Feb 14, 2019

A Spoonful Of Customer Love To Make Your E-Commerce Brand A Lot Sweeter

When was the last time someone surprised you? It may have been a random gift that your best buddy gave you. Maybe even a surprise birthday or anniversary party. Gestures like these put a big smile on your face since you don’t expect it to happen every day.

Come the month of February, it’s hard to ignore the buzz around Valentine’s Day. With every brand running campaigns, it’s also a chance for them to connect with their customers since love is a universal topic.

However, let’s not forget that it’s important to show your customers how much you love them not just today – but every day. That’s why customer delight is critical.

With digitalization, brands are constantly competing for digital mind-space. Owing to this, the e-commerce industry is thriving as many prefer making transactions through digital wallets or other payment methods. This is also another reason why supporting industries are also working hard to create and deliver a seamless experience across channels.

But how does customer delight fit in the CX puzzle that e-commerce players are working towards?

E-commerce giants who have their fair share of digital-savvy customers often practice customer delight with a surprise factor. Some of the common answers to delivering a consistent experience include:

• 24X7 support on phone lines
• Web cookies (to track site movement) to display ads
• Emails on deals of the day or week
• Web / video chat

But when innovation and creativity bring a personalized touch to interactions, customers are happier. These can comprise of:

a) Personalized emails: A simple addition of having the customer’s name in an email adds a little bit of magic. This along with deals based on web searches add value to the emails.

b) Website pop-ups: Similar to the web cookies, most e-commerce players use it to resell the customer’s frequently used products or cross-sell ideal matches to items in the shopping cart.

c) Predictive phone interactions: When an agent greets you and also predicts the reason for your call, you wouldn’t mind calling the contact center to rectify your issues. This reduces the strain that customers face when trying to explain the problem. For example, an issue regarding billing or late delivery are triggers for calls to agents.

How to deliver an intuitive and personalized CXWatch Video

d) Verified list of sellers: For high loyalty customers, brands could share a list of verified sellers based on their frequently purchased items. This ensures timely delivery and a good quality product.

e) Purchase reminders: Every e-commerce company has a database of the purchases by every customer, with some of them being repeat purchases in a period of 30 or 90 days. To maximize purchases, they could send reminders via email about buying the product.

f) Personalized deals via SMS/emails: Oftentimes customers wish to buy things but they are out of stock. Their instant action would be to add it to their wish-list. With this data, brands could send out offers or notify them when items are back in stock.

g) Early bird offers: During Thanksgiving, Christmas, or End of Season sales, customers go gaga on the list of items that are put on sale. To give them an advantage, loyalists could be an all access offer a few hours prior to the start of the sale.

h) Easy return/refund process: Products in transit from the seller may face quality tampering issues or sometimes may not be the right one. In situations like this, customers prefer to return their deliveries. An easy return/refund process can help manage interactions better and increase the speed of problem resolution.

i) Free/Negligible shipping costs and free returns: Free shipping costs, faster deliveries and free return on selected products are a few ways to improve the shopping experience.

Customer delight represents those little things that brands do to make your customers smile. Going above and beyond to create a memorable experience will likely make them loyal in the long run.

So, what are some tips and tricks that you have to delight your customers? Share them with us!