How to Gain Customer Experience Insights

Author

Ines Maione

Ines Maione brings a wealth of experience from over 25 years as a Marketing Manager Communications in various industries. The best thing about the job is that it is both business management and creative. And it never gets boring, because with the rapid evolution of the media used and the development of marketing tools, you always have to stay up to date.

Whether we talk about online and offline retail shopping, customers have the same needs and expectations. And if you can meet these expectations, you can retain your current customers. Most importantly, you wouldn’t be able to find new potential customers for your retail business. Therefore, customer experience insights have become vital for businesses today.

Besides basic expectations like pricing and availability, customers today want an omnichannel experience. It means they want you to deliver all-in-one services or products that offer them high value.

Moreover, they also want to enjoy a customized shopping experience that provides them with products or services in a way that sits well with their shopping behavior. Therefore, if you want to grow your business today in the online circle or offline, you need to gain relevant market insights. 

We will discuss ways to use customer insights and data to enhance the shopping experience. Moreover, we’ll also give you an idea about how experience management and insights platforms can help you provide an immersive shopping experience to your customers.

Table of Contents

• Why is it Important to Improve the Customer Experience for Online and Offline Retail Shopping?
• Important Elements of the Online Shopping Experience Today
• How to Gain Customer Experience Insights? (Online and Offline Retail Shopping)
• Why is an Experience Management and Insights Platforms Vital for Your Business?
• How Can Experience Management and Insights Platforms Benefit Your Business?
• Final Thoughts

Why is it Important to Improve the Customer Experience for Online and Offline Retail Shopping?

To stand out in a hyper-competitive market, businesses today need to provide an immersive shopping experience to their customers. Whether online or offline, customers’ expectations have gone beyond competitive market pricing and product availability.

They want to enjoy a personalized shopping experience across various online channels. It means they want to see and navigate through products that suit their needs. Moreover, they want a more comprehensive product review to help them make buying decisions.

Providing a truly personalized shopping experience allows your business to build a strong customer base. If you offer that experience, they’ll likely pay more for your products or services. In the long run, this can improve your revenue and profits.

On the contrary, using a one-size-fits-all approach for all customers means you’ll lose them since they aren’t getting additional value from your brand. You’ll likely fail to bring your current customers to come back to your store and also won’t be able to attract potential buyers.

Important Elements of the Online Shopping Experience Today

The retail industry has greatly changed in the last few years, particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic. Customers now rely on eCommerce to buy products due to its convenience.

However, a few elements shape the overall online shopping experience today. Gaining customer experience insight can allow you to understand where you’re lacking.

By working on these areas, you can improve consumers’ online shopping experience. Here is what matters most to customers when they shop for products online.

• Visual Icons 

There should be visual icons that tell you about the product details. For example, the visual icons should tell customers if the product is water-resistant, sustainable, etc. This way, the customers can know about the product’s key characteristics without reading too carefully.

• Videos

Customers are more inclined to purchase an item when they know how it looks. Adding video content gives customers a clear image and idea of your product, helping them decide more quickly. Moreover, retail businesses that add video content for products are considered more reliable and trustworthy.

• Search Options

If you offer your customers a wide range of products, then it should be easy to navigate through them. Therefore, customers want to enjoy robust search options related to the products. It should go beyond the typical filters for price, availability, color, etc., to provide an optimal customer experience.

• Product Reviews

Product reviews can help customers understand how other people feel about the product. They can understand the products’ features and then decide. Most customers will trust a brand with positive online reviews and customer feedback. Therefore, it is vital in the customers’ shopping journey today.

• Tutorials

Customers prefer buying products from brands that offer them a complete tutorial. They can get a better idea of how the product works. Therefore, they are more likely to become a customer. Most customers wouldn’t be comfortable going for a product they don’t know how to use. Tutorials can help gain customers’ attention and confidence in the product.

• Product Descriptions 

Providing relevant information about the product allows customers to understand its features and specifications. It is an important element that many people consider when purchasing any product. They will compare the products’ features with others to choose the best one.

• Product Images 

Just like videos, images can also help customers to know what the product would look like. However, it is best to use images that give a more precise representation of the product. Most people use edited images that create a fake idea about the products in the customers’ minds. As a result, it can negatively impact the overall shopping experience.  

• Similar or Recommended Products

If customers are looking for certain products, they should also be able to see similar and recommended products. There is a chance that they might not buy the original product they were looking for, but end up purchasing a similar product. Therefore, it is best to show products with the same value or services based on their preferences.  

• Adding Items to a Wish List or Favorite List

Lastly, customers today would like to explore their options before making a final decision about a product. But, they would keep your products in mind, hoping to come back if they can’t find something better. So, a wish list or favorite list can ensure that customers to keep track of your products.

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How to Gain Customer Experience Insights? (Online and Offline Retail Shopping)

You can try out different ways to gather relevant data for your business. You can use them to get customer experience insight and relevant data that will help develop ways to optimize the customer experience.

• Feedback and Surveys

One of the best and easiest ways to get customer experience insight is by carrying out surveys. Interviews and surveys are an ideal way to get relevant information from customers regarding particular topics. You can add questions to help you get relevant information from your target audience.

You can also go for “How Are We Doing?” style questionnaires to learn about areas where customers want to see an improvement. The data can also be useful in developing future marketing campaigns.

• Behavioral Data

Behavioral data is the information your brand can collect to see how customers react when using your goods or services. The data gives you insights into the customer experience with your brand and how they interact with your products.

Usually, most brands gather these customer experience insights through their website or social media analytics. You can use this data to understand the triggering points for your customers that would either convince them to come back for the product or discontinue using it.

• Third-Party Data

In some cases, a small organization might find it difficult to access a large amount of customer experience insights and data. So, it can be difficult for the SME to extract useful information from the data. An easy solution to this problem is to get third-party data.

Various large organizations have a bigger audience base through which they can get relevant customer experience insights. Therefore, you can use the data from these organizations.  

Understanding the trends and problems customers face throughout their shopping journey can help you improve their overall experience. You can design marketing campaigns to help you engage your target audience accordingly.

• Real-Time User Testing

Running A/B tests on aspects of the customer experience can help in getting valuable insights into the audience’s preferences. Most brands use A/B testing to get the customer’s feedback and experience insights.

A/B testing allows you to monitor how your customer base interacts with various aspects like navigation, copy, etc. This method allows you to come up with conclusions from statistical proof. 

• Customer Sentiment Surveys

It might be difficult for your customers to fill out and complete long surveys in a fast-paced world. They might need more time to complete the questionnaire and answer each question. Even if they do, there is a chance that they might not express their honest opinions.

So, the best way to deal with this situation is to conduct customer sentiment surveys. While they are less in-depth than customer questionnaires, they can still give insights into how your customer base feels about your products and services.

The best part about customer sentiment surveys is that they are different formats you can use for them, such as ratings, dislike and like buttons, etc. These formats are not only engaging, but they are also less time-consuming for your target audience to complete.

Also, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in the customer sentiment surveys can give you an idea of how likely customers would suggest your brand to others.

• Chatbot Data 

Last but not least, chatbots have become an integral part of the customer support team for most companies. They interact with customers and can be a great data source for companies.

Chatbots can help you get insight into the main problems customers face throughout their shopping journey. You can find out the common issues that most customers face to optimize their experience. 

Why is an Experience Management and Insights Platforms Vital for Your Business?

Now that we have established that customer experience plays a vital role in shaping your brand’s online identity, you might want to know how to improve it. Gaining customer experience insight is the best way to help you improve the overall shopping experience of your customers.

You can understand which things affect customer experience and work on resolving them. And the best way to do that is by using experience management and insights platforms. While you can follow the steps mentioned above for gathering customer experience insights, it is vital to use that information properly.

And that is where a customer experience management and insights platform can help you utilize that data effectively. You can understand and address the customers’ pain points and optimize their overall journey with your business. Let’s get a better understanding of what a customer experience management platform is.

Brief Overview of Experience Management and Insights Platforms

The customer experience management and insights platforms allow you to collect feedback from your potential customer base and deliver actionable insights. You can use the platform’s functionality to understand the data and develop a plan to make well-informed decisions accordingly.

