Member Article

E-tailers must be wise to customer experience

The UK’s online shoppers are experiencing problems, according to major research from customer contact specialists, Aspect.

The study, conducted in December of last year, found that one third of online shoppers encountered difficulties during their last online shopping experience.

Some of the obstacles identified included: ‘couldn’t find an answer to a question’, ‘insufficient product information’ and ‘a slow website’.

Aspect suggest e-tailers should be wary of such customer experiences, which may encourage them to seek alternatives.

10% of respondents had to contact e-tailers, post-purchase to return items, check on deliveries, or change orders.

Elsewhere, 97% of shoppers reported abandoned shopping baskets at some time, ranging from Cds to furniture, and cited reasons from ‘unable to access live support’, ‘delivery charges’ and insufficient product information.’

Despite the negative findings, 86% of shoppers said they were ‘happy’ or ‘very happy’ with their last shopping experience.

One of the key findings of the study, was lack of liver service support, particularly at weekends and in the evenings.

Mark King, Senior VP of Aspect for Europe and Africa, said: “To ensure sites are ‘stickier’ and fewer issues arise during the purchasing process, e-tailers must consider investing in improved information, self-service (pre and post purchase), live help (voice and webchat) and outbound contact facilities.

“They should also re-assess when and how they use different communications channels (email, phone, web chat etc.) to ensure that both their objectives, and those of their customers, are optimally met.”

“Despite this, the cost of supplying an agent based channel for customers is costly and is unsustainable, and e-tailers must embrace multi-channel customer contact in the same way as they have embraced multi-channel retailing.”

Among the recommendations following the report, Aspect suggest use of ‘cart recovery’ techniques, where e-tailers contact shoppers within 24 hours of abandonment to employ re-marketing techniques.

The company also encouraged e-tailers to consider the value of different communications, claiming that online shoppers are often forced down the email route because it is the cheapest option for e-tailers rather than the preferred choice for shoppers.

Mark King added: “Our survey revealed, however, that currently e-tailers make 92 percent of purchase confirmations by email.

“And when asked how they prefer to communicate with e-tailers, just 52 percent of shoppers opted for email, while 31 percent selected the phone, and 16 percent web chat.

“There is a role for higher value ‘live agent’ voice and web chat services in key service areas: such asproactively calling valued customers to update statuses and alert them to issues (even before they become aware of them), and offering web chat assistance to customers that are struggling with the online shopping process.

“We believe that this will not only help reduce the number of abandoned shopping baskets but also reduce the number of unnecessary customer calls caused by individuals making incorrect purchasing choices because of a lack of information, or because they misunderstood an instruction.

“Call avoidance should not be seen as a negative position. By informing the customer before they ask the question is actually an improvement to customer service and to consumer perception of a company or brand, which costs less than the traditional inbound call centre operations of the past.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .