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How To Keep Online Shoppers Happy: Your Guide To Ecom Customer Satisfaction

how-to-keep-online-shoppers-happy:-your-guide-to-ecom-customer-satisfaction

Ecommerce customer satisfaction is multifaceted. Customers need to fall in love with your products, your brand, but also your customer support.

Customer satisfaction is critical to your ecommerce business, because you want as many repeat buyers as possible.

Customers can continue to spend money with your brand for so many reasons:

  • Purchase related products or similar products
  • Get gifts for their friends family
  • Stay subscribed to your subscription box
  • Refill or reorder your products when they run out

The motivations for customer loyalty are endless. But none of these will come true if your customers aren’t satisfied with not only your products but your customer service interactions too.

In this post, we dive into what creates high levels of ecommerce customer satisfaction, how to measure this, and how to improve it so you can keep your customers as happy as possible. 

What factors go into ecommerce customer satisfaction?

Buying products online can be fun and exciting. From hitting the “place order” button, to stalking the tracking page, to opening up a cool package, customers love online shopping. 83% of US consumers are satisfied with their overall online shopping experiences. According to the research, the top reasons for that satisfaction are the ease of checkout and the variety of brands and products available.

To impress your customers and turn them into repeat buyers, you need to nail all of the following factors:

Product quality

77% of consumers say that what increases their brand loyalty most is quality products. Have you ever heard the saying “you can’t paint lipstick on a pig?” This is very true. Every other factor below won’t improve your ecommerce customer satisfaction if you’re not offering great products. 

Here are some important ways your products can stand out:

  • Material quality
  • Effectiveness or comprehensiveness for solving a problem
  • Better branding and packaging
  • More on-trend
  • Sustainability
  • Value for money

Product listing accuracy

Inacurrate or incomplete product listings can cause a lot of frustration. 

If certain details are left out, customers can feel misled. If they don’t have a deep enough sense of loyalty to your brand, this can cause them to abruptly end the relationship and not order from you again. 

Fortunately, reviews and customer service interactions are an easy way to find problematic listings. You can fix your listings with better images and more accurate product descriptions.

Shipping speed, transparency, and cost

Shipping speed and transparency are major factors when it comes to ecommerce customer satisfaction. Customers want free or affordable shipping, and they want to know exactly when the order will arrive before they complete the checkout process. 

53% of online shoppers won’t purchase something if it’s not clear when it will arrive, and 43% have abandoned a cart because of too-high shipping costs. When the order is placed, customers want regular communication throughout the delivery process, like SMS and email updates. 

You can use ecommerce shipping software to provide accurate shipping rates during checkout and offer on-brand shipping updates.

Return policy

Because of what big brands and retailers offer, online shoppers have come to expect a favorable return policy even from smaller ecommerce brands. 92% of online shoppers say that they are likely to purchase from a brand again if the return process is easy. 

Customers expect free or affordable shipping (such as a flat rate of $5-8). They also expect to have a pre-paid return label included in the order, or to be able to easily print one online. Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be a technological challenge. Many shipping software platforms designed for ecommerce companies also include features for printable return labels. 

Customer service quality

89% of companies say that great customer service plays a big role in customer retention. Retention can have a big impact on your revenue. Existing customers are 50% more likely to buy one of your new products, and they are also 31% more likely to spend more than your average cart order value than new customers. 

In order to improve your customer satisfaction, you first need to measure it. Here’s how. 

How to measure customer support quality and overall ecommerce customer satisfaction

Don’t overcomplicate measuring customer satisfaction. 

Instead, choose a handful of really important metrics to track, and make sure that your scores are improving every quarter. If you see big dips, get to the root and address it.

These are the metrics we recommend:

First response time

When you track your first response time to customer support tickets, you can set an accurate minimum benchmark and also create goals for improvements. 

We looked into the average response time for all the customers of our ecommerce help desk software, and for the most efficient 25%. Here’s what we found:

  • Average first response time of all Gorgias users: 12.13 hours
  • Average first response time of the upper pf Gorgias users quartile: 2.21 hours

Resolution time

The average resolution time is another smart metric to track, for benchmarking purposes. The most efficient ecommerce companies resolve customer issues in less than 5 hours. 

  • Average resolution time of all Gorgias users: 43.87 hours
  • Average resolution time of the upper quartile of Gorgias users: 4.98 hours

Support quality level

To measure customer support quality, we created a system called the support quality level. We’ve broken this system down into 5 levels. The top 1% of Gorgias customers with the highest quality support have a first response time of 0.08 hours (4.8 minutes) and an average resolution time of 0.03 (1.8 minutes). 

Gorgias users in the top support quality levels use our customer support automations and template features to drastically speed up their response times and the standardization of the messaging. 

Net promoter score

Net promoter score (NPS) is a system that all sorts of businesses (including ecommerce) use to measure customer satisfaction. You can install an NPS widget on your website and ask customers to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely they are to recommend your brand or your products to a friend. 

For best results, use an NPS widget that lets you set criteria for the customers that will see the survey request. For example, you could set the widget only to appear to logged in users who have placed at least one order, or who have visited your website at least 3 times in the past month. This way, you’re requesting the data from existing customers, not new website visitors.

Customer satisfaction score

A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is another popular metric. 

Like NPS, it aggregates responses to a very simple question. In customer satisfaction surveys, you’ll ask customers to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 how satisfied they are with your business. As with the NPS, make sure to set criteria for which customers will see this widget on your website. Or, you can work this into your processes. For example, you can add this question to your order tracking page, customer portal, or drop it in a chat conversation after an issue is resolved. 

You can use the American Customer Satisfaction Index to find the right benchmark for your industry or product categories.

How to amp up ecommerce customer satisfaction

When you want to improve the customer satisfaction for your ecommerce brand, there are three main ways to do it:

  1. Listen to your customers
  2. Deliver outstanding customer support
  3. Create branded experiences at every step

Listen to your customers

Your conversion rate will be higher with existing customers, who are 3 times more likely to purchase any product than a new customer. 

Customer reviews and social media are treasure troves of customer feedback to help you find what existing customers want.

Your customers might suggest improvements to a product’s design, or request the same product in more colors or variations. 

Brands who listen to their customers  will create a strong bond with their customers, increase loyalty, and drive more repeat sales. 

With Gorgias, you can manage your social media support queries in one place. This not only helps you provide better customer service, but it makes it easier to analyze comments and issues that originate on social platforms. 

Deliver outstanding customer support

When you offer amazing customer support, you show your customers that you care about them and that you value their time and their patronage. 

To deliver great support, you need to templatize your responses. Not only will this save time, but it will ensure a consistent experience, regardless of the agent handling the issue. 

It’s also smart to use a help desk software that pulls data from multiple sources, so you can have accurate automations and responses that are unique to the customer’s needs. 

Create branded experiences at every step

When customers shop from you, they want the full experience. They’ve chosen your brand over any others. When you create a completely branded customer experience, you reinforce that decision and make them feel like they are part of something bigger. 

Depending on your brand, that “something bigger” could be a lot of things. Maybe your brand helps women feel more confident, or it allows them to support a minority-owned business, or it makes it easier for them to make healthier choices. 

“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.”

– Howard Shultz, CEO OF Starbucks

Beyond the products, there is always a deeper meaning. Find those values, and make them evident across every interaction. 

Your brand should be infused not only in your products, but in the packaging, your marketing campaigns, the brand voice you use for customer support—everything. 

Gorgias is a scalable help desk for providing amazing support. Learn about how our DTC brands use Gorgias

Special thanks to our friends at Gorgias for their insights on this topic.
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