touchpoints are plotted. The next step is to analyze your customer's experience along this "path".
Customer experience analysis
While the touchpoints are plotted above the timeline, the customer's experiences and emotions can be plotted directly below at the touchpoint level. The result is a visualization of the customer experience. But how do you get to the values that tell you more about the customer experience? How do you make customer experience measurable?
In fact, optimizing the customer journey works even better online than offline because it can be measured in much greater detail.
What data do you have?
For analysis, it is necessary to define at least one metric for each touchpoint. While this is obvious, it should also be mentioned that you can and are allowed to actually collect this metric. This is where privacy, cookies, and the use of third-party tools can present various challenges. Once these hurdles are overcome, what data is meaningful for your customer experience analysis? It depends on the touchpoint, as the following examples illustrate.
For online advertising campaigns
Anyone who uses social media for advertising campaigns is probably familiar with the metric of CTR. The click-through rate (CTR) is a percentage that indicates how many of those who saw an ad campaign actually clicked on it. It is an ideal metric for comparing multiple campaigns or testing different audiences.
For website usage
In the online store itself, metrics such as time on site, bounce rate, or the number of clicks required to go from entry to purchase are more meaningful. Conversion rate is also a powerful metric that tells you the percentage of users on your site that actually reach a specific goal that you have defined as a conversion. This can be an order, a payment, or even a customer inquiry.
For offline touchpoints
Measuring customer experience for offline touchpoints can be difficult. Existing studies and survey data can often be used here. What delivery time is satisfactory for customers? How many customers respond when asked to rate their order?
The goal is to define a measurable baseline for all your touchpoints. In addition to these mostly automated data collections, you can also gather additional information from users and customers through user testing or surveys, which you can incorporate into the customer experience analysis to get as complete a picture as possible. Once your customer experience analysis is complete, it will help you to better understand your customers and their needs, and to better respond to them.
The customer experience - the basis for strong customer loyalty
Analyzing the customer experience is not only important for gaining insight into the potential for optimization along the customer journey. The insights it provides also have a direct impact on customer loyalty. If you can deliver a consistently positive experience across touchpoints, repeat purchases and customer loyalty are the direct result. Reason enough to start analyzing the customer experience right away.
