One of the key goals of an e-commerce website is to provide topmost customer experience to every user. It is a broad term, which is associated with every single interaction that a user has with your brand. The whole relationship starts with the awareness of your brand culminating into purchases and feedback. When it comes to boosting sales and conversion for your e-commerce website, the user experience is prima facie to the success. By enhancing the user experience, e-commerce owners can add value to their websites which improve conversions and sales.
The customer experience is crucial for building the right customer perception of your business. It influences the users’ perception about your brand and can also help build trust among your customers. If your users are not able to find the items or options they are looking for on your site, it turns out to be a poor customer experience which could spoil your image. Plus, if they struggle to get to you through email, call or chat, it adds fuel to the fire. Choose the right e-commerce development company to build a website that offers optimum customer experience.
When you are providing the best customer experience to all your patrons and they are happy with your services, you must encourage them to provide feedback. Positive feedback and appreciations from customers are helpful for building trust and confidence among new users. Plus, they enhance the overall user experience by making a seal of trust.
How is customer feedback helpful for improving user experience?
Due to globalization, every business has extended their reach to masses which led to the creation of all-inclusive websites which fulfill the expectations of all the users. It might be difficult for businesses to provide optimum experience to all the customers as their tastes and preferences vary. The users’ feedback provide great opportunity to ascertain customers’ expectations and work around their preferences to improve the overall customer experience for your online business.
There is no one who knows better than a customer about what appeals them. Through feedback, they get a chance to express their thoughts and feelings about your brand or service as well as give suggestions wherever required. Customers’ feedback are very useful for all types of businesses to formulate a better user experience strategy.
Different types of customer feedback
As we have described above, customer feedback plays an important role for improving customer experience. But, what are the sources where customer feedback come from? There are multiple sources of the feedback which can be categorized in three major types, viz. Observed, Given and Requested. They are explained below.
Observed
Under this, information is received based on the scrutiny being done for different scenarios. You can collect information through observation of the customers. This includes the information regarding how customers interact with your brand, what path they follow and what documents they read, etc might be under this category.
Given
It is a self-motivated feedback. You don’t encourage customers to send feedback, they proactively do this. This category includes different aspects like support tickets they create and more. It also includes methods like phone calls, social media messages, and live chat conversations.
Requested
Under this category, you receive information after you take initiative to contact your customers. By contacting them, you aim to get their feedback and suggestions about your products or services. You can also ask them about what improvements can be made in the communication methods. Your enquiry might include:
- Responses for in-app messages or email newsletters.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
- Response for customer satisfaction rating.
These are the broad categories that the types of feedback can be divided into. Feedback is useful for capturing new customers, nurturing exiting customers, and promoting repeated sales. It also encourages customers to advocate your brand to their friends and acquaintances. And, this provides a free of cost promotion for your brand.
How to use customer feedback to improve customer experience?
The reviews and feedback that you receive from your customers matter a lot as they give you an idea of possible improvements in your services. They enable businesses to add information into their product data sheet which isn’t already available.
Through feedback and reviews, you can collect information about your customers’ expectations and find answers to questions that help you reassure the quality of your products or services. You must promote your customers to leave reviews and feedback about your services. Following are the processes that you can apply to feedback to improve the customer experience.
Step 1: Collect customer feedback
Many of your customers will provide feedback by their own, but a large number of customers either withhold the criticism or never return to your online store. Therefore, you need to encourage your customers to provide feedback so that you can use this information to improve customer experience. There are many ways to obtain the information some of them are as follows:
Reviews
Reviews are useful to get an in-depth view of what customers feel about your brand. However, you cannot reach a conclusion with a single review, you need to go through the most reviews to get into the right direction. You can also analyze reviews of other online stores to find out the shortfalls, which you can improve in your own store.
Surveys
Surveys are great source of collecting information for three reasons:
- You can obtain information right from the real source.
- You get opportunity to tailor questions to get accurate answers.
- You can include “Why?” questions.
