1. Develop robust buyer personas

Buyer personas are research-based profiles of your target customers. They help you understand their goals, doubts, and needs. You can use them to address their pain points to deliver a truly excellent customer experience.

Sabrina Tillemans is UX and Digital Innovation Manager at German ecommerce agency active value. She recommends making your customer a partner throughout the whole user experience process.

“Put the customer at the first step of your considerations,” Sabrina says. “And remember: a user flow can only be efficient, easy, and satisfying when you build it from the customer’s perspective. With this understanding, you can create a trustworthy user interface and build a consistent relationship between your customer and your company.”

2. Use data

You can use data to tailor your online strategy to your customers’ needs and personalise their experience. That includes using onsite tracking software, customer surveys to optimise buyer personas, and tools to discover your cart abandonment triggers.

“At the heart of any good customer experience is data that helps personalise a shopper’s journey,” explains Aubrey Harper, a content strategist for marketing automation platform Klaviyo. “Seeing what types of products someone has viewed, when they visit your online store, and what they like helps you create more impactful content across all your marketing channels.

“And whether it’s onsite tracking to see how people behave on your website or even a survey that leads to more extensive buyer profiles, don’t be afraid to use customer feedback and behaviour to get more information.”

3. Personalise as much as possible

Personalisation is paramount to providing an exceptional customer experience. It includes everything from correctly addressing customers in marketing materials to ‘magically’ suggesting products they like.

Crafting tailor-made experiences ensures you have the best chance possible to make your customers happy. The figures back this up: Google and BCG’s Business Impact of Personalisation in Retail report found that 40% of people will spend more than planned when their experience is personalised.

To get started, try these things:

1. Entice shoppers to create an account: Ask customers to sign up to your site or subscribe to a newsletter to get more data about their likes and dislikes.

2. Use personalised homepages, offers, and recommendations: Create offers and recommendations based on how your customers shop. Use data to anticipate their needs and display products and offers that meet them.

3. Send personalised emails and celebrate milestones: Use data to send personalised emails with links to pages or products and services you know they’d like. Delight them by sending them offers on their birthdays and other special occasions.

4. Look after your customers even when they leave: Give your customers a reason to return to your site by showing them an offer when they’re about to leave. And send a cart abandonment notification to entice them to return after they’re gone.

4. Prioritise mobile commerce

Nearly 60% of the world’s internet traffic is mobile-based.

What does that mean? That optimising your mobile offer is a great way to deliver better service and enhance your customer experience.

Just think about it: your shoppers no longer have to visit a store or even use a desktop device to make a purchase. Instead, they can use their smartphones to find (and buy) what they need immediately.

Mobile devices also offer the chance to deliver quicker browsing and faster transactions. Of course, this relies on ensuring you provide a genuinely mobile-friendly experience. That means testing and refining your customer journey, mobile website speed, and mobile checkout flow.

5. Perfect your tech stack

We’ve seen how you can use data to create the best customer service experience possible. But you also need to think about the other technology that powers your ecommerce operation – and how that impacts shoppers.

So, where to start? Let’s hear from Matt Rhodes, Sales and Marketing Manager at Honeypot Furniture. He has been building a new tech stack to create ‘the ultimate ecommerce customer experience’.

“Our new tools will work together to revolutionise our messaging automation, phone system, order management, logistics, warehousing, and product-feed management,” he explains. 

“From a customer’s perspective, this will mean more accurate and up-to-date product pages and information, higher-quality transactional notifications, delivery status updates and tracking, quicker response times for customer queries, and better stock forecasting leading to shorter lead times.”

6. Make your shipping (and returns) shine

The fastest-growing brands focus on building first-class shipping experiences. There, we said it. And the experts do too.

“The shipping process is arguably the most crucial part of the ecommerce experience as it has the most customer touchpoints,” says Rob van den Heuvel, Chief Executive Officer at Sendcloud. “And one bad delivery experience can make consumers hesitant to reorder. 

“The best brands offer their customers multiple shipping options, send branded tracking notifications, and offer a hassle-free returns process. As a result, they get better reviews and build loyalty.”

Focus on shipping and returns to provide the best experience possible, outshine your competition, and drive customer loyalty.

7. Use conversational commerce

Conversational commerce is an approach where social tools such as messaging apps, chatbots, live representatives, and social media messaging are used to sell through digital channels. It makes the customer experience a two-way conversation that guides shoppers through their journey to boost sales and loyalty.

For Yash Kotak, Senior Director of Product Management at Vonage and Founder of Jumper.ai, conversational commerce is the perfect way to create an experience your customers will remember.

“Whether it’s messaging, chat, video, or AI-powered conversational commerce, consumers expect to connect with brands in the same way they connect in their personal lives,” Yash says. “Businesses should communicate more like family and friends, creating a customer experience that will drive engagement and keep them coming back.”

8. Optimise your payments

As a payment service provider (PSP), we are always thinking about the value of offering a great payment experience. In fact, we surveyed online shoppers across Europe to see just how important it was to them. 

What did we discover?

That offering a quick and efficient payment method is the main factor that convinces consumers to buy from a retailer. And offering the correct payment methods is the most significant factor driving customer loyalty.

Then we went one further – asking just how important it was that retailers offer their preferred payment method when shopping online. 

The results speak for themselves: 90% of consumers said it’s important that retailers offer the payment methods they prefer to use when shopping online. And more than half (53%) cited it as ‘very important’.

So, perfecting your payments should be a key part of your customer experience strategy.