E-commerce experts reveal steps in improving customer experience

Growth is predicated on customer experience, they said.

Optimisation of customer experience is at the core of it all when achieving success in digital commerce.

This sentiment was strongly stressed by Ultra Commerce vice president for strategy and corporate development Jeremy Howe and Amazon Web Services head of developer advocacy for AJPC Matt Fitzgerald during the ‘Success factors for an exceptional online customer experience’ webinar.

More than 90 people participated in the webinar moderated by Retail Asia publisher and editor-in-chief Tim Charlton.

Driving exceptional online customer experience
In a nutshell, there are four tasks organisations must do to improve their customers’ experience. At the top of it all is being able to add modern features quickly, which serves as a top “critical challenge” for 31% of organisations, according to a study by Gartner.

To elaborate on that, Fitzgerald talked about the Amazon flywheel, saying that growth is predicated on the customer experience, which is the starting point of everything. He mentioned, as an example,that Amazon has invested heavily in the infrastructure side of things to deliver a more seamless service to users.

Fitzgerald also explained the “two pizza team” concept. In maximising the efficiency of teams, these should only comprise “just enough people that two pizzas should be able to feed.” These small teams will then move quickly, and be responsible for specific subsets of functionality whilst working together to achieve the larger objectives.

Delivery of personalised experiences is also essential, as customers want services “that are bespoke to them.” Personalisation of services is based on inferring; on the customers’ past purchases, videos watched, ads clicked on, amongst other things. By predicting these things, online retailers can reduce the friction on the checkout process.

“Personalisation is key to driving revenue because we want the people to stay on the website,” said Fitzgerald.

Moreover, reaching customers across multiple channels is also vital, as the world has moved on from being a desktop-centric to mobile and more. Howe said: “In a future state, commerce organisations will be faced with the prospect of supporting dozens of different channels and the need to reward customer loyalty across all channels.”

Howe added that being able to talk consistently to customers regardless of which channel is used is also becoming increasingly important.

Lastly, understanding buyer behaviour through analytics is important. Data gleaned from a digital commerce app, historical data, and more will give better personalisation in terms of personalised searches, offers and promos, recommendations, and segmentation.

In choosing a digital commerce platform, Howe advised to look for those which offer out-of-the-box features, with “the more customisations to deliver what your customers want when they want it.” Digital platforms should also be flexible, and the organisation using it should also be able to grow with it.