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Key Factors Driving the Customer Experience in Digital Commerce

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Jane Brewer

In order to keep the pace up with consumers of tomorrow, eCommerce merchants have to build up their digital commerce and marketing playbooks. It is of critical importance that they reevaluate their current technologies and online strategies in order to step up their online game.

In order to drive sales and be more productive online, retailers need to be proactive. They need to 

  1. The critical importance of research

Before you create a website, it is important to understand who you are designing it for and why. The tasks that you are helping them to complete or issues which you are solving for them needs to be laid down first. The first step here is to create personas that help you empathize with your customers and better understand their context and behaviors. Buyer personas are a type of hypothesis regarding what we as business owners think our customers are like.

The next step is to dedicate some time in ‘walking in the customer’s shoes’, observe and talk with them in their natural environment which will help you identify how, why and what they buy. This is the most important step many business owners overlook. 

You can call it a customer-centric experience only if you involve the customers in the design process. One should focus on tracking down their customers’ unfulfilled needs and pain points. This becomes the initial spark that kickstarts your journey towards innovation.

Most of the times it is easy to understand what your customers because they follow a predictable buying pattern but across many touchpoints. Whenever they visit your website, it doesn’t mean that they are ready to buy: they may still be researching options. It is when they add items to the cart, then you know they are interested and as soon as they reach the checkout, it justifies that they are serious about purchasing the item or service. As a business owner, you should understand how each step can work seamlessly to attract and convert your customers.

  1. Try to create an ideal experience

Focus on utilizing the insights from your research in order to construct an ideal end-state journey for your customers. One should not be afraid to be bold, futuristic, and aspirational. However, you should also be ready to prioritize these major components of the journey according to feasibility, financial viability, and customer attractiveness. 

The overall journey of the customer gives insight and direction ensuring that customers’ goals become your goals. Knowing what your competitors are doing is a healthy thing, but one should not obsess about what the competition is doing and simply copy everything feature by feature. 

 

The customer journey on their website is different. When you completely focus on your customers, you will come to know what they want and will be able to deliver the experience that is best suited to them.

  1. Make the experience human-like

When you are developing and designing for digital channels, you should think about how you can encapsulate the exact emotions and excitement that customers experience shopping in-store. One can always rely on ready-made templates, it’s easy to do so, however, it is imperative that you always keep your customers in mind.

Keep asking, how the customers would react to a particular feature or this experience? It is always people and brand customers look up to, not the websites or apps.

If you want to create a personalized experience, data is the foundation of it. More and more customers now want to be treated as individuals and not like a crowd. Your customers expect brands to remember them, know what they like, what they don’t like and to reward them for their loyalty. Focus on creating a holistic experience for your customers.

  1. Entail customers in the design and development process

During the development process, ensure that you build prototypes and iteratively validate the experience and design with customers before committing to code. This becomes relatively easy if you take help from a reputed WordPress or Magento development company who can take care of this aspect. With this, you make sure that when the launch is set, you may have designed something that customers actually want.

Conclusion

In the online retail industry, one should be mindful of how future technology could improve experiences. This could include anything with the likes of automating or mitigating manual or tedious tasks. Do not forget that, technology is simply an enabler. Online shopping is and will always very much remain a human experience. Delighting your customers should be your end goal.

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Jane Brewer
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