The challenges for retailers

The major goal of any retailer is to increase their conversion rate – yet 72% of retailers report facing a challenge in checkout abandonment.

Reasons may be technical, experiential, or could just be the result of a customer changing their mind. But the key is to understand why these conversions are lost, quantify the impact and understand how to make the biggest improvements.

Whilst understanding general trends is important, drilling down into specific customer journeys provides the greatest insight. Just under half (49%) of retailers have an excellent understanding of how customers get to their website, yet this knowledge diminishes when it comes to what customers do on the site (23%) and how they pay for their products (24%). Overall, retailers possess visibility of fewer than half (46%) of all difficulties experienced by customers on their website.

As well as affecting brand loyalty, customer experience issues have a direct impact on the bottom-line. To understand the extent of this, the problem has to be tied to the resulting impact.

As well as improving conversion, retailers are acutely aware that they need to provide an experience that keeps customers coming back again and again. Retailers are also concerned with providing a consistently great experience across all their channels. Understanding customer behaviour and removing sources of struggle in the online channel is key to this strategy.

Currently, many retailers have limited visibility of the experiences their customers have. Most of the information comes from inbound channels, such as surveys or customer service calls, or is gleaned from listening to social channels. In reality, companies typically think they only know 50% of the issues customers are having at any one time.

Common issues for retailers

There are many issues that arise for online retailers. Summarized below are a few of the common issues that can negatively impact conversion rates.

Payment difficulties

Online payment has become increasingly complex with multiple tender options and payment gateways to contend with. While eCommerce has broken down global barriers, when it comes to payments there are still some very specific cultural preferences – there are, in fact, 300 different types of payment methods in the world of eCommerce. Multiple payment tenders and gateways, coupled with device compatibility, create a complex environment in which to close the deal with customers.

Technical issues in this environment can be a big challenge – if there is an undiscovered payment issue then customers will not be able to convert. Equally, some retailers do not support multi-tender payments i.e. paying via two types of cards or with a gift card and another payment method. Without deep insight, it can be impossible to know if a customer has abandoned because they were unable to use their payment option of choice.

Form field errors

A key area of issue, form fields can cause frustration in many ways. Whether through validation rules that do not accept required characters, mandatory fields that are not applicable to the customer, or the form not being supported or legible on the user’s device, form fields can cause endless customer frustrations. And while these issues can be quickly fixed, many organizations just don’t know they’re occurring and the impact on conversion.

Search terms

Optimized search functionality can be key for customer journey success. The customer expectation is for a search function that operates with the effectiveness of any of the large search engines. Retailers are under pressure to ensure products can be easily found and they need to make sure that customers receive relevant results on terms they expect to be able to use.

The Container Store is the USA’s original and leading retailer of storage and organization products, offering more than 10,000 innovative and multifunctional solutions designed to simplify customers’ lives.

With UserReplay, The Container Store has improved the customer’s capability to search their website for products. In the past, the website returned products unrelated to the search, or incorrectly returned no results at all.

Through the insight provided by UserReplay, the development team has been able to work with the online merchandising team to adjust the search terms to work more intelligently based on customer input.

Common issues for retailers

Consistent experience

Many retailers operate as a marketplace – offering products from multiple suppliers. A customer doesn’t know, or even care, that the contents of their basket may come from different suppliers. They expect the same options for delivery, as well as the ability to use any promotional codes they may have, for their entire transaction.

Re-platforming

With a great number of retailers looking to upgrade legacy systems, many are moving to new or upgraded platforms; some have transferred services to the cloud to improve their agility. Managing the customer experience during this process is critical, as website outage can damage retailer reputations.

At best, a transition to a new platform or infrastructure can cause momentary lapses in service. At worst, it can cause significant outages and degradation in customer experience. There have been multiple cases of retailers being embarrassed as their customers suffer during these changes.

Understanding the context around Voice of Customer

Voice of customer (VOC) technology is often implemented by retailers to try and gain an understanding of customer experience. These solutions include customer survey and feedback solutions.

Unfortunately, the feedback or survey responses provided by customers do not always provide the context required to make actionable decisions. Often responses are anonymous and there is little detailed understanding of the problems customers experienced.

Success or failure of multi-variant (MVT) or A-B tests

Many retailers are running MVT or A-B tests but actually have very little insight into why particular tests succeed or fail. By better understanding the customer experience for particular tests, retailers would get a much better idea of why customers may not be converting.

These tests are often run at the top of the funnel. If conversion obstacles have not been resolved further down the funnel, investment in MVT or A-B testing can be wasted as customers continue to abandon their transactions.

