What does the 2020 shopper look like? Despite our best predictions from 2019, understanding the modern shopper has become more of a journey than a destination. With customer preferences, priorities, and behaviors changing daily, what worked last month no longer works today. This presents a huge challenge for brands looking to drive growth in the current retail environment.
The 2020 pandemic led to record breaking ecommerce activity as consumers quickly turned to digital alternatives to in-person shopping experiences. 41% of customers are currently shopping online for things they used to buy in-stores. Many consumers plan to maintain this new shopping behavior even after the pandemic ends. The burst of growth in eCommerce is here to stay. And to add fuel to the fire, the largest retailers in the world are doubling down on direct sales.
Fortunately, staying ahead of a constantly changing market can be simple. By collecting the right feedback from customers, companies are able to adapt products, experiences, and marketing campaigns in-step with their customers. When done right, this decreases acquisition costs, increases website conversion rates, and improves customer loyalty. The hard part is finding a way to collect the meaningful insights your organization needs to succeed without annoying your customers with out-of-date feedback gathering methods.
Where Companies Get It Wrong
Most companies understand the value of customer feedback to the organization. Unfortunately, the traditional feedback gathering approach is no longer enough. Today’s consumers suffer from survey overload. Inboxes are inundated with attempts to gather feedback that customers have begun to tune out. As Gen Y, Gen Z, and Millennials become a larger representation of the market, companies must “think outside the survey” in order to gather feedback from these hard-to-reach audiences.
If we aren’t going out of our way to find engaging, fun, or even gamified alternatives that get customers excited and willing to provide feedback, then we aren’t making our investments in feedback gathering worthwhile.
We know how detrimental negative customer experiences can be for a brand, but for every 1 customer who complains, 26 other customers who feel the same way say nothing? Customers will simply abandon their purchase journey and not purchase from you again. You will have no way to know how you could have improved that experience, gotten the customer to buy, and turned them from a detractor to an advocate of your brand.
With so much on the line, if we aren’t putting in the right processes and technology in place to gather immediate feedback from our customers—that they’ll actually engage with—and use that to better their experiences and increase their likelihood to purchase, we’re going to be swept away by competitors that do.
eCommerce has become the battleground for market dominance and traditional methods for gathering feedback from online purchasing experiences no longer cut it.
Offer Your Customers a Simple, Quick Touchpoint
Don’t deaden the customer experience with a lengthy post-purchase survey buried in email. Hear from your customers while they’re browsing your site, with the opportunity to provide meaningful insights right where they are in their shopping experience. With the right tool for collecting feedback, your brand will experience unprecedented levels of engagement and higher conversion rates from your CTAs, driving actual value from your efforts.
Feedback is a gift, so brands must put a system in place that maximizes engagement from hard-to-reach audiences and does so in a way that provides a positive experience for the customer at the same time.
Here are three ways you can drive even more value from your customer insight efforts:
Get to know your buyers:
Engage customers and broad audiences with short, gamified, and visually rich interactions. Dive into your consumers’ persona, their preferences, and what they truly need from your brand and products, while they are engaging on your site. Make buyer insights the basis of the long-term relationship you want to establish with customers.
Personalize interactions:
Engage with audiences in a way that aligns with your brand’s vibe and in the spirit of the platform you are posting on. Ask the right questions to the right audience segments at the right moment in their customer journey. Personalized interactions = higher engagement = deeper insights = better business decisions.
Accelerate time-to-value:
Take control of the digital interactions you extend to customers. Deploy tailored interactions on digital platforms where your customers spend time with minimal IT involvement. Gather up-to-the-minute customer feedback to glean insights on topics you and your customers care about. Leverage the insights to inform stakeholders and decisions at the speed of business.
As you build out your digital capabilities with improved online shopping sites, mobile apps, and simple payment options to cater to the increased demand this holiday season, it’s important to also think about how you will source meaningful insights from customers on your website and social platforms. The solution must be flexible and seamlessly integrate with your current technology landscape in order to provide value quickly.
Your customers are invaluable sources of knowledge. If you put systems in place to collect meaningful feedback from customers, you’ll accumulate a bank of knowledge and empathy for the problems or challenges they face. The insights will help you anticipate what customers want and turn more shoppers into customers.
How can you quickly harness the voice of shoppers, followers, visitors, and consumers? Get a demo of Alida Touchpoint today!