The best time for sending surveys to customers is when they made purchases and they receive products.
Public conversations
There are a lot of platforms, where customers can express their opinions like review sites, social networking websites, discussion boards, forums, etc. They are useful to obtain raw and unbiased information. You can utilize social media tracking tools to find mentions of your brand.
Analytics tools
Analytics tools help you obtain a lot of crucial information that you can utilize for improving your site. With this, you can analyze how people respond to pages, images, language, offers, etc on your website. It allows you to analyze how customers make decisions on your site.
Step 2: Set preferences for changes
If you utilize all the above four sources of feedback, then you will end up with a lot of information and problems. You might be thinking to address all, but it’s not possible with limited time and resources. To cope with this efficiently, firstly you need to turn feedback into actions that you can take and secondly, you need to prioritize the actions accordingly.
You can adopt ICE strategy to achieve this goal, which stands for Impact, Confidence and Ease. In this strategy, you have to a give a number between 1-10 to each potential change as follows:
- Impact: determine how impacting will it be to implement the change. Here, 10 will be for the most impactful.
- Confidence: set it to determine how confident you are about the change if it will solve the problem. Here, 10 means fully confident.
- Ease: it shows how easy it is to implement the change. Here, 10 will denote completely easy.
You can try to be as subjective as possible when answering these questions. Finally, you need to add all the scores to get a total ICE score, then you can arrange every potential change according to the score. The highest scorer change will be your focus.
Over time, you will collect more feedback and score every new potential change when they come into light. You will also end up accumulating low ICE score changes at the bottom in your list of changes which might sit there for long time. Don’t remove them as even a small change is important. However, your main focus will be on high scoring changes, which will create more value.
Step 3: Implement the changes
After prioritizing potential changes, the next step is to implement those changes beginning with the ones that have higher scores. Before implementing any change, you must first evaluate its impact by measuring it before and after. For example, if you think that by making your return policy more generous, you can improve the customer experience. So, you should first start by surveying about your current return policy. Then after implementing the change survey it again after some time to learn the new feeling of customers about the new policy.
By evaluating the change before and after, you can ascertain whether the change brings any real impact or not. You can also utilize this information to rescore any potential change to make future improvements in your evaluation. You can also test other changes in real time with split testing or A/B testing. Under this test, you build several variants of a website element which are visible to a proportion of your user traffic and allows to quickly evaluate if a change is effective.
You can test different elements that affect user behavior with A/B testing such as:
- Body copy.
- Heading and subheadings.
- Color and images.
- Navigation and site structure.
- Reviews, testimonials and social proof.
- Call to action buttons and copy.
There are different tools like Google Analytics Experiments to start A/B testing.
Conclusion
There are tons of factors that contribute to the success of your e-commerce website and better customer experience is not an exception. In fact, it is one of the most crucial elements of a good e-commerce website. The better the customer experience your site entails the more conversion you are likely to earn. The importance of it can be understood by considering an e-commerce website with poor customer experience. Many customers not even want to visit such website as it might have confusing navigation, poor website structure, fuzzy elements and more.
An e-commerce website that has clean and well-structured design is preferred by all customers as it offers higher customer experience. You should choose the right e-commerce development company to make sure to build a topmost website for your business. You can provide optimum level of satisfaction to the customers through enhanced customer experience as your customers get hassle-free way to buy products and services.
Customer feedback can be useful to give you an insight on what changes you can make to improve your e-commerce website. Hence, you should utilize the feedback to collect important information from customers to determine what is lacking in your ecommerce website that you can improve on. You can then hire the best ecommerce website development company to create a topmost online store for your business.
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Author Bio
Emily White is associated with CSSChopper, a web design, development and ecommerce development company delivering high-end solutions to customers around the world. She is a senior developer at CSSChopper. Emily loves to develop quality web solutions for clients and also likes writing quality content for her audience in her free time. She enjoys coding as well as writing. She wants to spread knowledge through her well-researched articles and blogs that she writes from her area of interest.
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