When you’re running a business, you’re keen to leave your customers with a smile on their faces. Of course, it’s great to make the world a happier place through your enterprise – but there’s also the incentive to make customers happy, so that they return to your company, and they talk about your firm to friends. As such, maintaining good customer journeys is an important part of your business’ objectives – and, for online companies, this is one of your fundamental challenges. Here’s how you’ll face that challenge in 2021.
Exploring Your Website
Hundreds of people explore your website every week. They look at your ‘About’ page to understand your firm and scroll through your products pages, too. In website development terms, these consumers are undergoing a ‘UX’ journey. That’s ‘User Experience’ – and it’s something that you can measure in the back end of your website. You can see, for instance, the hotspots on your pages – where web users’ cursors land on the page, for example.
This is the beginning of a web user’s journey with your brand. By measuring this initial introduction to your firm, you’ll be able to slowly adapt your website to make it more attractive and amenable to web users. You’ll remove the friction that your web developer is spotting, and you’ll encourage more and more web users onto your products pages, where they’ll consider buying from you.
The Store
Here, we’ll look at your online store – the product that you’ve listed online, and what you can do to make them a little more attractive to web users from around the world. Here are some quick tips to help you make a customer’s interaction with your product listings that bit more enjoyable:
- Make a point of taking only high-quality photos of your goods. Take them from different angles to give potential customers the best possible idea of what they might be about to purchase.
- Add in-depth and exciting product descriptions. This means listing the product specifications but then hiring a copywriter to add a little pep and edge to the writing on your website.
- Making it as easy as possible to navigate through your sales pages – and to click off a particular product and back into the listings where you left off. This is a job for your web developer.
When your store looks the part, it’s going to convince more people to shop with you, adding items to their cart. This is what a good customer journey is all about – providing a luxurious and easy-to-use experience for all your customers.
The Checkout
The final stage of the digital part of your customer journey is at the checkout. At this point, a consumer has explored your website and has filled a cart with products. This is promising: they likely want to spend cash with you. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of carts that are abandoned every day across the world. That’s a staggering amount of cash lost for businesses online.
You need to avoid this happening to you. Your checkout needs to be as simple and easy to use as possible. When customers are entering their postal address, how about asking for their area code and auto-filling the rest? Remove as much friction as possible from this final stage of the shopping process so that a consumer will always feel comfortable shopping with you and parting ways with their cash on your site.
Delivery
Now comes the physical side of your journey with your customer. They’ve left your website, and they’re awaiting the delivery of the product that they purchased. Here are some things that you should focus on with your delivery:
- Smart packaging, with printed-off address labels instead of hand-written ones. You want to look professional – and you want your customer to know you value them.
- Accurate deliver dates. A customer who receives their package after four days is far happier if it was predicted to arrive in 5 days rather than in 3 days. Be accurate, and pleasantly surprise your customers.
- If your package is large and will therefore require customers to be inside their homes when delivery is scheduled, be certain that you’re able to meet the time specified.
The most difficult stage of your delivery process is the final mile – what’s called the final stretch of a product’s journey. It’s relatively easy to transport goods between cities and states – but far harder to get it to the door of your customer. There’s plenty to learn about how you can facilitate that final stretch delivery – and often you’ll find a firm that you can trust to do it for you.
Customer Service
Finally, the last part of your journey with your customer comes with your communications with them if there’s anything wrong with the product that they ordered. As with all online businesses in the modern world, you can differentiate with fine customer service. This is what earns you 5-star reviews on Google and other rating websites. Customers appreciate honesty and rapidity in how they’re dealt with, and that’s what you need to be offering them when they get in touch.
As a rule, you should pay a full refund to anyone who asks for one. You’ll sometimes be caught out by people who don’t deserve one, but the alternative – vetting every refund enquiry – is simply too expensive and time-consuming for your firm. Be sure to train your customer service representatives well, so that they’re friendly and kind to each customer.
Feedback Forms
You’ll be able to check how you did with a feedback form – asking customers about their journey with your brand, and what they might suggest to improve it for the future. This will give you much-needed data on what you’re doing well, and what you should concentrate on next to fine-tune your journey with every customer who trades with you.
There you have it: a complete guide to the customers’ journeys of online traders, and what you can do to leave customers smiling and happy after trading with you.
