Bad navigation and poor ‘findability’ are common examples but serious issues customers are encountering on business’ websites, leading to lost revenue of around £12bn annually in the UK.
It’s happened to all of us. We need to do some last-minute shopping, so we power up a laptop and after five minutes of browsing online we find just the thing. Add the item to the shopping cart, click “check out.”
Then we wait. Click again. Wait some more. Hit the “back” button. We examine the contents of the cart and try again, only to return to the checkout page to find that the cart is empty. Transaction failed.
This happens across any variety of transactions, not just retail. A customer may eventually succeed or might quickly move on to a different vendor’s website. Either way, they have just experienced “online customer struggle.”
We’ve all struggled online, whether it’s difficulty logging into an account we haven’t used for a while, adding an item to a shopping cart, completing a financial transaction or navigating through a site. Yet these seemingly minor issues can have a huge and negative impact on a company’s bottom line.
Poor online user experience, coupled with a lack of insight about why customers are abandoning websites, is causing businesses to lose 24% of their annual online revenues – this equates to around £14 billion lost in the UK in the last year, according to a study by Tealeaf.
As the online channel becomes increasingly valuable to business, it is vital for organisations to ensure that the customer journey is as pain-free and seamless as possible. The most common causes of online customer struggle are:
- Customers often aren’t sure what path they need to go to accomplish their task;
- Customers just don’t understand the information on a page, whether it’s a description of a product or a service;
- If customers aren’t sure if they can complete a process like applying for a loan or making a change to a setting on their account, then they aren’t likely to finish the process;
- At times, customers need information that is scattered across the site, forcing them to hunt around to collect what they need;
- When the site goes down or returns an unexpected error message, customers can be turned off from the entire experience.
The rewards of moving to online self-service can be quite high. Do it well – that is, provide a streamlined and efficient channel delivering an experience that’s more satisfying than traditional means of customer service – and you’ll save money, increase customer retention and have bragging rights over the competition.
But do it poorly, and you’ll spend a lot of time and money trying to win customers back.
Businesses need to remember that customer-facing applications are only as beneficial as the customers themselves deem them to be. Without a healthy understanding of how customers behave, online self-service can be a perilous undertaking.
The problem is, it’s nearly impossible to catch all the things that can cause customers to struggle on your site. So the question becomes how to get a clear picture of customer behaviour and proactively identify customer issues.
Customer experience management enables you to take a disciplined approach to understanding how customers interact with your business online and removing the obstacles to their success. Until you know why things are going wrong, you can’t fix the causes of poor customer experience. Customer experience management shows the ‘why’ – like why so many customers accessing a self-service application suddenly need help.
Customer perceptions of an organisation are built as a result of their interactions across multiple channels, and online business is rapidly becoming multi-channel business. With the cost pressures that companies face today and the unbelievably fast growth of the mobile web, it is harder than ever to deliver a seamless experience to every customer, in every channel, every time. Furthermore, social media can increase the impact of a poor customer experience from a single disgruntled customer to millions of apprehensive prospects.
