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Why the Customer Experience is Most Important

By Eric Leuenberger Leave a Comment

Many online business owners focus solely on technology and design when building their websites and forget about the most important element: what the customer expects!

Most online business owners simply add some content, launch the website and then wonder why they don’t have customers.

To really make an impact and influence customers, businesses must move beyond a seller’s perspective. Generating business value happens by creating a customer experience driven from the buyer’s perspective.

Website Usability

Usability guides the placement and direction of content within the design and technology. The goal is convenience for the visitor’s interaction. Powerful usability enables a frictionless customer experience where intuition versus thinking drives the visitor’s movements.

A well-designed website that has high usability includes intuitive and instructive navigation, clear call-to-actions, articulate value propositions, credibility-building communications and a convenient order process.

Customer Influence

Influence is where the seller guides the buyer down a deliberate sales process. A usable website generates average sales; an influential and usable website can skyrocket sales. An influential website is like a consultative sales person providing information, helping to evaluate alternatives, adding reassurances, feeding the emotional appeal, and skillfully pulling the visitor towards the purchase not always “now” but assuredly at a point in the future.

Influence includes personalization, suggestive selling, relevancy, trust, assurance, sincerity, helpfulness.

Influence is not manipulation. It is not the stereotypical used car salesperson tactics of cheap talk and deceptive ploys. Powerful influence is about intimately understanding the visitor’s needs to provide them the right information at the right time. It moves them clearly and easily through their buying process.

Usability and influence are buyer-driven because what is usable and what influences a purchasing decision is entirely controlled by the buyer. And just like you can’t manage what you don’t measure; you also can’t influence what you don’t understand – the visitor’s intent.

Website Design

Design is the façade around the technology. It adds curb appeal to the website and directs the visitor’s eye towards a desired path. Great design directs a visitor’s actions through the effective use of colors, graphics and lines.

The design is initially recognized by the visitor in forming their first impressions about your ecommerce business. Design is like a person’s clothes or dress style; it doesn’t provide substance, but it forms our willingness to interact, to commit time and to frame the possibility of fulfillment.

And like people’s clothing style, we naturally associate stereotypes to a design to speed our decision process.

Whether fairly perceived or not, design plays a crucial role in setting expectations. With the average visitor spending 10 seconds or less determining our website’s relevancy with their goals, our designs either connect or expel them.

Ultimately design plays a supporting role to usability. Great design drives great usability.

Technology

Technology is a website’s foundation that must work seamlessly supporting the customer experience. Visitors shouldn’t notice the technology and typically only do when it is broken.

Technology is like a car’s engine; most drivers don’t know or care how it works, it’s just a vehicle to get them from point A to point B. But it quickly grows frustrating when it slows down, breaks down or falls apart.

Remember, in developing and evolving your online business – put the customer’s perspective first.

Filed Under: Conversion, Design & Usability Tagged With: ecommerce business, ecommerce help, ecommerce tips, online business, online business usability

5 MORE Proven Methods to Decrease Your Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

By Eric Leuenberger Leave a Comment

5 MORE Proven Methods to Decrease Your Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

I’ve already explained that shopping cart abandonment is a problem that all ecommerce sites see to some degree. The rate at which your visitors abandon depends on how effective you have structured the checkout process.

I offered you 5 proven methods to decrease your shopping cart abandonment rate in this article and here are 5 MORE.

Clearly display your security and trust seals. Customers want to ensure the information they submit during an order is secure and protected. Make sure you clearly and plainly tell them that their transaction is secure and show them the seal to prove it. Don’t hide the seal at the bottom of a page or make it hard to find. In fact, tests have shown that adding a security seal within the user eye flow at critical times during checkout can improve conversion.

Offer multiple payment methods including PayPal. Offering multiple payment methods opens up the number of people who will do business with you. Customers like choice and control. Providing them with the choice of multiple payment methods in addition to PayPal will help keep them in the checkout process. In fact, one in three shoppers expect to be able to pay with PayPal or at least be given that option in addition to other methods.

Enable customers to order over the telephone if desired. No matter how perfect a site is, there are going to be customers that prefer to complete their order by phone. Whether they start the checkout process and have a question that needs to be answered or simply don’t feel comfortable providing their personal information over the Internet, you must give them the ability to call you to complete the transaction. Place a customer service phone number in a clearly visible location with the text, “Prefer to order by phone?”

