How To Improve The Customer Satisfaction of Your eCommerce Store

Satisfied customers are the most important part of any business. It won’t matter how good your product might be if you can’t meet customer expectations and make them want to buy from you.

And what’s even worse, bad customer experiences can quickly snowball into a big crisis for your business.

The average American will share their negative experience with fifteen people, which means that you’re not only losing the single customer but are forming a negative reputation about your brand.

What’s more, 89% of customers say that a quick response to an inquiry plays a vital role in their decision to buy or not.

But when even the smallest details play such an important role, what can you do to minimize the chances of bad customer experiences?

Well, to help you get started, let’s look at some of the most critical aspects of customer satisfaction on your eCommerce store, as well as tips on how to improve the customer satisfaction.

Focus on Seamless UX

User experience is a hot buzzword in the eCommerce store, and for good reason. Consumers have many choices when shopping for just about anything, and if your store isn’t on par with the industry leaders, they won’t waste time trying to navigate it.

In fact, having a poor user experience on your site can be the deciding factor that limits your sales and pushes away a significant number of otherwise ideal customers.

Therefore, one of the first things you should do is carefully analyze how your website functions and how to improve it. New tools and approaches are being developed each year, and the eCommerce stores that adopt them first will have a massive advantage over the competition.

One of the first things you should do is ensure that you’re operating on a modern, innovative platform equipped with all of the necessary tools for success. If you need a custom solution, you might even want to consider Big Commerce design services to help you get the functionality that your site needs.

One of the most important features you should be striving to improve is personalized recommendations based on user behaviors. The technology has been around for a while, but you should try to make the recommendations as accurate and relevant as possible, which can be the single biggest catalyst for your growth.

You should also look at your site’s structure and how your products are categorized. Think about what type of audience you’re catering to and try to make the journey towards finding the right product as short as possible.

Finally, make sure that your website features plenty of social proof, encouraging your customers to share their experiences and then putting those testimonials on full display.

Whether it’s general testimonials about your services or product reviews, social proof elements play a vital role in the decision to buy, so think about how you can make it a bigger part of your site.

Collect Customer Feedback

If you want to improve as a business consistently, you can’t rely on yourself to make the right calls every time. After all, the eCommerce store you’ve created is there for the customers, so it’s only natural that you should ask for their opinion on various aspects of their experience on your site.

And the good news is that there are multiple ways you can collect feedback from your customers and gain unique insights about their needs and preferences.

One of the most straightforward methods is using surveys. Many online survey tools make this easy, and you can either embed the survey link on your site or reach out to customers directly.

Surveys are great because you can do them at scale, they require little effort once set up, and you can ask all kinds of questions, even open-ended ones.

However, if you want people to follow through and make an effort, it’s a good idea to incentivize the survey with a discount or exclusive offer.

Another great way to learn about your eCommerce store and especially your products is through reviews. As mentioned before, reviews are an excellent social proof element, but they can also help determine which products to focus on and how to improve your selection.

Finally, you can use analytics to gain insights without having to interact with your audience directly. By looking at which pages they’re engaging with, you can learn about what to focus on and restructure your site for better customer experiences.

Create a Knowledge Base System

One of the biggest headaches eCommerce stores face is having to deal with customer complaints. And unfortunately, that’s an unavoidable aspect of running an online business since customers will sometimes have questions or run into issues.

However, while that may be unavoidable, it doesn’t mean that you can’t strive to make the process more efficient.

Instead of dealing with the same issues repeatedly, you could create a knowledge base that you can direct customers to when they are facing a common problem. That way, once it has been resolved by a live support representative, next time, it won’t have to take as much time, and your staff can focus on more challenging issues.

However, to make the process as simple as possible, it’s essential to choose one of the best knowledge management systems that are easy to use.

At first, adding posts and articles to the knowledge base will take time. Still, as you develop a more effective system and accumulate a more extensive library of answers, you’ll start to see the massive benefits that it offers.

Provide Top-Tier Customer Support

All of the strategies listed above can help you take steps in the right direction and significantly improve your customer satisfaction. But in the end, if your support team can’t help your customers in a timely manner, none of that will matter.

And to make your support excel among your competition, you will need to take a comprehensive approach that restructures your support system from the ground up.

For one thing, you should make reaching out as simple as possible. Phone and email are no longer enough, and you should consider adding chatbots, live chat on your website, and even ways to quickly reach you on social media.

Another crucial aspect of customer support is actually helping them. Your support team must be trained to handle different situations, such as where to direct users and how to provide help as quickly as possible.

If you take full advantage of the knowledge base discussed earlier, you will find that your team won’t have to spend as much time solving the actual problems and can instead direct customers to helpful resources.

This will help keep interactions short, ensure a high problem resolution rate, and keep your staff available for the next person that seeks help.

Final Words

Customer satisfaction can be the deciding factor that either propels your eCommerce store’s growth or causes it to fail.

But if you take advantage of the strategies outlined in this post, you will have a much better chance of staying in front of any issues that might arise and providing your customers with the best experience possible.