How UserReplay can help

With a complete view of the customer journey, retailers can overcome these challenges. Traditional web analytics have a role to play, but only provide an insight into the “what” and “when” of visitor behaviour. For the “why”, Customer Experience Analytics is required.

A key capability of a Customer Experience Analytics solution should be to allow easy identification of customer struggles using analytics. UserReplay powers these analytics with flagged events that are configured to identify particular customer behaviours or activity. It is then possible to drill-down to the most interesting session replays that allow the retailer to visualize troublesome journeys through the customer’s eyes, step-by-step.

After an issue has been identified, the next step will naturally be “how could this impact our bottom line?”. Ultimately this requires tying the problem to the effect that it has on conversion and revenue. UserReplay is unique in providing built-in analytics that quantifies the monetary impact of an issue, to enable the prioritization of resolutions.

One of the biggest challenges facing web developers is reproducing customer issues; development teams often find this to be very difficult, if not impossible. It sometimes requires additional information to be gleaned from the customer before achieving an indepth understanding of the problem. And without the prioritization provided in the monetization step, time can be wasted resolving issues causing minor revenue impact before major ones.

How UserReplay can help

There are specific capabilities within the UserReplay solution that address some of the common challenges. Using UserReplay’s unique Customer Experience Scoring capability, eCommerce organizations are able to measure the quality of online experiences in real time – both for individual customers and for a web property as a whole. It uses numerical scores that identify both positive and negative aspects of the customer experience.

An extension of UserReplay’s flagged event technology - Customer Experience Scoring - allows weighted scores to be applied, according to a flagged event’s impact on the customer journey. These scores can then be aggregated across all customers to provide a site wide view of the quality of the customer experience.

The benefits for eCommerce brands are far reaching in terms of a deeper understanding of their customer base, identifying long and short term trends and reactions to specific events. For example, the ability to measure the impact of a new feature or change to a website process. If the customer experience score changes, the brand can respond accordingly. This will significantly reduce the time spent on identifying issues that cause customer struggle.

There are also significant benefits in terms of enhancing the understanding of individual customers. Struggle and success scores can be integrated with the data companies already hold about individuals. Brands can create more informed, personalized interactions with their customer and take into account how good or bad their online experiences have been. The impact is not just on how retailers market to their customers but also extends to areas such as customer service, allowing brands to proactively address customer issues.

UserReplay’s form analytics capability is a “fire and forget” solution that automatically identifies forms in the page and captures key data about their usage. This data is then used to automatically populate form analytics within the UserReplay portal. These analytics include overall form completion and engagement overviews, actionable form conversion funnels and field drop-off analysis. The analytics can also be sliced by segments that may impact on the usage of forms, such as browser or operating system.

UserReplay does not operate in isolation. It is an important part of an ecosystem of digital marketing technologies – such as MVT, VOC and web analytics. UserReplay acts as the glue between these different technologies and answers many of the questions left outstanding by them, such as: “Why is this test not performing well?”; “Why did this customer give us a bad feedback?”; and “Why do customers abandon at our payment step?”

Customer example

UserReplay improves conversion for Direct Ferries

As Europe’s leading ferry ticket retailer, Direct Ferries handles 1.5 million bookings every year – working with more than 90 ferry companies, and covering over 1,400 ferry routes and more than 400 ferry ports worldwide.

UserReplay worked with Direct Ferries to resolve an issue regarding what appeared to be an increase in session timeouts – with a view to ongoing visibility of any barriers to customer conversion, as well as the ability to quickly fix any bugs that may arise.

By running reports on customer activity, UserReplay was able to identify the issue: 20% of iPad and iPhone users were experiencing a lapse in authentication cookies from page to page, resulting in a problem with conversion at key stages in the booking process. Following implementation of UserReplay, Direct Ferries saw an increase in booking revenue in excess of £1 million per annum.

Conclusion

84% of retailers believe customer experience is a significant differentiator in their sector right now5 . Retailers’ focus needs to be on providing a frictionless customer experience to stand out from the competition. This can only be achieved by having true visibility of the customer journey to find and fix issues in real time. However, responding to every issue is unrealistic in terms of time and resource. This is where the prioritization of issues is essential. Assessing the monetary impact of the resolution of an issue enables a retailer to focus efforts where there will be the significant revenue results.

UserReplay gives retailers this complete visibility and delivers answers on the important questions raised but often left answered by MVT, VOC and web analytics. For the first time, UserReplay enables retailers to make sense of their vast customer data and turn this into actionable insight - delivering a direct, meaningful and positive impact on the bottom line.

84% of retailers believe customer experience is a significant differentiator in their sector right now.