During the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer expectations rose quickly: an October 2020 survey by Talkdesk found that 58% of consumers said their service expectations are higher today than they were a year ago. Buying habits bear it out, too: 65% of consumers give buying preference to companies that offer quick and easy online transactions as part of the customer experience (CX). That’s forcing companies to rethink their digital customer experience in a new light.
Since customer experience is made up of countless touchpoints, each with the potential to provide friction or value to consumers, it’s important to relentlessly track down every source of friction. But the quality of your ecommerce experience doesn’t depend solely on CX or digital experience (DX) managers. It doesn’t depend only on ops, development, marketing, customer service or product teams.
It depends on all of them working together – seamlessly.
Ecommerce customer experience is critical to the entire business
While some departments are closer to CX than others, customer experience is a business-wide imperative. More than two thirds of leaders responsible for CX say it’s the basis on which their business competes with other businesses (Gartner CX Survey, 2018).
Why CX is crucial for modern ecommerce. 63% of managers say cx became more important after 2020 (Zendesk). 90% of consumers will abandon a brand after 2-5 bad experiences (SAS). More than half of consumers say most companies fall short of their cx expectations (salesforce)
The simple fact is that siloes are one of the Photo Editing Services biggest roadblocks to creating the best ecommerce CX possible. Forrester reports that a lack of cooperation is the most significant obstacle to improving an organisation’s customer experience. Lack of collaboration consistently outranked budget, culture, and data as the biggest obstacle three years running.
A 2021 survey by Acquia found that 72% of marketers around the world need help from technologists to create digital CX, highlighting the need for strong collaborative practices and tools. Speaking of which, technology isn’t much help either. The same survey found that 73% of marketers believe their current marketing tech is holding them back from creating the innovative digital experiences their customers want.
Customer experience isn’t anyone’s responsibility – it’s everyone’s
Here’s the fastest way to identify areas for CX improvement in your organisation:
Look for functional objectives that don’t consider CX as a primary factor or conflict with the CX priorities of another team.
Identify CX-related tools and systems that don’t enable visibility and collaboration across functions.
Pinpoint the crucial data that is inaccessible to or doesn’t get shared with other departments.
Internal misalignment almost invariably creates breakdowns in the ecommerce experience.
For example, how does the feedback your support teams hear directly from customers line up with the marketing team’s positioning and priorities? Where does the analytics team see the greatest optimisation opportunities, and does that jive with data on your app performance? But eliminating those breakdowns isn’t easy. It can only be accomplished when you create a unified view of the customer’s ecommerce experience – a common platform for understanding the experience, identifying issues and prioritising projects, and a single set of data for all teams to tap into. Add to that aligned business objectives and you have the recipe for an exceptional ecommerce experience.