Business Success for E- Commerce Portal – a perspective through Customer Experience Management

Today, an online presence is equated with the company’s identity. Research and Practice reveal that active online presence increases customer base, deepens customer relationships and gives a positive boost to new collaborations. Online channels enhance engagement and are powerful enough to influence all other channels of customer engagement effectively. Transactions, communication, selling, promotions are now shifting online as it is convenient and saves customer’s time and effort. Or Simply Ecommerce or business through an online portal is as tangible as through stores and thus needs careful attention.

Business through online sales has consequently increased the need for more product information available in a compact, comprehensive way. Thus accessibility of the information and timely arrival of the product thereof is of critical importance for your business success. Through this blog, we focus on how an optimized online presence especially through website can help your company/business.

Effectively it means how to  

• Retain customers or attract new leads year-round.

• Become a successful flourishing business and self churning profitable system.

  
  

Backward Optimization and Integration for a Frictionless Experience

To start with, it’s a backward integration for an e-commerce portal where Optimization begins with processes, creating value in the supply chain that is eventually converted into a valuable product or offering for the end customers. 

A valuable product is a product with a competitive edge providing a solution to a certain need or want of the customer. And thus understanding your customers' needs, WANTS, and challenges need due diligence.

Customer needs wants, and demands change basis different requirements, willingness and ability which is dependent on the customer requirement, demographic aspects, socio-cultural aspects, and income levels. Based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs model, the product is either addressing physiological, safety, self-esteem, belonging, or actualization need of the customer. When the product meets the need/desire of customers along with a tuned-in strategy/business plan the growth propulsion can happen quickly with influencers also drawing attention to the company’s offering at the same time. This new growth sustenance from influencers to masses involves optimization of processes, people and technology as a single unit or else many businesses can struggle after this “Rapid growth” stage itself.

Needless to say, a well-devised eCommerce portal at the beginning itself, could help companies attract, retain customers while saving various offline marketing expenses. 

Creating an edge to Sustain and Survive

As a business owner/decision-maker you need to have a clear picture of your target customer persona, primary markets, leading competitors in the industry, and accordingly devise strategies to create awareness of new product propositions to the customers. For example, let’s look at how the change of strategy by a leading online transaction firm helped them to retain customers.

The online transaction firm is India’s leading financial payment portal and had its business boomed with the introduction of cash-back on every transaction done through them. This helped them lure customers towards online transactions, at the same time enabling customers to save money and experience the convenience of paying small amounts. The company’s value offering helped people change their mindset from traditional payment methods. Soon after, the company was facing issues regarding retaining e-customers due to new competitors in the market offering better discounts. The firm changed its strategy to build trust through liaisoning with many brands, expanding the scope of services and offer of en-cashing cash-back only in the subsequent purchase through them along with simplifying the whole process.

Key Takeaways for you - 

• Trust is one of the most important parameters to build a relationship with customers through online channels including website, app etc. And is the USP to survive.

• Engaged partners and other stakeholders can build a trustworthy network and experience for the organization.

• Being EFFECTIVE in your overall operations can support you to minimize the cost of delivering the right value to customers. Expectations and deliverables match can go a long way in retaining and engaging your customers.

• Experience through stakeholders can support to build customer trust and provide insightsto improve.
  

So, how digital engagement can support an E-Commerce to attract new customers and retain the older ones through online channels like website, app, etc?

You will agree that not only a company’s website or UX design of app etc directly affects customer retention and business performance, but optimized processes support by enhancing the experience to a customer. A good eCommerce trade that has a high conversion rate highlights customer’s trust in the company and its products. However, if the company is still in the early phases of development, there is an utmost need to earn customer trust through a well-defined customer experience strategy. The by-product of this strategy is revenue, increased sales and growth.

Further, the website particularly can be used as a tool by your business to enhance customer trust through the following ways:

We also suggest Partnership with local influencers is a win-win situation for both parties involved.

• As big companies have trustworthy credentials, associating with them furthers the worth of local influencers. Whereas, local influencers have a good fan following that can enhance lead generation.

• The critical product review specialists are trusted by lay customers for their unbiased comparison of the pros and cons of similar products of different companies. 

We also highly recommend that you use your website as a tool to engage and understand your customers. Good SEO, recommendations will take time to build on. And these tools should be a part of a holistic strategy for not only customer acquisition but retention too because customers might come but make sure the experience and value add from your product/service should propel them to stay with your company and also bring along their friends through recommendations and word of mouth.

Converting a lead to a prospective customer

Converting a lead to a prospective customer for an e-commerce portal needs an extra mile of detailing.

1. Frictionless Website (Easy and Enjoyable to navigate):

Research suggests that 87% of customers do an online search before buying a product; hence companies need a good eCommerce portal or website for engaging with customers. The website is an online face of the company where every detail is as necessary as the big picture presentation. It is the company’s personality where the way information is arranged reflects organizational capabilities and highlights various skill sets of the company. A clean web layout and clearly stated the company’s unique value smoothly guides customers that lead them to explore more landing pages of the website and easily grasp the company’s service areas. A mismanaged website usually causes confusion, mistrust, and result in low customer rate optimization. 

For your ease, we recommend you to use Customer Effort Score (CES), a useful metric particularly for website to deduce the frictions while assessing different landing pages for an engaging experience.

2. Research and Insights for Customer Engagement:

Develop insights through various researches like Competitor’s analysis, Customer Surveys, Customer Journey Mapping for explaining, planning and strategizing more to add value through your product/service. It can support statistical presentation on the website of how the products are helping customers with facts.

A thorough competitor analysis can help you to understand the company’s positioning and gap areas. Few questions to check in this regard are

• Who are the leaders in the industry, 

• Which marketing channels do they use, 

• What is the leader’s USP

• How does our company’s product differentiate from others?
  

With insight-driven analysis, you will be able to optimize your marketing spend with better visibility. 

 Customer surveys are very helpful in generating valuable insights that can help the company upgrade the quality of its deliverables. The insights from Customer Surveys can support you to create an understanding of expectations/perceptions as expressed by your customers and thus may eventually help in mapping the emotional impact of an experience, a relationship or a simple interaction. It can lead and give pointers to unsatisfied needs or ideas for some better products/services. It is imperative to identify customer’s viewpoints and align that with the company’s offerings. This way customer’s pain points are addressed and customer’s trust in the product is increased resulting in a higher conversion rate.

We summarize Website optimization for prudent conversion through following steps,

• Problem identification 

• Website optimization for a frictionless experience to your customers

• Competitor analysis to understand and map how you are adding value to your customers
      vis-à-vis others

• Research, Customer Surveys, Customer Journey Mapping to map your customer expectations/perceptions vis-à-vis your deliverables.

• Marketing spend optimization 

• Measuring growth using appropriate metrics to support Strategy.

• Customer Engagement.

And trust to seek support from peers or experts to see from outside the shell, big-picture view of the overall situation. It will give you an edge and support your business growth process and success.

- Pink Guava Team with Shweta Jain ( Consultant with Masters in Psychology )