Clearly state return and shipping policies. In survey after survey, shoppers say one of the big reasons they abandon the checkout process is due to the shipping charge or return options. Many sites don’t provide the shipping and return information to the customer until they are in step two or three of the checkout process. If the information they find there does not appeal to them they will leave. You can prevent this by offering them the shipping and return information at the first step of the checkout process or better yet from the page they are viewing their shopping cart from.

Don’t require registration to checkout. This is difficult for some stores to implement because of the architecture their cart is built upon. However, if you have the ability to offer what is often called a “guest checkout” feature you should do so. For privacy reasons, there are a number of people out there who do not want you to save their information and it is those people who will leave unless you provide them with an option to checkout without registering.

Following these and the other five methods for decreasing your shopping cart abandonment rate will not completely eliminate shopping cart abandonment at your site, but it should help in reducing it to a more reasonable level and increase sales.

Filed Under: Conversion, Increase sales Tagged With: ecommerce business, ecommerce help, ecommerce tips, online shopping cart, shopping cart abandonment

Customer Service Gone Wrong

By Eric Leuenberger 1 Comment

Poor Customer ServiceAs if it isn’t already hard enough to generate sales and gain customers in this economic age, here’s a recent experience you must hear to believe.

I recently spoke with a woman who described an experience she had while attempting to shop at an online store. This is the brief account of that day.

She was looking for a particular tropical fish cake pan to use for her son’s upcoming birthday. After searching high and low for the exact one she saw in a picture, she found it at an online store of who’s name I’ll withhold out of respect for them — they’ve got enough bad reviews and terrible internet exposure that adding one more to their mountain of “bad PR” is just a waste of time.

The site did not indicate whether the item was in stock (“no no #1”), and to be certain, she called them to inquire about its availability.

I’ll sum up the shocking conversation that following in a several bullet points rather than going into great detail.

The Conversation

  1. She picks up the phone and calls the store using the phone number provided on the site. You would think this is a good thing — giving customers a way to reach you. After all, answering a question can help close a sale. Think again. A store rep answers the phone and the lady proceeds to ask if they have the fish cake pan in stock that was seen on the website.
  2. The rep replied telling the lady she could drive out to the store and search through the 2 isles of cake pans to see if they had the pan she needed, but was not willing to go look for her.
  3. The store happen to be about 1 hour from where the lady lived, and she told the rep on the phone this.
  4. She asked again (several times) if the rep had a method to search for the pan to see if it was in stock so she could purchase it. The rep began to get agitated.
  5. The rep told the lady that she was not willing to go look through the items in stock and that if the lady wanted the item she should come search for it herself. (Yes, this is what was actually said if you can believe it.)
  6. After back and forth conversation on why she could not look for the item, the rep on the phone said “let me put you on hold”. The potential customer, happen to have a timer on the phone she was using, and after waiting for about 14 minutes on hold finally hung up.
  7. She called the store back 30 minutes later and the same rep answered. The lady asked about the pan again, and said she was waiting on hold for close to 14 minutes so she hung up to which the once again “gruf rep” replied “Oh, I must have forgot about you.”
  8. The lady asked if the rep had found whether the pan was in stock or not. The rep answered “I don’t know, you’ll have to drive out and look for yourself. I fill 200 orders a day from the Internet, and I don’t have time to look for the pan.” (Shocking eh? I thought so.)
  9. She told the rep that if she was not willing to check if the item was in stock or not then she would “take her business elsewhere” to which the now very agitated rep replied “I think that is a good idea. You should take your business elsewhere.” The conversation ended there.

Closing Thoughts

What this store obviously forgot is that there is no substitute for good customer service and satisfying customer needs is what grows a business.

The store’s lack of customer service did not cause them to lose just one customer and one sale — the lack of customer service caused the them to lose any other customers that would have been referred to them if the lady had a better experience when trying to purchase the pan.

Likewise, their actions will have a lasting ripple effect which will prohibit the company from growing, obtaining new customers, and of which will eventually be the downfall of it.

Apparently the store rep thought 200 sales a day was a lot and was not willing to get an extra one (which could lead to many more via word of mouth). Growing a business is not important to them and eventually they will fail.

If that store rep worked for me, I’d fire her. Turns out that “rep” was actually the owner of the store. How’s that for customer service?

Lesson learned.

Filed Under: Customer Retention Tagged With: customer service, ecommerce help

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