Customer Obsessed? 3 Signs Your eCommerce Team is Falling Short
Do you know that it takes just about 50 milliseconds for customers to form an opinion about your website? This determines whether they liked your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave, or if they’ll make a purchase. It is in these moments that your customer obsessed competition gain the advantage.
Your eCommerce team has to do a lot more than just attract visitors. Focus on personalization because the more impressed they are when they show up, the healthier your eCommerce business could grow. By increasing customer value, you can forge the most powerful customer acquisition tools – word of mouth and repeated purchases.
However, here’s the most important question: “Is customer obsessed just a buzzword in eCommerce or does it hold a more important value?”
Customer obsessed is not like a dedication to the much-vaunted proverb, ‘the customer is always right’. Rather, it is the outside-in business approach that uses data-driven insights to enhance the lifetime value of customers by providing them with quality and meaningful experiences. So, eCommerce businesses that want to thrive in today’s marketplace must be customer obsessed in all facets of the business.
Learning from Amazon
Being customer obsessed is Amazon’s first leadership principle, as they consider it a healthy, long-term business strategy. Here’s how they define it:
“Leaders start with the customer and work backward. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.”
If you want to grow your business, your team should obsess over providing value for your customers and an increase in demand for your products will follow. Here are some tips you can use to achieve customer obsession:
- Understand what your customer truly values.
- Prioritize building a better connection with every visitor.
- Build cost-effective ways to add value and increase margins using technology.
- Create products, offers, and services that best fit your audiences’ needs.
- Escalate your productivity to offer substantially more value for the same or lower cost, while maintaining (or increasing) your margins.
What is your eCommerce team missing?
Even if you become customer-obsessed, there are certain things your eCommerce team should focus on to understand them well. Because if you don’t really understand your website visitors, it can be difficult to attract more of them or make them stick around.
“Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on them.”
Jeff Bezos on the three tenets of running a customer centric company:
1. Listen to your customers
2. Invent for your customers
3. Personalize for each customer pic.twitter.com/cGW8soTBaq— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) December 7, 2020
With eCommerce businesses operating under a cyclical process of anticipating and meeting every client’s needs, you have to be quicker. Prior to product launches, you must be aware of what your customer is seeking and work accordingly. The more you know your customers, the better you can serve them.
“76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs.”
Here are the most common customer obsession mistakes to avoid while running an eCommerce business…
1 | You don’t collect or analyze data on what your customers want or need regularly
Once you have come up with a great idea for a new product, how do you know if your customers want to buy it? Are they willing to pay enough for it so that you can earn a profit?
Well, the answers to these questions start with better customer research.
Research includes the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting your customer’s data to strategize and work on what they need. For this, you need to do a lot of deep research across your industry and ask customers specific questions or feedback from time to time. By gathering in-depth details from customers regularly, you can deliver on their individual needs.
“29% of online shoppers choose “easy to buy” as their primary motive to purchase from eCommerce stores.”
Visitors leave a site if they don’t get what they expect. No one wants to waste their time scrolling through a list of unwanted products. Your website should be able to show the exact results for what users might be interested in or what they need.
Have you ever visited Amazon.com?
What do you see when you first visit this website? Is it not what you were expecting?
Every time you visit the Amazon website, they learn how you shop and show different products whenever you visit them again. They know what you need or what you might expect at every visit. This is the reason why visitors stick around and come back – to explore different products and make a purchase later.
If your eCommerce team is not focusing on learning how your visitors shop, your website won’t recommend products that visitors might be searching for. So, try to improve the intelligence on every visitor. If you can figure out what motivates your visitors, you can make them more engaged and purchase from your store as well.
2 | Your website isn’t proactively recommending products to new visitors
Including smart product recommendations as part of your customer experience can increase the average order value of your website conversions. A timely and accurate product recommendation can lead users to choose from the list of products.
“75% of what people watch on Netflix is generated by their recommendation engine.”
Product recommendation engines help to create a sense of satisfaction among the users during and even after their searching session. The system (powered by mathematical algorithms) works by displaying the appropriate products based on things like search keywords, previous purchases, etc.
For every new user, your site should prominently feature a list of recommended products on its homepage. Through recommendation engines, you can create a customized shopping experience by taking into account the visitor’s preferences and then correlating it with products or services available on your site.
“Product recommendations can generate sales uplifts of up to 11%.”
If you want to build on what you already have or get started with your own product recommendations for every new visitor, take a look at the approaches below.
Similar Products
This tactic suggests the products that are similar to the products on the current page or based on the content of product details such as name, description, tags, etc. This allows shoppers to see a range of alternative products similar to the one they are browsing.
Best Sellers & Trending
It suggests the products that are trending with other buyers. These could include- bestsellers, most browsed, or most frequently carted products. This gives users an opinion of other shoppers and acts as social proof to sway them towards making a purchase.
New Arrivals
This is the best way to suggest the latest products for new and returning visitors. Users want to move with the trend and have a built-in expectation that new products must be better than previous ones. This is the reason why people buy the latest iPhone every few years.
Proactively recommending products to new visitors is a strategy that your eCommerce team should try. Experimenting with a mix of personalized and crowdsourced recommendations, you can tailor shopping experiences according to their needs.
3 | Only your support team is able to resolve customer queries
Shoppers expect more than just great products. They prefer brands that can offer them timely support if they have a question or problem. This support should not only come from your support team but also from the customers who have experienced your services or products already.
One word for this approach is building a community. A customer support channel is a private conversation to deal with customer issues. However, sometimes your customers might need a suggestion from a person who has already used your product. For this, your eCommerce store needs to have a community.
“About 66% of brands who have their own communities build better relationships with their customers.”
By building a community, you bring together all your customer’s under one roof. They get an opportunity to communicate with each other and get their issues resolved in the least possible time. This way faster service is delivered without relying only on the customer support team.
Here are a few tips to build an engaging community for your users.
Create a community website
Build your community website or use the public forums (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), to give customers a place to talk with each other and share their issues. You can also include a variety of categories to choose from. Each sub-category can have different types of discussions, typical for every customer. This way your audience will easily find topics relevant to their interest.
Engage as much you can
Once you have created a community, let the people in, and start engaging with them. Be transparent with your customers and make efforts to make it a reliable place. If you contribute to your community often, your customers will know they are being heard.
Listen to the community members
Remember to monitor the conversations in your community. Pay attention to the answers your users are giving and note the negative remarks. Also, at times some questions are left unanswered by users, try to answer those queries and do not leave them unresolved.
“66% of customers believe that valuing their time is the most essential thing in online shopping.”
Resolving your customer’s problems faster is a cornerstone of good customer service. By building a community you take a step forward to improve your support channel rather than relying on your support team to solve every problem.
eCommerce teams that know their customers have more success
Making an online sale is satisfying but what if you could make a little more while keeping your customers happy too?
It’s obvious that companies like Amazon are successful at this principle. However, it’s just the basic things your eCommerce team has to focus on, besides using product recommendation engines, emphasize user data collection, and building better relations with them. And this is only possible if you could give them what they need, recommend what they are looking for, and engage well to quickly resolve all their problems.
You need to identify your customer’s needs and then act towards them. Recommendation for unwanted products can be a waste of time for you as well as for your visitors. So, prioritize your customer’s needs and deliver a great experience. This will add constructive value to your brand and also give your business a competitive advantage.
Read further to learn about automating your Shopify store, pricing optimization for your eCommerce business, and more.
