Customer Feedback Archives

Take A Deep Dive Into Your E-Commerce Site

Creating a compelling, informative, and user friendly e-commerce site can be tough. There is a lot of testing, planning and feedback collection that needs to happen to ensure a successful site.

Many companies will use tools such as Google Analytics’ in page analytics, which essentially shows a website with statistics at various touchpoints of a webpage, which gives a visual of how often links are clicked, pages are visited, etc.

Google Analytics also offers a behavior flow chart to show where website visitors start, which pages they go to after the landing page, and other useful information. This can be helpful in determining where customers tend to “drop off” or abandon their visit.

There are other ways to get deeper insight into website performance, pain points, and other information that will allow companies to improve the customer experience for their e-commerce customers.

Collect feedback: when customers place orders, or provide contact information at registration on your website, reach out to them to get feedback about their experience. This won’t capture those who abandon the site though. Enter exit intent technology – services designed to detect when a customer is about to leave your website, and make one last attempt to get their attention. This could be a pop up window that gives a special discount or offer if they stay to make a purchase, or another similar activity.

This can be helpful in gathering feedback from those who are ready to abandon the site, but it would have to be quick and easy in order to try to capture that information. Try a simple question such as, “Please let us know why you’re leaving!” and offer responses such as “It wasn’t what I was looking for” or “the website is running slowly/I’m having technical issues”, etc. This may detect trends other methods cannot pick up on.

Use mystery shopping: mystery shopping is an excellent tool that can be used to evaluate the e-commerce process from many different aspects. Not all companies think of evaluating their website using mystery shopping, but incorporating these evaluations can provide a deep dive of ease of use and valuable feedback. There are a couple of types of shopping programs that can be used:

Standard experience evaluation: this looks at all aspects of the e-commerce experience. Instruct shoppers to make a purchase and report on ease of use, quality of information, and overall experience. Dig deeper by including a call, email, or chat to customer service to ask questions to evaluate that piece of the journey, and finish with a product return to look at the final piece of the journey.

User experience: this is more detailed in that shoppers are instructed to use the website to purchase a specific type of product or register for a service. This looks more like a website video capture or journal in which the shopper provides commentary and suggestions on each point of the process – what was their impression of the website? How many clicks (pages) did it take to get to what they ultimately wanted to do? Where were the pain points? Was there enough information on the website to make an informed decision that would lead to a purchase? What is missing, and what could be improved? These are just some of the aspects that can be captured with this type of shop.

Pop up focus groups: thanks to online technology, this is easier than ever. Reach out to customers that have made online purchases, and offer them the opportunity to provide feedback in a focus group type format. This can easily be done in an online meeting room – listening to the conversations and collecting feedback in this type of setting is useful because people tend to offer more details in a group setting. One person may comment on something that triggers a memory from a past experience for another person, and that person will offer more insight and feedback that builds on a theme. This group conversation can be extremely valuable.

Online shopping is becoming an everyday event for many consumers, and it is only expected to increase in volume and activity. There are many tools to make sure your e-commerce site is as strong and functional as possible.

How Can You Get More From Your Feedback?

There is one very simple way to get even more from your customer feedback surveys – it can give you ideas, and assist in creating ready-made, authentic content for your marketing efforts.

Many feedback surveys offer a space for customers to provide comments regarding their experience with the company. By adding a simple disclaimer, those comments can become material to incorporate in future marketing efforts.

I’m seeing this more often when taking surveys as a customer; the simplest disclaimer with an offer to opt in, serves as a great way to curate content. Take a look at the examples below:

Let them know their words may be used: a restaurant offers optional space for customers to provide comments, and is sure to include the following statement:

The fine print: We reserve the right to use your comments to improve the restaurants or quote you to share the love.

This is a little vague, though it does inform customers that their comments may be used to “share the love.” There is not an opt in (or opt out) feature, so it may prohibit customers from providing this extra detail. It’s a great start, but not ideal.

Make it clear, and let them decide: the example below is perfect. It discloses that the comments provided may be used by the company, allows customers to opt in (or not), and offers a link to the terms & conditions.

Marketing has become challenging, and research points to the fact that customer reviews and word of mouth have more weight than company driven information. By taking this additional step in the feedback process, companies can easily and effortlessly collect this type of information to enhance current marketing efforts.

When Mystery Shopping & Feedback Suveys Are BFF’s

Two very different programs, two sets of data. For those companies using both a mystery shopping program (objective evaluation) and customer feedback (subjective evaluation), there is a wealth of information available that may not be immediately realized. This is the type of data that, while not obvious at times, can go a long way in making the most of both programs.

If your company uses both programs, hopefully the data is housed in the same portal. If not, it is a great idea to make this happen so you can easily see side by side data to make comparisons. If it is, there are a few things to look at to be sure you are getting the most valuable information possible.

Performance discrepancies

In many programs we’ve worked with, there is interestingly not a large data difference in performance scores for the feedback & shopping programs. This is fairly consistent across clients. However, there are times when we see a large discrepancy (more than 10% difference in scores on the two programs). When this happens, there are some things to consider:

Is it company wide or location specific? If this discrepancy is company wide, it may be telling you that perhaps you are not evaluating the right things in your mystery shopping program. It could also be that what you consider to be important tasks to produce a strong customer experience may not be what the customer perceives it to be.

Location specific discrepancies may boil down to a staff specific concern if the feedback data is collected during times when shops are not done. While this can possibly be determined through only one of the programs, having two programs can help bring this issue to light – after all, mystery shops are typically done once or twice per month; coupling this with feedback data can expedite finding the issue and resolving it.

Are you limiting your mystery shopping evaluation periods? If you focus your mystery shopping program on a specific time frame, maybe busier periods vs slower periods, and your performance scores on the feedback surveys are lower than your mystery shopping scores, it might signal that you need to open up the window of time shops can occur. This isn’t always the case, but it’s something to think about. When feedback surveys ask the customer for the time frame during which they visited, it is easy to pull overall scores by time frame to see if this is in fact a concern. It may signal a need for additional training for a particular staff member or shift of employees, or it may indicate that the staff is on “higher alert” during the times they know a mystery shopper can arrive, potentially skewing the results and/or causing “relaxed” service levels during other times of the day.

Not getting a lot of feedback surveys?

Ask one simple question – include “Did the cashier/employee mention the survey at the bottom of the receipt?” or a variation of this question. Look at the data that comes back to see if the survey is simply not being promoted the right way. This is also useful if you see that a location or group of locations does not have many customer survey responses – compare it to the response for the question on the mystery shopping report. This simple discovery could make the difference in the feedback volume you get.

Use data from one to enhance the other

What pains your customers? Identify the “pain points” customers share on the feedback surveys to enhance training to overcome these issues. Take it a step further and add questions to address the pain points on your mystery shopping report to further investigate. This can easily identify issues that need to be resolved quickly.

Test performance standards. Are there features of your customer experience that you think are important to customers, but you’re not sure? Add a question to your feedback survey that asks them to share their thoughts on it – you may be surprised with what you find. This can help tweak your training procedures and streamline the customer experience – a win/win situation all around.

Both mystery shopping and customer feedback programs are important to gauge customer satisfaction and continually improve the overall experience. When used efficiently and a bit “outside the box” it can really impact your bottom line.

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