It is recognised that consumers and businesses have made a huge leap this year when lockdown regulations started to come in place. Remote working is just the tip of the iceberg. Several consequences of working and living 90% of your week in a domestic environment have started to surface as well, including the need to shop entirely from home.
This means that many brands (well, all but one) have been forced to optimise their online platforms the best they could. Some, like Cath Kidston, even confirmed that their stores wouldn't reopen at the end of the pandemic. This cost jobs – but also meant a significant shift of the consumer experience from the high streets to the online environment.
Unfortunately, it appears that brands are failing to deliver strong online experiences. While most consumers now shop entirely online, their experience is disturbed by all kinds of poor online optimisation, lack of personalisation and more. But we're no UX experts, so we decided to ask Leigh Gammons, CEO of Cognifide, what he thinks brands should be doing to improve their customers' online experiences.
Time to re-think the online customer experience: why brands are failing to deliver
2020 has been a year like no other. In January, we were already living in an age of exponential change. Then COVID-19 exploded on the world and that rate of change accelerated beyond our wildest imaginations.
In terms of digital adoption, it’s thought that both consumers and businesses took a 5-year leap forwards in around 8 weeks. Our recent research report, Experiences Customers Want, appears to confirm this, with over a third of consumers stating they’ll continue to shop online more frequently following the pandemic. However, when we asked consumers what they thought of the online experiences brands are currently providing, more than a fifth strongly felt that they were failing to live up to their expectations.
It’s therefore clear that, at a time where more and more consumers turn to digital to manage and live their lives, brands are not always delivering.
Then what are consumers really looking for?
Image credit: Brand & Deliver
Basic online challenges
Today, brands are juggling endless touchpoints: email, apps, website, social, chatbots, phone – the list goes on. And for consumers, every interaction on each of these touchpoints leaves an impression.
Our research identifies a number of common consumer pain points when it comes to customer experience. Out of their top frustrations, consumers say slow websites, targeted ads and hard-to-navigate websites are the most serious. And when it comes to identifying potential deal-breakers, a fifth say a slow website stops them interacting with a brand altogether.
There is a split in consumers' and marketers' thinking
These are serious issues, mainly rooted in basic website performance. Yet when decision-makers were asked how good their website’s performance was, over three quarters thought it was ‘great’.
So, we can see there is a split in consumers’ and marketers’ thinking, and it’s clear that their priorities are not always aligned.
Personalisation
To provide a positive experience, brands need to work harder at being available in the right place, at the right time. For any one customer journey, this may involve various different touchpoints. And those touchpoints need to join up and share information – enabling businesses to provide a seamless, personalised conversation with each of their customers.
The word ‘personalised’ is key as, more than ever, customers expect to be treated as individuals. They want brands to know who they are, what they are interested in, and to remember their past interactions with the company. But personalisation is fast becoming a broad-brush term for any experience delivered and based on customer data, and it’s very clear that this doesn’t always deliver value. In fact, customers are very clear on where the use of data does deliver value.
The top three consumer priorities when it comes to online experiences are: getting the best deal possible, feeling valued as a customer and having a seamless experience across all devices and channels. Whereas a third of consumers said that targeted ads were among their biggest frustrations.
For brands, it’s clear that a focus on 1st party data is going to be increasingly important as we move towards a cookie-less internet. Once consumers are already inside a business’ ecosystem, they tell us that they are more than happy for their data to be used to help navigate the website and find the best deals. This hints at a possible virtuous cycle for personalisation. If the experience is designed with optimisation in mind, then these sorts of things are the hooks to encourage consumers to want to participate. Once they have engaged, then the cycle of increasingly refined personalisation can take place, which drives further engagement.
Great personalisation is all about relevance and context. It’s subtle, but genuinely useful.
Image credit: Caroline Dolan
An omnichannel experience
Consumers and brands have very different priorities when it comes to a seamless experience across channels.
However, brands tell us that they are still grappling with some of the challenges that make the omnichannel experience a reality. They cite difficulty turning data into insights and action, the challenge of capturing customer data, difficulty in unifying data across channels, brand governance and compliance, and data silos within their organisations as among the critical barriers.
To try to solve any of these major challenges without the right technology in place is impossible. But CX decision-makers shouldn’t think that having the right stack in place solves for everything. Having the right people, skills, processes and operating model are absolutely crucial in successfully building omnichannel campaigns.
Steps to success
The above proof points highlight what customers today really want and where brands are struggling to deliver. In addition, it’s clear that the challenges each individual brand faces are both similar, yet different.
However, there are some golden rules that all businesses can bear in mind as they reimagine their online experience.
Firstly, businesses should ensure they get the fundamentals right before investing in personalisation or other blue-sky projects. This includes the basics such as website performance and ensuring that brand content is accessible for everyone – whichever device or endpoint they’re trying to access it from.
When it comes to personalisation, businesses need to first assess whether it’s truly going to add value to the customer and be beneficial to them. If they conclude it is, then there needs to be a programme in place to assemble the data required to make it effective. And it might be that simply going for optimisation based on generic segmentation is the best option.
Complex personalisation at scale requires significant investment and businesses should not underestimate that. Furthermore, that investment should only be plugged into areas that add value to the online experience, not detract from it.
Businesses should also prioritise the responsible collection of 1st party data that can produce meaningful value. Organisations can then work to join up the data points they have on customers to create an omnichannel experience that is seamless, from brand discovery right through to purchase and customer service.
Finally, as customer needs evolve, brands need to listen to them. As Covid-19 rages on, brands need to keep their ear to the ground and understand what is expected of them. Then they should be ready to adapt when needed – as even if they understand what their customers want today, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re agile enough to change direction quickly.