Maybe you’re not completely aware, but surfing and the usability of your online store could be frustrating your customers and, therefore, thwarting sales. Let’s talk about the customer experience and the mistakes that are costing you money.

What do we mean by Customer Experience?

It’s more than optimizing a channel. We understand the user experience to be the global interaction between the brand and every process done with the customer. Customer-centric experiences are talked about more and more now, with everything revolving around what the customer feels, needs, and even suggests. The goal is for everything to go smoothly, with no hiccups, so the user becomes a recurring customer.

Some CX errors that are costing you money are:

#1– You’re not coordinating your team

A good customer experience has to be something that passes through all levels of the company, from the sales, logistics, and communications teams to management and, of course, customer service.

You have tobe thorough with every person and department involved. It’s not a question of web design or how you deal with post-sale complaints. Everyone should pull in the same direction because if each department has a different protocol, you’ll have clashes among workers, which will directly affect the customer and your profits.

Seriously: define and create a plan on how to deal with each taskconcerning the customer, look for synergies and don’t hesitate to have continuous training to make sure everything’s clear.

#2– You’re hiding

We’ve all seen web sites that you practically have to be a detective to contact. It doesn’t matter if you think everything’s clear or that no one will have any questions: there’s a certain percentage of customers who will have questions no matter what and will need to grab onto something to keep from getting frustrated and moving on to the next Googlehit or a competitor’s ad.

It’s not just a matter of having a phone number or uploading an in-depth contact form (and a chat of course). These elements have to be there, whether they’re interactive or proactive like the click-to-call or online calling. This way, the user feels that all their queries are welcome, which is precisely one of the reasons to go with Oct8ne: you combine all forms of contact in a single, attractive and visual tool.

#3– You collect data without analyzing it

The online sector has suddenly meant having access to a quantity of data that we couldn’t have imagined 10 years ago. We have incredibly thorough reports at our disposal just a click away but we don’t always take advantage of this information.

It’s critical that you stop to think about your strategy and define the KPIs related to the user experience, just like you do with advertisements. Look at metrics like:

• Direct traffic: If your users come to you this way, they either know who you are or have been recommended by other users.
• Pages viewed and length of stay: Put it in to perspective; If theylook at a lot of pages or browse for a long time without making a purchase…something isn’t working well.
• Cart abandonment: This is critical and a key indicator of lack of persuasion, confidence, or even technique.
• Churn rate: Do customers give up on your communication efforts? Or worse, on your services? Don’t let these metrics get out of control without taking a look at what’s happening.
• Customer satisfaction: You can chooseto implement some type of NPS (Net Promoter Score) that will help you translate the average user satisfaction level into data. It seems pretty basic but it works well if you ask your customers directly.

These are just a few examples, but I think you can see exactly what I mean.

#4– You’re not listening to your customers

This is probably the CX error that costs a company the most money. We think we know exactly what a customer wants but won’t the customer himself know better?

We need to focus on analyzing audience feedback from any medium, so it’s best to collect all the information you have: social networks, phone calls, emails and, of course, your agents’ comments since they have direct contact with the customer.

Once you have that information, take time toanalyze it and extract patterns. A comment or complaint will get your attention if it’s repeated too often.  Don’t ignore it because it could end up being a problem for your conversion.

#5– Don’t dwell on the ‘shy ones’

By ‘shy ones’, we mean the users who prefer to search for answers by themselves before asking proactively. We could also call them ‘self-sufficient’, which is something that’s heavily promoted on the internet.

For these users, it’s important to have a FAQ or a public knowledge base with an index that includes the most common questions. This is a good step because it frees up your customer service agents from answering recurring questions. In the event thata customer’s question isn’t completely answered, they’ll be guided to customer service, which will speed up managing the situation.

Do you see yourself anywhere here?  Are you making any of these CX mistakes that could lose you sales?