These platforms are also equipped with analytics dashboards that make it easy for the entire organization to view the feedback data. Many businesses leverage customer experience management and insight platforms for various cases, such as:

• Product experience 
• Market research 
• Customer experience

• B2C account experience
• And other purposes 

How Can Experience Management and Insights Platforms Benefit Your Business?  

A customer experience management and insights platforms help you develop a robust plan that can help you improve sales and increase profitability. Using the platforms will allow you to enhance and provide a more personalized customer experience.  

It will drive old customers to come back to your store and ensure they bring in new customers through word of mouth. Moreover, the customer experience insights allow you to provide better customer support services. Let’s go over some other benefits that you can enjoy from this platform.  

• Brings Down the Churn Rate  

The churn rate refers to the rate at which customers are leaving your services or not buying goods from your brand. It also applies to subscribers who are not renewing or canceling their subscription to your services. A higher churn rate means the business is losing customers faster than it can replace them.  

That is where a robust customer experience management platform allows you to reduce churn by offering lifetime value to the customers. You can collect data and understand why customers leave your business to develop relevant strategies.  

Bringing down the churn rate can benefit your business since retaining customers is less costly than finding new ones. Companies can also take advantage of their existing customers by upselling their products to their existing clientele. Existing customers are more likely to buy your new products since they already have a trusting relationship with your brand.  

• Improves the Customer Satisfaction  

Getting customer experience insights from the platforms to help you to understand their needs and preferences. Therefore, it helps you recommend relevant products and develop sales or marketing strategies according to the given data. In a nutshell, you can use it to offer a personalized shopping experience.  

It will help improve the overall customer satisfaction level and ensure they would return to your store again. You can offer them suitable products and services according to their needs and wants. Additionally, you can understand the problems the customers face when shopping at your store.  

You can take rapid action to resolve those problems so that prospective customers don’t face the same situation again. All these things can help you improve the satisfaction level of the customers.  

• Increase Consumer Engagement 

Consumer engagement is also critical for businesses that want to survive and grow in the hyper-competitive online market. When you deliver products and services that surpass customers’ expectations, they will engage with your brand again.  

Customer engagement is when customers engage with your brand through various social media platforms. For instance, they will comment and mention you in different posts. The customer experience management software will ensure that your customers know the new posts your brand is updating.  

Most importantly, if you keep your customer base happy and satisfied, they will likely share your brand with their friends and family. Additionally, higher customer engagement will positively impact the brand’s image and identity. 

Today, social media platforms have made it easier for you to connect with your customers. Relevant customer experience insights can help you increase engagement with your user base. 

• High Customer Lifetime Value 

One of the biggest benefits of using experienced management and insights platform is that it helps you track how customers spend money on a specific brand, product, service, etc. It gives the business a clear idea about which customers they should invest their time, money, and efforts to retain them.  

As a business, you would want to target customers more likely to become long-term prospects. Businesses with long-term clients can increase brand loyalty and improve overall recognition. It will benefit them in the short and long run.   

• Brings in More Customers  

There is nothing better than positive customer reviews and word of mouth to attract new prospects. A satisfied audience will talk about your brand positively and tell others about it as well. This way, you can bring in new customers for your business without incurring any acquisition costs on the new customers.  

Your current customers will tell their friends, family members, and acquaintances about the personalized customer experience they received from your brand. They will act as brand ambassadors for your business without even having to pay them.  

It shows how important customer experience insights are for your business since it allows you to deliver customized products and services. Your customers would appreciate and enjoy their experience with your brand and will speak highly of it in front of others. 

Final Thoughts

Customer experience is the most crucial aspect for a business to get a competitive edge over others. If you provide a personalized shopping experience, you can retain your old customers and find new ones. After all, customer retention is the most crucial factor for businesses’ long-term success.

Businesses can incur a high cost of acquiring new customers, and there is always a risk that they might not find your products useful. On the other hand, there is no cost that you would incur for your previous customers. They are more likely to reorder from your brand.

Additionally, the upsell opportunities mean that they can be an additional source of income. With the help of customer experience management and insight platforms, you can learn about customer issues. It can also help you find out ways to improve the overall customer journey.