How many times have you been left angry and frustrated by fundamentally bad websites? How many times have you hit an obstinate and totally senseless block in an online transaction? How many times have you had a transaction cancelled, arbitrarily timed-out or been obliged to switch to a more user-friendly rival site?
CMO.com reports that an average of 10.9% of online revenue is spent on marketing … so, good money is clearly being spent on driving people to online shops that are never fully optimised. What a waste!
It’s the key differentiator that drives loyalty and improved margins. Anything that damages or diminishes that experience is a dangerous and costly aberration. Here’s the evidence…
The 2016 Christmas Season Consumer Survey reveals that: “19% of online Christmas customers were forced to shop with alternative retailers due to stock unavailability and delivery time constraints” (source: eConsultancy Blog). But this begs a key question: how many businesses know the price they are paying for out-of-stock and delivery constraints? How many of your potential customers clicked off in frustration and took their loyalties and buying power to a competitor?
In all probability, you don’t know. Most companies have no way of tracking the customer’s onsite experience. Consequently, they have no way of quantifying the size of this problem or taking instant action to eliminate these losses. But they should know – and, what’s more, they could be fully aware…
It’s called UserReplay.
Think of it as the online equivalent of “your call is being recorded for quality and training purposes”. Then imagine that you could take all of this real-time data (including all the support recordings) and use it to remove sub-optimal experiences. And here’s the clincher: just suppose you could do all of this and optimise revenues whilst the customer is online.
For Pizza Hut, UserReplay delivered £4.7M of additional revenue in just one year.
For Direct Ferries, UserReplay engineered a 1% point increase in conversion rates (just imagine what a 3% to 4% uplift could do for your bottom line).
And the secondary benefits are equally impressive. Efficiencies right across the team will enhance proof of purchase, fraud validation, customer services and internal processes that directly drive online improvements.
Without UserReplay, most businesses can do little more than track the basic analytics of the numbers that arrive at the online store and those that either abandon or succeed to complete their purchase.
Flawed assumption No.1:
Is to think that, just because someone bought, they automatically had a good experience. Don’t mistake shopper persistence for customer satisfaction. Many determined customers may have doggedly worked their way through an inept and deeply frustrating site to get what they wanted – but, they will never, ever return for a repeat experience!
Flawed assumption No. 2:
Is to think that these sub-optimal experiences happen in isolation – they don’t! All too often they happen in multiples – indeed, the worst record of failure was a site where one unfortunate customer had 18 sub-optimal events in one visit!
The e-Commerce team know the traffic numbers and the IT team know about slow pages and keeps a record of exception errors (the infuriating and baffling coded messages: ‘&&%£ integer error’). However, all too often, ‘out of stock’ messages are viewed as an unfortunate but inevitable reality of business life. They are not seen as sub-optimal experiences. Unfortunately, for you and your profits, customers have a rather different perspective!
Flawed assumption No. 3:
Is to regard the number of times something happens as not of any direct consequence to the business. Wrong. If you really want to know the health of your online business, check out the basket, booking and policy values. These are the real measures of an optimal online experience.