How to Build a Customer Experience Strategy in Retail: 7 Things You Can Do Now

Customer experience is the much-heralded and often elusive target that turns a casual shopper into a loyal advocate. Getting customer experience right results in stronger likelihood of repurchasing, willingness to try related products and services, and opportunities for word-of-mouth referrals. 

That begs the question...how do you get customer experience right? 

We examine how to build a customer experience strategy in retail for companies to improve and optimize the retail ecommerce experience.

Quick Fixes to Strengthen Customer Experience Strategy

Before we get into the more involved solutions for improving your customer experience, our team thought it was a good idea to offer a few easily implementable methods to improve your customer experience strategy, such as: 

• Conduct consistent employee training

• Offer special promotions

• Provide richer product information and reviews 

• Consider unique services like gift wrapping or personalized messages
  
• Create interactive experiences like virtual try-ons 
  

eCommerce retailers of any size can take advantage of these improvements. Quick fixes, while easier to implement, typically only provide a small boost to customer experience. True, lasting improvement takes time and strategy to pull off.. Read on and learn how to build a customer experience strategy with more substantial improvements.

Build a Customer Experience Strategy: The 7 Best Practices in Retail

Assuming that your customer experience strategy needs a greater overhaul than the quick fixes discussed in the section above can provide, this section discusses more involved options that ultimately yield more significant results.

Optimize Your Website

Updating your website to improve elements like page upload, security, and navigation make it easier for customers to make their purchases, including elements like a clearly delineated search bar and shopping cart on your top navigation bar. 

Research customer use patterns to make optimizations—which will vary based on the industry and how your unique users shop.

Develop Richer Product Images

Improving the quality of product images tells visitors that your company cares about quality products just as much as the customer's experience. Similarly, including more photos displaying the product from different angles or exposing special details on/within the product help them make important decisions quicker, ultimately leading to a sale.

Create In-Depth Product Information 

Your website will be a host to a wide variety of shoppers looking for wildly different information, so your product descriptions should be comprehensive to cast as wide of a net as possible. Including information on the product's production, manufacturing and distribution, and materials grants customers the information they may require for that last push toward a sale.

Create segmented product descriptions based on customer profiles/personas. This is an opportunity to Get the right customer the right information without additional effort to mentally sort out what they don't need.

Generate Personalized Product Recommendations 

With backend access, managers can compile and track a specific customer's shopping history. Using that information, developers can personalize customer experiences by recommending complementary products to the ones they’ve already bought. This gives customers greater access to products they might be interested in, making them more likely to return to your site.

Streamline Checkout Options 

In addition to including the means to access their shopping cart on the top toolbar, each product page should also have some means for immediate purchase (think Amazon’s “buy now” button). If the customer is going through the checkout for the first time, it is important for companies to provide them with as many payment options as possible, including non-traditional methods like Apple Pay or Paypal. 

Communicate Quickly with Marketing Automation 

Once a customer has made a purchase, your ecommerce solution should provide the store with some follow-up method. This allows companies to ensure customer satisfaction with a purchase. In the case of a negative experience, it also allows customers to provide essential feedback for stores to identify weak points in their customer experience and implement necessary changes.

Meet Your Customer on Mobile 

Nearly 80% of smartphone users have used their phones to make an online purchase in the last six months. With that in mind, it is crucial for retailers to optimize the mobile experience for shoppers. This can include things like:

1. Making it easy for customers to find what they are looking for by simplifying navigation and creating a clear and intuitive user interface.
2. Provide mobile payment options, making it easy and convenient for customers to complete transactions on their mobile devices.
3. Using push notifications to alert customers about sales, new products, and other promotions.

These are just a few of the many strategies that retailers can leverage to make the mobile shopping experience better for their customers. 

Tech Fixes For Customer Experience Strategy 

In the previous section, we discussed several tech-based solutions to improve your ecommerce store’s customer experience strategy. The table below evaluates several of Concord’s technology partners, including a description of what they do and their effect on building a customer experience strategy.

Companies wanting to utilize these solutions to their benefit will need to consider working with an ecommerce platform that provides integrations for one, if not several, of these options. 

Looking Forward With Concord

At Concord, we understand the importance of building an exceptional customer experience within ecommerce. Our team of experts can help you create an optimized customer experience strategy roadmap and implement data-focused solutions that align with your business goals, delivering tangible results for an otherwise opaque challenge. Furthermore, we work with clients to ensure organizational changes that support your new strategy.

Getting Started

Concord USA is a consultancy that combines technology and industry depth with a get-it-done culture to enable resiliency, efficiency, and innovation. Whether you are trying to improve customer satisfaction, data strategies, security, or other technological issues, Concord can help. 

Contact us today to learn more about how to build a customer experience strategy in retail, our Technology Integration Services, and how we can help your business thrive.