How Customer Experience Became Vital to Online Business
Introduction
Customer Experience means the sentiments of customers while buying products from any online business platform. This is said to be one of the most crucial stages of selling online that directly impact your product’s performance. At times, sellers do not care about their customer satisfaction. But this attitude impacts the working of your business worsley. As every business needs to deal with their society, hence neglecting customer ratings can result in a huge loss. It is potentially said that a business can only survive if they have a good image and trust in the society.
Understanding the term “Customer Experience” is a difficult task. All sellers can recognize it through their customer ratings only. Basically, what happens is when a customer places an order through a digital platform, they look upon many components. Likewise, whether the product delivery timing is good or not, whether the site is user friendly, how much is the rating, what quality of products is it, and a lot more. In this, while the order processing takes place, customers want updates regarding the same. At this point, if the seller loses control over effective order processing (miss the deadline of delivery), it gives a wrong impact on the customer.
Customers are rare who fully trust online shopping. And because of this, they start judging the seller on such parameters. Including this, you also need to take care of your SERP position. If you do not know how to make things work on an SEO mechanism, it creates hurdles for you to grab better deals.
Where Does Poor Customer Experience Impact Your Business?
Low Public Rating
Customers who have a satisfactory purchase experience from your brand may not find it necessary to give you good feedback regarding the same. But in contrast to this, people who find bad order fulfillment or low product quality, will immediately bounce on the feedback section to give you one star. These stars significantly lower your rating on public domains. Eventually, your other customers will also lose interest in buying your products. Including this, you must have seen people recommending products or websites to their fellow mates or other customers. This chance of indirect promotion also gets hampered if you have a bad rating. Therefore, focus on what your customers want from you and improve accordingly.
Loss on Long-term Profits
In e-commerce, it is harder to grab potential customers. A customer won’t see your product if you are not capable enough to highlight yourself in the market. Therefore, you need to be always extra in terms of order processing or after services. Since digital platforms have seen drastic competition and hence, made it more difficult in doing USP(Unique Selling Point) flaunts in comparison to other competitions. This is because every seller is using innovative marketing strategies to show that their product and services are best of all. For such matters, what you lose upon is customer engagement. In case you fail to provide good quality product or delivery on time or after services to your customers, there would be a big struggle to find trusted customers and long-term profits.
Low Sale Opportunity
eCommerce sellers must have been known with the fact that this industry has a larger operational scale than an offline business model. Meanwhile, these platforms also take care of customer interest. This has given rise to feedback features. This feature helps other customers to understand whether they can find a good product for themselves or not. If you lack in this segment, you may lack in finding customers too. As it is said, customers play a vital role in growing your business because without them you are nothing. That is why you must improve your performance online to be a more credible and chosen seller for any eCommerce platform.
Lack in Competition
eCommerce is highly dynamic in nature and has a competitive behavior. If a seller ignores aspects of effective order fulfillment, product quality, SERP ranking, etc then they may fall behind in the competition. Because the eCommerce marketplace has more sellers who can offer their customers better deals, you will have no attention at all. For such circumstances, you need to be effective and efficient enough in comparison to your competitions so that you do not find hardships in selling your products or going overstocked.
How Can You Improve Your Customer Experience?
Mobile-Friendly Sites
Being an eCommerce seller, you need to be wise enough while choosing your platforms that can be more suitable for your products. For instance, if you are dealing in clothes or cosmetics, your target customer would be people who are more likely to use social media or mobile apps. This would grab their attention easily because you are on the same page with them. Including this, those sites need to be effective enough that give quick product suggestions to enhance customer visits. If you have your product on such platforms which are not available on mobile may grab less customer attention than on mobile responsive channels.
Flexible Ways of Customer Support
In case your customer wants to reach out to you, you need to be available for them always. For this purpose, customers may find ways to contact you. You may provide an email, customer care number, Live Chat options, etc. This will enhance your customer experience as they would easily be able to not just contact you but also find solutions for their issues. These matters of facts are normal but crucial because not every seller offers this flexibility. Having said that, you may also require a good team to assist them as well.
