How businesses can win big this holiday season
This year, it’s been predicted that there will be an 11 per cent increase in online sales to a total of USD 91.6 billion. One of the keys to winning a huge part of this pie will be a standout customer experience. With customers shopping across multiple touch points – mobile, website, and even on VR, retailers will need to seamlessly connect experiences across every touch point.
With that, Adobe has five tips on how business can improve their customer experience and win big in the retail space. They are:
Develop customer journey maps
Journey maps show you where your customers’ experiences with your brand begin and end. But to be effective, they must take into consideration all the contexts and environments in which customers might use your products and services. For example, do your customers interact with your brand at home or on the go? Both? Do they depend on you daily or intermittently?
Start by collecting all your customer data from throughout your organization, then plug it into a data platform that can help you identify key personas. Learn how those personas interact and respond at different touchpoints
Keep in mind as well that as your technology evolves and new channels emerge, so will your sources of data. So constantly revisit your data sources and make sure you’re using everything you’ve got.
And because quantitative data tells only one side of the customer story, you need to round out your learnings with more hands-on research. Enlisting ethnographers or cultural anthropologists to observe and listen through interviews, “follow me home” research, or shopper shadowing helps you understand how people use your products and services and learn where you can improve their experiences.
Prototype the experience
With your new customer journey maps, build out experiences for your key personas. But understand that you don’t have to engineer every interaction all at once. You’ve spent the time to understand these journeys, so you can start to prioritize the touchpoints that will make the most emotional impact on each persona as they move from channel to channel. You certainly shouldn’t ignore the other touchpoints, but with your journey maps, you can see where each touchpoint will have the greatest effect and plan accordingly.
Analyse and revise your prototype
Use data to learn how customers respond to your experience prototypes. Identifying data anomalies quickly shows you areas within the customer journey where customers are experiencing extreme friction or enjoyment. As you uncover the reasons for these anomalies, you’ll know whether to repeat your previous efforts or redesign them to improve the experience.
Again, use key informant interviews or focus groups to get qualitative feedback. Ask customer services, sales, and support teams for input provided by customers about their experiences. Find all areas that need adjustment, and make the appropriate changes.
Roll out and perform ongoing optimisation
Deliver the revised experience, modified to meet your customers’ needs and expectations. Continue to monitor how customers are responding to your experience design through direct feedback, social comments, and reviews.
Also use analytics to identify metrics like low conversion rates, abandoned cart statistics, video completions, repeat visits, and others that identify opportunities for improvement.
Automate engagement
Reaching each and every one of your customers with personalised content and experiences across channels and devices is impossible without automation.
To scale to meet the demands of your customer base, use technology to automate the delivery of one-on-one experiences that are relevant to each customer segment.
At the same time, continue to evaluate the experience, both by customer satisfaction and the evolving needs and capabilities of your business. Just because an experience is working well doesn’t mean it couldn’t work better if you augmented it with a connection from a new channel.
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