Do this one thing to vastly improve your customer’s online experience.

Whether you have turned to online shopping for convenience or necessity, the experience during Covid has frequently been less than stellar from my perspective. I speak from experience and I am not only referring to small or local companies that just came online, I am talking about really big brands that have served up horrible online experiences. Are they not conducting user experience testing? Many companies just didn’t focus enough attention on or make the move online soon enough and were forced to do so as a survival mechanism. I get that, and I want to support these businesses, but everyone has their limitations. 

How many of you have spent the time to do your research and then sat down to place the order for your latest purchase only to abandon the cart due to sheer frustration? 

You do not want this to happen with your customers.

In my last article I wrote about the planning process company’s  go through when pivoting strategy. I talked about the importance of mapping your customer buying journey as a critical step in the process. I can’t stress enough how important it is that this is a current document, in fact according to Maria Boulden, Vice-President, Executive Partner, Gartner, “If your buyer’s journey map is more than 6 months old, it’s past its shelf life”. If you haven’t managed to update or complete this exercise, there is one thing you can do that will immediately improve your customer’s online experience.

The one thing you need to do right now.

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Create a scenario that would be typical for your customer to begin a search. Then have some employees, friends, or family walk through the process while you observe. Make note of steps that were not intuitive or where they had to annoyingly repeat steps. Then do the same thing for a couple of your competitors observing points of friction, opportunities for improvement and innovation. At the very least you should come away from this exercise with a couple of areas you can address that will make the experience better. Having your customer service and marketing employees participate will most certainly result in some critical learnings.  If your list is long, try prioritizing based on outcome. For example, there are some basics that every e-commerce site should have such as an ability for guest check out. Obviously, if you find your site is lacking the basics, you will want to add these before you attempt bigger improvements.

This user experience testing can be a very simple thing to do but you can also get more sophisticated, using readily available tools. This user experience testing can be a very simple thing to do but you can also get more sophisticated, using readily available tools. Here is one article on some examples of this type of research but depending on the type of business you are in, there are many options.

Why the urgency?

A staggering 88% of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience. A further 70% of online businesses that fail do so because of bad usability. Don’t become a devastating statistic because you lacked digital customer empathy. The higher percent of online business may be new to your company this year but consider digital as just another means of serving your customer. Every touchpoint is a reflection of your brand.

I should qualify this article by saying I am not a marketer but I am a customer and a business leader. I was motivated to write this article after one too many abandoned carts (aka lost sales for the company I was trying to buy from). This advice does not apply strictly to B2C. I have spent my entire career in B2B and I can tell you that B2B is still lagging behind the B2C e-commerce experience.