Over the last six months, the scrutiny over big tech has increased. Digital assistants are not entirely as digital as we initially thought, and actual people are listening in to our very private conversations via our smart speaker.
After the news came out, each company that makes these assistants scrambled to provide ways to delete your voice recordings. However, not all of them were equal. Some had complicated steps, while some gave no acknowledgment of deleting the data.
Another thing that comes to mind from this is how difficult it is to delete or deactivate any service. A considerable number of services pull you in to sign up by saying that you can leave whenever you want. But when you want to go, they make it extremely difficult.
As someone who runs a business, I understand the importance of ensuring that your customer interacts with your business often. But put yourself in the shoes of your customer. You come looking for a solution to a problem. Do you want to watch an entertaining movie that everyone is talking about? You subscribe to a streaming service. Want to go to the airport? You sign up for a ride-hailing service.
But those requirements also end sometimes, or customers change their mind because they want to try a different service.
As a business owner, your focus should be on making the customer’s experience with you as smooth and helpful as possible. This means you should make the deactivate button as easy to find as generous as you were with the CTA button.
Customer experience is defined by how you treat them too. But this does not mean simply the customers who are complaining against you. It includes all your customers. This is why your CTA buttons and your onboarding processes are inviting.
SEE ALSO: 6 Effective Ways to Respond to Customer’s Feedback
However, the onboarding and offboarding experiences are not the only ones you have to take care of. You have to make sure to provide your customers with a seamless experience throughout their journey with you. The customer journey is an elaborate affair that has tiny details that you need to be careful about. For this, you will need to have a customer-centric mindset. So, let’s explore the stages and how you can redefine their experience on your website as well as with your customer portal.
So let’s start paying attention to the actual reason why they are here on your website.
Landing Page or Sign up Process:
Someone who visits your store is not necessarily thereby intent. They may have stumbled upon it via another site or a social media ad. If you overwhelm them with Signup options, they are more likely to abandon the site.
Instead, you can work on the landing page in a way that does the job of inviting the visitor to your eCommerce shop enough for them to sign up once they browse a little. If a landing page is well designed, you will not need an abundance of CTAs. Instead, you can give relevant and non-conflicting CTAs.
Another thing that you can work on is refining your signup process. All eCommerce websites offer social sign-in options with Google and Facebook or other third-party ones. Stay on top of the industry by always keeping the logo updated on the social sites and the encryption technology you use. Of course, the customer will not notice the encryption updates, but they most certainly will take notice if their data leaks.
Recent Update: Last year, Apple introduced Sign In with Apple. Understand its nuances and add that option to your website if traffic and customers come from Apple devices. Over the last few years, Apple has been a symbol of privacy, and by using its feature, you can leverage the trust that customers place on them to your advantage. In addition, it will not affect your communication with your customers.
Interaction:
Now you may think that you have the best support team and that your chat box is smart. I am sure it is, but an excellent experience of your web store is when a customer doesn’t have to interact with it. Learn how to anticipate some of your customer’s needs and give them all the required information. This does not mean that you overwhelm them with information.
Strategically place information regarding your products, add sections where you can cross-sell related products. This section not only helps you cross-sell but also helps you sell the original product as well. Wondering how? Let’s take an example:
If your eCommerce store sells clothing and accessories, you can have a section that shows a ‘How to Style this,’ which shows clothing and accessories that match the product.
A clever and crisp copy can do wonders in this section. And your customer may end up buying earrings that match the dress.
Visitor Becomes Customer:
Your visitor has now turned into a customer after the clever placement of sign-in buttons and buys now buttons. Once they are a customer, their journey now shifts from the website to the customer portal. A portal is a gateway between your CRM and your CMS; it’s a platform for your customers to interact with you and your organization. Its structure will ultimately depend on your customer journey and the CRM you have as a backend. For example, most eCommerce giants have either Salesforce or Dynamics 365. In that case, you can look for a Dynamics 365 customer portal.
SEE ALSO: Salesforce Editions Comparison
In the portal, work on placing buttons that are not the CTA buttons. For example, set the ‘Return’ and ‘Exchange’ buttons below each item in an order list in your customer portal. So the customer can use them if they need it without having to use a chatbot tool, which then later connects them to your support staff.
If you are selling electronic items, like cables, adapters, etc., make sure to add a segment for FAQs, safety guidelines, and more. Burying this information just on the section page or in the blog is not valuable for your customers. A knowledge base is only effective if it ends up being useful when making a purchasing decision.
Offboarding Process:
No matter how much you work on your business as a whole, if a customer wants to leave, they will. Not all good things necessarily last. But as a business owner, you can either sulk about it and make the offboarding process difficult, or you can use it to your advantage.
If the process frustrates them, they may give up trying to delete their profile, sure. But that doesn’t mean they will continue shopping from your store. So do both of you a favor and make the process simple, even fun.
Place a ‘Delete’ or ‘Deactivate’ button on the user profile page in the portal. Make it visible and add a quirky copy there. You can also reassure them that you will delete all their contact details and that they were a valued customer you are sad to see go.
The customer will remember the entire experience of interacting with you, not just the product or the service. So do right by them from the beginning to the end.
Additionally, the software you use to make some of these things easier is essential. It should offer optimum security and should be feature-packed for you to take advantage of it. Everything from the customer portal to the delivery management extension becomes invisible when it integrates well into your web store’s flow. In its invisibility is its efficiency.