Social Media Presence
It would be more impactful if you create social media handles for your customers. Nowadays, customers are more often available on social media rather than online platforms. For this, it would be great to extract attention and expose your best-selling products on social media too. This increases the chance of sales as well. For example, if a customer does not want to buy anything, still your attractive products may appeal to them to make a purchase. These unplanned buyers gradually turn out to be your long-term customers. Also, you can have more than one source for your earnings.
Omnichannel Availability
Start establishing your business setup for not just one but multiple eCommerce channels where one customer can find your product anywhere in the marketplace. This is a scope to increase high sales opportunities. It may be possible that if a customer finds your product on Flipkart at a cheaper rate than Amazon, they may buy that product on Flipkart. Eventually, you will not lose on any type of customer and enjoy your higher scale of operation.
What Benefits Would You Get Through Good Customer Experience?
Better Brand Reviews
Improving Customer Experience would help in getting better reviews on public platforms like quora, pinterest, and other eCommerce websites. It is natural that when you satisfy your customers, they will love to suggest your products to others as well. Or, if someone searches for your reviews, your existing customers will also say a “yes” for making a purchase to them. Reviews and ratings are significant because they directly influence new customers regarding your product goodness and hence, contribute to your growth. Improving this component of marketing will always give you good return in terms of long-term interest of customers and profits.
Better Goodwill
As you know, the Indian market has a keen interest in copying other customers and would like to buy products from the place their neighbours have bought. From a business point of view, you may change this into an advantage to increase your customer base. Lets say, if someone flaunts about buying an iPhone because it has the best for camera and security purposes. You would not think twice for buying such products that have sold their USP in a larger and credible perspective. Similarly, you also get an advantage of high goodwill power about your USP if you are capable enough to showcase your uniqueness. And for this you need to appeal to people to buy your product. And this appeal and your selling point highly depends on your customer experience. Therefore, next time make sure you leave your customer with a better sentiment that can not be found anywhere else.
Encourage Indirect Promotion/Unpaid Promotion
Think yourself as a customer and analyze that when you have an excellent feeling buying a product from somewhere, you decide to buy from them again and again. Not only this, you also keep suggesting your loved ones about it to help them get their best deal. In the same way, improving customer experience also helps you to promote your product to such customers who are not even looking to buy products from you. Brands like mamaearth, nykaa, and boutiques do not require an introduction from the sellers, why? Because they have adopted indirect promotions by enhancing their customer experience. Likewise, you are also going to enjoy deals with no investment on them.
Higher Selling Graph
When you look after enhancing the business segments where you can increase your selling ability, you end up with a good profit report. It is said that better services are an assurance that the outcome would be fruitful. Hence, if you not just focus on advertising, procurement, large-scale operation, but also on what your customers are expecting from you. This will keep you ahead of all in the market. Including this, you will be able to build trust and confidence of your customers who would buy your products and show their long-term interest. Because every business works for gaining higher profit, you must not overlook the interconnected aspects of your business such as your customer’s sentiments.
Conclusion
Customer Experience has a big impact on putting things on board for better performance and enhanced visibility. If you have problems in terms of product quality, or after services, or order management, then you need to fulfill all these gaps. Having said that, customers also judge you on the tools that you choose to perform business activities that may affect your deadline achievements such as order fulfillment, invoice creation, updates on order, etc. Therefore, if you choose to make a good profit in e-commerce platforms do not miss on any such aspect that can stop or hamper your growth. Remember, customer satisfaction is the prior thing you are working for.
In addition, there are some software tools that work to enhance your business efficiency to get you powerful customer support. These tools are nothing but an artificial intelligence that works for creating a professional level of order processing, autopricing, product performance, reports on data analytics that gives you an idea about the scope you need to work. Want to know more, tap here for a new gateway for your business success through automation solutions.
