Customer experience struggle… resolved!
Have you bought anything online this month? You most likely have, about 75% of all online shoppers do buy online at least once per month (1). Perhaps, you made several purchases because of a special occasion, a birthday, new home or just because… If you live in the United States your purchases will be part of a $500+ billion revenue (2) stream estimated for 2022 (2), in Europe this is a similar amount just tipping over the $500 billion mark.
The growth in the numbers of purchases online and the associated revenue noted previously has been influenced by several factors such as consumer flexibility, their mobility, availability (smartphone, tablets, …) and of course product visibility. However, this growth also relies upon a great consumer experience. We all know if the experience isn’t good, they may not buy at all, go elsewhere and certainly not recommend the site to friends, colleagues, or family. In fact, customers who have a bad experience are twice to three times more likely to write an angry review than customers who had a great experience are to post a happy review.
Poor customer experience or a struggle to achieve a successful outcome when shopping online is a risk online retailers can’t take. With the advent of the online retailers growing and the voice of the customer through social media, deep behavioural insight into the online journey and experience is a necessity.
HCL Unica Discover is a solution that allows companies to:
- Understand and give insight to the customer’s journey
- Identify and quickly resolve a customer’s struggle
- Highlight and pre-empt customer experience challenges
Why do customers struggle?
There is no single answer to this, but we do know that it leads to frustration, lost revenue and of course the on-going impact through social media of a company’s brand.
Struggles can be categorised by their impact:
| Direct | Error messages because of incomplete or missing data; links or navigation not working as expected; promo codes not being accepted; payment issues …
These all lead to a direct impact on revenue. |
| Indirect | Application timeouts not aligned, too short; poorly designed user experience (UX) leaving the customer bewildered or unsure as to the next steps; not fully tested on a range of mobile devices …
These all may lead to an impact on revenue, however loyal customer may persevere. |
There is a third category however where customers can encounter struggle which does not impact their ability to complete a purchase or a task but will make them think twice before revisiting or recommending due to the frustration encountered during that process.
Regardless of the struggle type, the higher customer demand will equal a greater imperative to convert every single visit. Customer struggle must be minimised and any company reaction to a customer struggle swift and decisive.
What struggle?? What can I do about it?
Using HCL Unica Discover companies can capture the full individual customer journey and analyse the data to identify the key pain points to conversion (whatever that may mean for your business).
| IDENTIFY | With session & network data at your fingertips identify consumer behavioural patterns which point to struggle, that may be multiple errors in a session; repeat page views; repeat form field entries; click thrashing (bashing that mouse button) or application timeouts. |
| MONITOR & ALERT | Click, drag, reporting to monitor and track any changes in behavioural patterns. Setup alerts and thresholds so department or team can be alerted to any peaks or troughs in the data collected that may be the result of a system going down manifesting as increased error messages or page visits as customers are unable to proceed with an online application. |
| SEARCH & REPLAY | Dive into the behavioural pattern data at a customer session level, utilising Unica Discovers Search and Replay functionality.
Replay allows customers to look at consumer sessions and delve into what the customer experienced along their online web journey. While in Replay, utilise heatmap, form field overlays and attention maps to get a broader picture at the point of struggle, see if other customers struggled in the same way, perhaps due to a poorly positioned button or field. |
| EVENT & INTEGRATE | Identify both individual and multi-user struggles by taking advantage of the data export functionality or the built-in integrations with the likes of Unica Journey to exchange data.
With powerful eventing (without coding!) look for pain points or customer struggle patterns, exchange their data from Unica Discover in near real-time to other marketing solutions enabling retargeting. |
When it comes to customer experience, ignorance is not bliss!
Want to tap into the power of HCL Unica Discover to gain deep insight to your consumers experience online? Understand the WHY and WHAT of your consumers struggle?
“Thanks to Gary Clewes for the inspiration for this post.”
