How to build an ecommerce customer experience that keeps shoppers coming back

Did you know that only 3% of companies are considered customer obsessed? And 54% of consumers say brands treat customer service as an afterthought. For ecommerce brands this can be an even bigger challenge. How do you convey great customer service when a shopper doesn’t typically come in contact with anyone in a transaction?

Customer service doesn’t only shine through an interaction between two people — or one person and a bot — and it can start long before an issue even arises. If you’re wondering how to improve your ecommerce customer experience, here are five changes you can make today to mold your site into a brand consumers love to keep shopping with.

Incentivizing your customers to create an account is one of the best ways to personalize their ecommerce customer experience. And personalizing their customer journey — with proper opt-ins and consent — can really improve their shopping experience with you. You can send them discounts on their birthdays or when you haven’t seen them in a while. Using previous purchase data, you can make them offers that are more tailored to their tastes and show them products that they’re actually going to be interested in buying. You can even set up dynamic on-site product recommendations or checkout page recommendations based on their purchase behavior to help ensure that any nudges you make are actually helpful for them and feel less annoying.

In a world dominated by Amazon Prime, free and fast shipping is an excellent way to make your customers love shopping with you. After all, they’re often used to those perks because of Amazon. No one likes to wait for a purchase to arrive. The next time a shopper needs their purchase in a time crunch, they’ll remember how quickly their order with you arrived. By offering fast and free shipping you’re keeping them happy and eliminating one of the main reasons they may choose Amazon over your brand in the first place. 

Eliminating that factor lets you keep their focus on the things you’re able to do better than Amazon could — a more personal relationship, more unique products, and more personalized customer service. And fast and free shipping doesn’t just keep them happy, it also reduces your cart abandonment rate and increases sales. It can seem like an expensive perk to offer on the surface but the benefits outweigh the negatives for most e-commerce stores. 

Making it easy for customers to get a hold of you can be scary. Typically the ones that want to reach you the most are the ones who are frustrated. But making it difficult for them to get a hold of you is only going to make them angrier. And louder. They’ll always find a way to share their feedback and if they can’t get a hold of you, they’ll leave it all over the internet for everyone to find it.

Add a chatbot and customer service chat to your site so they can get a hold of you in just a few clicks. Whether it’s for help during their purchase process or resolving an issue they had with a previous purchase, getting to the bottom of it more quickly helps them feel happier with your brand and keeps them coming back in the future. 

Public customer feedback can feel scary as well. Not all of them are going to have something nice to say. But being proactive in soliciting their feedback helps them feel heard and helps you get the good feedback as well, instead of just the bad. It also helps you open a dialogue with customers in one place, giving you the chance to respond publicly and deliver excellent customer service when something has gone wrong. This is something future customers will notice when they’re looking into your online reputation. 

Resolving a negative review doesn’t just end when you’ve made that individual customer happy. Look at the trends in your customer reviews and make adjustments to your products and service around any negative trends. If customers are consistently leaving you bad reviews around one specific area, they’re telling you exactly where you can see immediate improvements in your ecommerce customer experience by making some improvements.

And your good reviews don’t just exist to make you feel good either. These reviews are a goldmine for your business. Leveraging your positive reviews throughout your customer journey helps your customers understand which areas you excel at so that they can understand if that’s a match for them. Some customers care more about quality, some care about shipping or price. The more you’re including your customer reviews, the better they’re able to evaluate whether or not you’re a good fit for them, based on what matters to them most.

When you think about it, the majority of unhappy ecommerce shopping experiences are made after the checkout is complete. Late shipping, quality issues once a shipment arrives, receiving the wrong product, or a poor refunds policy or process are all very common reasons for shoppers to be unhappy with an ecommerce business. 

Improving your post-purchase period will help minimize the damage when something does go wrong with an order and encourage that customer to return and shop with you again. If nothing else, it will at least reduce the chance that they leave a nasty review and tell all of their friends how much they hate your store. 

The biggest thing you can do here is to make your return process as quick and easy as possible. It should be free for them as well. And following up with a reward or referral program, or return discount is another great way to say thank you for their business and encourage them to return and shop with you again. Post-purchase experience is all about doing everything you can to thank them for shopping with you and incentivizing them to shop with you again soon.

To learn more about how to improve your ecommerce customer experience by leveraging your customer feedback, check out our Happy Linen case study. To find out how your company can make the most of Trustpilot reviews get in touch with us below.