5 Proven Ways to Improve E-commerce Customer Satisfaction for the Holiday Season
The holiday season is a busy time for stores. People are shopping for gifts, and using the money and gift cards that they received as a gift. This applies not just to physical stores, but to online retailers as well. The holiday season is when many companies make the most money, so it is a very important time for them.
A key to succeeding around the holidays when it comes to e-commerce is customer satisfaction. If customers are not satisfied with what you have to offer, there are dozens of other places they can go. As a result, you need to do all you can to ensure customers have a wonderful time.
With that in mind, this article is going to go over some proven ways to improve e-commerce customer satisfaction for the holiday season.
Improve Your Customer Service Efforts
One of the single best ways to ensure your customers are satisfied is to improve your customer service efforts. Make sure you have a helpful FAQ on your site and be ready and willing to quickly answer any customer questions or concerns.
Make sure to communicate things clearly and often, to ensure everyone knows what to expect from your company. Consider using some customer service software if you don’t already, as this can help you keep track of and manage different customers and organize them correctly.
In addition to refining the techniques and tools you use, consider bringing in some help. Hiring additional help around the holiday is a good idea to lighten the load for everyone. Hire the right people who use the right CV keywords and have the right experience to help your business, and you should see your customer service efforts improve.
Boost the Performance of Your Site
Boosting the performance of your site is another great way to help ensure customers are satisfied. In particular, you need to focus on the importance of website loading speed and make sure that you are finding ways to minimize the lag and other interruptions on your site.
People today have short attention spans, so you need to do your best to make sure your site gives people what they want, without a lot of wasted time. If your site doesn’t measure up and is full of lag and slow-loading pages, people are likely to shop elsewhere during the holidays.
Also, be prepared for the boost in traffic. If your site performs well with only a few visitors but struggles once there is more interest, find ways to fix and address this before the holidays arrive.
Ensure Your Site Looks Great and Works Well on All Devices
How your site looks can also play a role in how popular it is. It should look good, and be able to entice people to continue shopping. However, don’t only focus on how the site looks on your desktop computer screen.
With more than half of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices, it is crucial that you ensure your site loads and looks good on all different devices. You want to use a responsive web design and make sure things like your font and buttons don’t look out of place. If your mobile site is hard to navigate and simply isn’t optimized, you will surely lose customers.
This can make the design process a little more involved in some cases, but this extra work is worth it. Once the site has been optimized for mobile use, be sure to test it yourself on a variety of devices to make sure it looks good and runs acceptably. This should include tablets and phones of various sizes to ensure all is good.
Offer Free Shipping and Other Deals/Discounts
People love anything for free or a discount of some kind. Because of this, consider finding ways to help customers save money during the holidays. You could offer a free shipping promotion if someone spends over a certain amount, or include a wide range of other deals and discounts for customers to take advantage of.
This could be a free item with a purchase, a deal if people buy multiple items, or whatever else you think will bring in more business. Of course, be sure to highlight your deals and discounts and make sure they are known by everyone who visits. Make it easy for customers to get discounts, too.
Not only can this make existing customers happier and more satisfied as they will save money, but it can be a great tactic for enticing new customers to come on board.
Keep Everything Simple and Straightforward
Whether it is the holiday season or not, your online store needs to be simple. If someone has to spend a ton of time simply searching for what they want through your site, it can really turn them off and you may lose a customer.
In particular, your navigation should be very easy to figure out and allow people to get where they want to go in as few clicks as possible. Even requiring a couple of extra clicks to find the right product or checkout can lead to people abandoning their purchase.
Things like your checkout process should also be optimized and should be as simple as humanly possible. The pages for checking out shouldn’t be too cluttered, and you shouldn’t have to go through half a dozen clicks or pages to complete a purchase. The longer it takes and the more cumbersome, the better the chance that people leave.
Also, refrain from changing too much about how your site looks during the holidays. Many companies will make major changes to how their site looks and redesign it for the occasion. People like consistency, and giving them something brand new right before the holidays isn’t always a good idea.
In conclusion, these are some of the best ways to improve E-commerce customer satisfaction during the holidays and any time of the year.