What the Future Holds for E-commerce Customer Experience

To succeed in the E-commerce industry, you must have quality products consumers want. However, that’s not the only reason consumers buy products from specific E-commerce brands and ignore others.

Nowadays, consumers consider numerous factors before purchasing their desired products from a particular E-commerce website.

And one of these factors is customer experience.

The importance of customer experience in E-commerce has amplified a lot in recent years.

According to a report, 52% of online shoppers are now willing to pay top dollar for a superior customer experience.

If you want to succeed in the E-commerce industry, providing a superior customer experience is as important as having quality products.

That means predicting the future E-commerce customer experience trends well in advance and leveraging them to your advantage.

Here are the top 5 data-driven, future predictions to keep in mind for improving your E-commerce customer experience.

1 – Omnichannel Experience is the Way Win, More Customers

Online shoppers have been pushing E-commerce brands for an omnichannel experience for many years.

For the uninitiated, the omnichannel experience is about finding out the channels your potential customers most frequently and selling your products on those channels. Get support from business phone providers, use social media, create a website chatbot- these are all different ways to provide excellent customer service. M-commerce is a perfect example of this.

Statista recently revealed that the total M-commerce sales in the US already surpassed $360 billion last year. And that amount is forecasted to cross $710 billion in the next four years.

This proves that if you want to remain competitive in the E-commerce industry, you ought to provide the same seamless customer experience on smartphones and other channels as you do on your desktop website. Utilizing mobile analytics tools regularly will help you improve the website’s usability.

2 – Faster Delivery is the New Normal

We live in the era of instant gratification where consumers want things delivered as fast as possible. The speed of delivery plays a vital role in the overall customer experience of an E-commerce website. And Amazon has played a big part in it.

Amazon has spoiled nearly every online shopper by pivoting from the standard 2-day delivery to next-day delivery and now, same-day delivery.

Because of this, online shoppers have grown so impatient that 88% of online shoppers are now willing to pay extra for faster delivery.

This has resulted in forcing other E-commerce brands to follow the same route.

As a result, more than 51% of E-commerce brands worldwide have already started offering same-day delivery, while the rest of them planning to offer it within the next two years.

Suppose you’re an E-commerce startup with no capacity to fulfill this immediately. In that case, we strongly recommend leveraging micro fulfillment solutions and letting the professionals handle this aspect of your business until you have the resources to do it in-house.

3 – Better Customer Service Means More Sales

Despite what the “self-acclaimed” E-commerce gurus say on the internet and everywhere else, customer service dramatically impacts the overall E-commerce customer experience. And we have data to prove this!

According to a Zendesk CX report, 81% of consumers are likely to make another purchase if they’ve had a positive customer service experience from a brand.

I’m trying to say here that if you want to outperform your competitors in terms of customer experience, you need to pay serious attention to the quality of customer service you provide.

4 – Hyper-Personalization is the Secret Ingredient

The benefits of hyper-personalization are truly unmatched in the E-commerce industry.

For example, a recent McKinsey study discovered that E-commerce brands that go above and beyond to offer hyper-personalized customer experience tend to grow faster than their competitors who don’t leverage it.

So if you want to accelerate your business growth in the E-commerce space, you need to leverage personalization differently.

For starters, you can utilize hyper-personalization to offer custom-tailored incentives to boost sales and introduce personalized rewards, referral bonus programs, cashback offers, and much more. Also, you can implement Walkme competitors to deliver your customer’s positive experience and increase retention as well.

The options are endless.

Just keep in mind that whatever tactic(s) you prefer, make sure hyper-personalization is at the core of it to maximize your returns.

5 – AI-Powered Chatbots will Take the Reins!

If you have been neglecting to invest in AI-powered chatbots for your E-commerce business, you’re making a terrible mistake.

AI-powered chatbots are already highly-leveraged in the E-commerce industry.

According to Juniper Research, E-commerce brands are forecasted to spend close to $7.3 billion on AI-powered chatbots by the end of 2022.

The reason for this is simple — online shoppers are growing impatient every passing day, and they just hate waiting to get answers to their questions. And AI-powered chatbots can resolve this issue.

To elaborate, AI-powered chatbots can answer your prospective customers’ questions in real-time.

And if they cannot answer a customer’s question, they can automatically redirect it to one of your human customer service representatives.

This, in turn, can free your human customer service representatives from answering common, frequently asked questions and focus more on answering complex queries.

Conclusion

So these are the top 5 E-commerce customer experience predictions expected to go mainstream in the coming years.

Suppose you’re an E-commerce brand looking for ways to grow your business. In that case, you must take advantage of the above predictions to offer a superior customer experience and beat your competitors in your niche market.