Delivering an exceptional online user experience is a challenge faced by all retailers.
In traditional “bricks and mortar retail” sales professionals engage “face-to-face” with customers. They have the benefit of deriving insight into a customer’s immediate feelings towards the engagement through conversation, body language and other observed behaviours. There is an element of personal touch, serving the customer as a unique individual and fulfilling their desire to be rewarded for their investment in your brand.
This face-to-face engagement allows for the application of different techniques by the salesperson in order to gently guide the customer down a predefined process, overcoming objections and delivering what the customer feels is an exceptional and unique experience.
Unfortunately this face-to-face engagement (and associated insight into a buyers thoughts) is not as easy in online environments. Instead, retailers must focus on “ease of engagement” to influence the buyer’s behaviour and deliver a gratifying experience.
There are many aspects to consider when dealing with online user experience.
- How easy is it for the buyer to find what they were looking for?
- Is the content being presented relevant to the buyer?
- Is the buyer’s journey intuitive or do they feel like they are being forced down a particular path?
- Can they interact with your brand in the way they want to?
- How much of their time is required to complete the buying process?
All of these things can be simply encapsulated in the following statement:
Does the buyer feel they are receiving equal or better value for the effort (investment) they are making to engage with your brand?
There are many technologies available to assist in creation of tailored personal online engagement to deliver simplified experience for the buyer. These include sophisticated site search engines that help the buyer find what they are looking for, relevant content presentation based on previous transactional and browsing history that can suggest products of interest and advanced re-marketing technologies.
Whilst these are all valid (and necessary) techniques used to deliver exceptional customer experience, another obvious yet often overlooked technique is to simply reduce the effort required by customers when engaging with your brand. Something as simple as adding recurring order capability or multiple shipping preferences to your site can greatly enhance a customer’s experience with your brand.
Another technique that is proven to lessen the effort required by customers to engage with your brand and site is to implement predictive data capture technologies. These technologies greatly minimise the number of keystrokes required in order to enter required information (by as much as 85%). Quality predictive capture technologies will have the ability to assist in the entry of various types of information, including names, addresses and emails.
In addition to minimising the keystrokes leading predictive entry technologies there are some, such DataTools Kleber that also have ability to validate the information provided in real-time and append addition information that can be used to further tailor the user experience.
When talking about User Experience it is easy to get caught up in the technology and process, however the reality is that the User Experience is more about the customer and their perceived Return on Investment (ROI) with your brand than the site and technology used.
Quite simply, if a customer’s engagement with your site gets to a point where they feel they have given enough in terms of time and effort before being rewarded with their coveted prize, no amount of costly analysis, insight or technological wizardry will change their experience.
Exceptional User experience is about reducing the effort required to engage with your brand. Minimise the arduous tasks of data entry for your customer and improve both the Customer ROI and your own.
You’ll quickly find that an improved User Experience is just the tip of the iceberg.
