Improve and optimise the eCommerce Customer Experience
What is Customer eXperience Optimisation and what it means
It’s not easy to talk about Customer eXperience Optimisation (CXO) if we don’t introduce the concept of Customer eXperience (CX) first.
CX can be defined as the set of feelings that a customer experiences in relating with a company or a brand for as long as it will remain a customer. This includes every interaction between the brand and the consumer regardless of the channel where it takes place and every detail and nuance of this interaction.
CX is therefore deeply linked to the omnichannel, that is the multichannel approach to marketing, sales and service to consumers regardless of how, where and when the consumer is reached out or reaches the brand itself.
This omnichannel approach allows the consumer to live a fully integrated and coherent CX in all phases of the relationship with the brand during his customer journey and during his customer lifecycle. By placing the consumer at the centre of its brand strategy, it is possible to guarantee a seamless experience independent of the channel and the moment.
CXO means working on many aspects of brand strategy with the aim of ensuring that the experience of consumers in the various touchpoints with the brand not only corresponds to their expectations, but that these are also exceeded.
Why it is important
CX is the key factor for many consumers when deciding to buy a product or a service. Customers today don’t just want a website, an app or an e-commerce that works, they want it to work seamlessly, save them time, recognise their interests or their preferences perhaps without them even realising it.
But not only that: CX for many brands is the way to maintain a competitive advantage over their competitors. Leading brands continue to develop constantly an omnichannel experience that increasingly focuses on the final consumer and his experience with the brand.
With this in mind, CXO become a highly crucial activity for a brand with a special focus on e-commerce optimization. This process of improvement allows the brand to develop a better experience that will lead to conversion rate optimisation, to business reputation growing and to brand image boosting.
Our approach
There is no standard customer, everyone’s needs are varying depending on time and context.
Our scenario-based approach, foundational to being customer-centric, enables us to imagine typical paths to conversion and loyalty and to understand customers’ expectations and identify areas to focus upon to improve and personalise the CX.
But we don’t just do this: we collect and match data in order to refine the user-scenarios and to understand and predict what a great CX is. Blend qualitative insights such as research, users’ interviews, focus groups, usability testing and consumers data, such as sales data, web analytics, search data, is the focus activity for creating and delivering a better CX.
Our CXO method, in the end, combines new qualitative information to what data outline, allowing us to understand customers’ motivations, to underline their needs and to add detail to how they’re meeting those needs.
Our methodology
Once the project scope, its boundaries and its mission are identified we can start with the customer experience optimisation process.
During the first phase, we establish the foundations for the project through some interviews to significant stakeholders, carried out using our AWARE methodology (Analysis of Web Application Requirements). These interviews sessions provide valuable insights that would otherwise be difficult to obtain, summarised into a structured overview of the common findings.
The next step is the core of our methodology: we gather information coming from inspections (i.e. UX evaluation, tech inspection, SEO audit…), matched with ecommerce data (i.e. analytics, CRM, ERP…) and validated with customer through interviews (if needed). Through these activities, we’ll refine the starting user scenarios, identify the primary conversion funnels and outline the Emotional Customer Journey, a scheme that mixes a time lined CX with indications of customer’s emotional status, highlighting bottle necks and pain points.
At the end of this path a roadmap of the recommended activities will be defined, together with the overall prioritized features & changes list, to achieve the enhancement we set as starting goals: increase conversion rate, improve business reputation and boost brand image.
CX versus UX
What is UX? What is the difference from CX? We have defined CX as how customers perceive the totality of their interactions with a brand. User eXperience (UX) focuses on helping users complete a task in the most effective, efficient and enjoyable way possible. We can see an immediate difference: while UX concentrates on the end user (the one using the product or the service), CX focuses on the customer and on his journey with a brand. Both UX and CX are part of Service Design, that is the wider and complete experience design process.
UX design aims to enhance customer satisfaction by providing a high-quality website and service through different aspects:
- Usability is the basis of User eXperience design and determines the extent to which an e-commerce, a website or an app can be used by specific users to accomplish specific goals effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily
- Interaction design defines the interaction patterns that are most applicable in a specific platform, making the design as consistent and intuitive as possible.
- Information Architecture (IA) outlines the organisation and structure of a website and of its content in a way that makes navigation by the user as intuitive as possible.
- User Interface design (UI design) deals with the use of images, colours, fonts and other elements in order to enhance a design or an interaction and engage users.
In view of all of this, E-commerce User eXperience is therefore a fundamental part of our CXO methodology for brands that want to offer an optimised experience and a enhanced digital services to their consumers.