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With 86% of customers willing to pay extra for quality customer experience, businesses today are faced with a choice. Contrary to popular opinion, 50% of companies have already redirected their marketing budget towards customer experience innovation. E-commerce is one industry that is expected to serve 2 billion users in 2020. Online stores are expected to do business worth $4 billion in 2020.
2 billion people buying things online is something that has not happened on its own, players like Amazon, Walmart and Flipkart have tried every weapon in their arsenal to improve customer experience. One-click return, one-day delivery, Omni-channel experience, and instant gratification are some attributes that have helped these players grow big.
For the nascent players, the e-commerce industry continues to be a battle-field with innocuous threats like data breach, credit card frauds and increasing return rates. Focusing on customer experience for e-commerce players has less to do with customers and more with the backend processes.
An Invespro study found almost 30% of all products ordered online are returned out of which 22% of products are returned because they were portrayed incorrectly online. Return rates not only impacts the revenue but also the customer’s lifetime value. Dipping customer experience also adds up to the increasing cost of customer acquisition.
Top issues that impact customer experience on e-commerce platforms include:
Fake or imitated products: There can be nothing more irritating than waiting a whole week only to receive a fake or imitated product. Customers not only return these products but also stop buying from that particular marketplace.
Credit Card Frauds: Be it phishing, identity theft or credential stuffing, customers hate their credit card details being accessed illicitly. Card frauds is a reason strong enough for customers to never visit the online store again. Though customers redeem themselves by exercising features like chargeback, the overall damage to the online store’s reputation remains prominent.
Poor Post-sale support: A lot of sellers are on these marketplaces just to make quick money. Post-sale support or service is not a matter of concern for themselves. Lack of quality customers not only pisses the customer off but also robs the online stores of the referral and returning purchases.
Willing to improve customer experience? Take these Actions now!
1. Establish Catalog Quality Checks: With multiple quality checks in place, online stores will be able to identify fake or imitated products easily and remove them. When only genuine products are listed online, customers will receive quality products and share their good experiences with friends and family leading to more sales.
Catalog quality checks improve customer experience in the following ways:
• High-quality images make it easier for customers to make a better decision
• When catalogs have a rich product description, they start ranking for relevant keywords, facilitating faster product discovery.
• Correct attribute values allow customers to identify the right product
2. Get PCI DSS Compliant: PCI DSS Certification is necessary for every enterprise that stores, processes or transfers cardholders’ data. Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a set of regulations designed by payment facilitators like VISA, MasterCard and American Express.
Here’s how getting PCI DSS Compliant helps e-commerce stores offer quality experience:
• Renders all sabotage attempts obsolete: With PCI DSS certification, it gets tough for hackers to access data because all data is encrypted and locked with a key. Only authorized personnel and software can access these data.
• Boosts Customer Confidence: Data breaches that have impacted businesses like Facebook, Quora and Uber have coaxed people in being very careful before sharing their card details online. With PCI DSS certification, businesses get the logo to display on their site, which increases customer’s confidence. Customers today look for such logos and https symbols before sharing their details.
• Keeps the user data protected from unauthorized access: The 12 requirements of PCI DSS ensures that cardholders’ data are kept behind a protected wall. With little to no access by any internal employee or external personnel, all data is safe and protected.
3. Hire a Managed Security Service Provider: 56% of people shop online because they love the liberty of shopping anytime from anywhere. With e-commerce stores impacting the lives of a billion people round the clock, it deserves a security operation center that looks for threats 24X7. With managed security services, online stores can ensure that all their customers are protected against potential threats at all times of the day.
Investing in managed security services will offer them the following benefits:
• Identification and neutralization of threats in real-time.
• Restricts all phishing and credential stuffing attempts.
• Prepares enterprise’s cyber defense for upcoming threats
• Makes sure that site remains available for shopping at all hours of the day
4. Comply with GDPR and CCPA: No matter if you are serving in European countries or not, getting GDPR compliant helps online stores with improved search rankings. Customers are also looking to shop online from sites that GDPR and CCPA compliant.
Compliances like GDPR and CCPA came into existence because online sites have abused customer’s data to a great extent. Today, governments want to protect their customers in being brainwashed by a particular brand hence all these restrictions.
5. Offer Quality support: Rendering quality customer support can usher e-commerce stores in a direction that makes it invincible. Since customer experience has got to do a lot with the “experience of customers”, you must ensure that you are offering them a memorable experience.
It is impossible to render all challenges obsolete, the best thing organizations can do is offer incomparable support and ensure instant gratification. Handle your customers efficiently on multiple channels like social media, email, chat or calls.
Conclusion
By 2040, 95% of retail transactions are expected to be overtaken by e-commerce stores. The growing impact of e-commerce is simplifying lives and offering people with multiple options to choose from. The future of the e-commerce industry is full of opportunities, challenges, redemption and success, players who dare to offer quality customer experience against all odds will survive while the rest will fail to make an impact.
