The customer experience is the new battleground for retailers with an e-commerce presence. But even today, websites and apps take second place to traditional market research around the in-store shopper journey and path to purchase. Ignore it at your peril, is our message to retailers.
Poor navigation and functionality, an excess of pop-up menus, long load times, incomplete SEO, difficulty of use, or trouble finding specific products all compound to create a less-than-perfect customer experience that inevitably means shoppers turn elsewhere. Retaining customers and generating new loyal shoppers requires a better understanding of CX in the online space. But crucially, better CX means uncovering deeper UX insights.
How Poor UX and CX are Driving Customers to Competitors
The omnichannel nature of shopping these days means it’s incredibly easy for customers to find an alternative. And with consumer behavior constantly changing online, understanding the shopper’s journey and experience is not as simple as it used to be. Mapping the shopper’s journey through the online store looks, unsurprisingly, nothing at all like a trip to the physical store.
Without understanding how shoppers interact with their apps, brands miss out on important insights into pain points for customers and the areas that need improvement. For example, an app that is difficult to navigate or has slow load times can lead to frustration and a poor shopping experience for customers, ultimately causing them to abandon their cart and turn to a competitor. What’s more, supply chain issues that have nothing to do with a brand’s app (such as products being out of stock) can reflect poorly on the app itself.
It’s an uphill battle to keep on top of things in an e-commerce market. Poor customer experiences lead to negative reviews, poor consumer opinion, shoppers leaving in droves to competitors that are doing things better, and eventually, potentially catastrophic revenue declines. This is why it’s crucial for brands to regularly evaluate their shopping apps and online presence, to identify and address any issues that may be having a negative impact on the user experience and therefore the customer experience.
E-commerce Success Requires More Ingenuity Around Consumer Insights
As researchers, we know that creating a great user experience keeps customers loyal and helps attract all-important new customers; and there are tried and tested ways to examine the efficacy of a brand’s app or online presence. But these are table stakes for any e-commerce retailer – the bare minimum to compete online. Testing functionality to understand whether the app is performing as programmers intended, generating usability and utility scores, or ranking an app against its competitors are all important factors to scrutinize. But where a brand may be winning the usability game, it could be losing in the discovery and trial, impulse, or upsell races. To truly understand the multi-faceted nature of UX and ultimately CX in e-commerce requires a more inspired approach. Here are a few examples:
Cat food buyers: This is an excellent example of a very specific type of shopper. Cat food buyers represent consumers who know what they want, are loyal to a product line, and will rarely deviate from that choice. In their online shopping journey, they are conducting a very specific search for a product. A search function that allows for that will create a good CX for cat food buyers. But where is there an opportunity for the trial and discovery process for this type of shopper online? Can interruption and disruption be a positive experience? Only by understanding the rates at which these shoppers are leapfrogging through the site, past upselling messages, or around promotional pop-ups, can brands maximize behaviors that are beneficial to both the brand and the shopper.
Impulse categories: Impulse is a notoriously difficult category to sell online. For brick-and-mortar retailers, creating an interruption or opportunity for impulse purchases presents very little challenge. So much so, that shoppers are used to this and expect it. In fact, an impulse purchase can be a reward of sorts, at the end of a job well done. Navigated your way through each of the aisles and ticked everything off your shopping list? Time for a KitKat! But how does this play out online? No one wants half a dozen pop-up windows to close. Nor does your shopper want to click a few more times to decline suggested items. Each of these types of interruptions creates a sub-par customer experience in a sphere where convenience, ease of use, and speed are king. The challenge is in creating an invitation rather than an interruption. Experimenting with pop-up windows, suggested items, post-sale add-ons, understanding basket dynamics, and which brands and products are most likely to be cross-purchased is the key to getting these impulse triggers right online.
Unseen is unsold: Putting aside the cat food buyers of a brand’s customer base, almost every category requires ‘eyes on’ to sell. Although it seems cliché to say that unseen equals unsold, this is truer than ever for the online shopper. And UX can heavily contribute to this phenomenon. Heuristics is an important factor to consider, especially for online shopping. So much of how we shop online is down to muscle memory, lowering the cognitive load and repeating behaviors that make the shopping experience quicker, easier, and less frustrating. Combating the relative hypnosis under which many shoppers operate online is a major challenge for brands. It requires pinpointing where shoppers are navigating, what they are seeing, and importantly, what they are looking at but not seeing. UX journey mapping gives a much deeper understanding by revealing the true-to-life online shopper experience. Only then can brands innovate and illicit the behaviors they need.
Looking Beyond UX Scores to Entice Rather Than Repel Consumers
When it comes to online shopping, different nudges will work for different people. Improving CX for specific types of shoppers requires more than just a blanket solution. At Explorer Research, we look beyond the traditional consumer insights such as usability and help brands to uncover untapped potential in their customer base. Here are some of the solutions we pose:
Catering to inexperienced shoppers: Not all online shoppers are operating in a stupor. For some, online shopping is a new experience. For others, new motivations have brought them to the category for the first time. To cater to these new customers and turn them into loyal shoppers, brands need consumer insights into why and how these customers are operating. Understanding trip motivators or lifestyle changes (starting a new diet, becoming a new parent, or caring for a parent at home are all good examples) can mean tapping into a customer base that isn’t yet operating on muscle memory – creating new and loyal consumers for whom suggested items, cross-category shopping, and even pop-ups may be a welcome assistance.
Growing the brand versus growing the category: There is a very nuanced difference between the two. An app or website’s UX should be seamless and efficient, or customers will go elsewhere. On the other hand, if it’s too easy for some customers (like the cat food buyers of the world), brands miss out on the ability to grow the category. Some retailers are balancing this by offering a variety of invitations and interruptions, including banner ads, pop-ups, suggested items, and hints for impulse purchases at the checkout stage. For Walmart shoppers, this might be dry food options to supplement canned food or vet and grooming services that can be booked online. Those buyers who want to leapfrog these invitations can still do so, but they’re presented with the opportunity to be invited to consider additional products and services that could be useful to them – growing both the brand and the category. Knowing how each of these invitations will work with shoppers requires deep behavioral analysis, like the kind we do at Explorer Research.
Cracking the impulse category: What you can and can’t influence shoppers with is really down to the store and category type. With advanced UX insights from Explorer Research, we can delve deeper into what customers are seeing, what they’re scanning over, what’s second nature to them, and where we can invite them to look at another item, all without disrupting their experience to a point that the customer experience is compromised and they turn elsewhere. Although intrusive pop-up windows are a no-no, there are other solutions. Sidebars, banners, suggested products, and more, can create both useful and less disruptive invitations that enhance rather than detract from the customer experience. Understanding exactly where and how to do this, to tempt rather than terrorize the customer, is key.
Explorer Research Helps Brands to Maximize CX By Understanding UX
What makes Explorer Research’s shopper insight data unique is our capabilities is deep behavioral analysis, rich journey mapping, innovative e-commerce eye-tracking technology, and immersive qualitative analysis. Our approach helps brands build a full and detailed map of the e-commerce path to purchase, just as we would for a brick-and-mortar store. With our analytics, we can uncover how shoppers are interacting with the online store, as well as how they feel about it afterward – which is the true key to keeping them coming back.
There is so much more to a competitive advantage online than simply having a great UX utility score. Explorer Research understands this and offers best-in-class approaches to comprehensively evaluate the shopper experience and make a material difference for leading brands.
