Business
Ecommerce: What’s Key to Building Customer Relationships?
By Tim Harrison, co-founder and director of WatchPilot
For any retailer, providing a positive customer experience is crucial. The more positive the customer experience, the more likely the customer will return, and, in a busy retail market, customer loyalty is paramount.
However, underpinning a positive customer experience is the strength of the relationship a brand has with its customers. So, what’s key to building customer relationships? And what can ecommerce brands do to improve?
Ensure a seamless experience
Today’s consumer expects easy-to-use, intuitive digital experiences across multiple channels and devices, and e-commerce retailers that can deliver on those expectations are seeing the greatest returns.
Over the last year, the lockdown has sped up the reliance of digital within retail, with physical shopping experiences quickly becoming virtual ones. However, that’s not to say that there’s no future in real-life customer experiences – it’s just crucial to make sure that the move between the two spaces is seamless.
Whilst making sure your brand is consistent no matter what the digital customer touchpoint certainly helps this positive experience, it’s also important to make this faultless between the digital and physical world, too. For example, ‘best-in-class’ e-commerce businesses are now offering live product demonstrations and enhanced product video content to bring that in-store experience as close as possible to an online environment, building customer relationships regardless of where they shop.
Review your offering
We launched WatchPilot in February 2020 as we wanted to create a disruptive ecommerce brand in an otherwise bricks-and-mortar reliant space. However, seeing the positive reaction that consumers have given to the high street since lockdown restrictions were eased earlier this year has been encouraging and has given us, as an ecommerce business, much food for thought.
Maintaining positive customer relationships means reviewing what you’re offering to your them, whether that’s through products, policies or, in our case, store location. Seeing the positive reaction from customers to non-essential retail reopening has only strengthened our desire to expand into bricks-and-mortar locations, providing an opportunity to support our customers in a physical store space, too. Whilst we’re immensely proud of the digital experience that we provide to our customers, this third dimension would extend the experience that we can deliver and add another method of interaction.
Communication is key
Like any relationship, good communication is vital and it’s exactly the same when building positive customer relationships, too.
Giving customers a chance to share their views and feedback is important. You may not be able to resolve or action their feedback but listening and acknowledging your customers’ concerns will often move people in the right path to acceptance and help to build trust in your relationship.
When planning changes – whatever it may be – it’s essential to deliver a clear and concise message to your customers in sufficient time prior to the date in which changes take effect, which explains not just the change itself but ‘why’ the change is happening and how it affects your customer. Customers are not always interested in the reasons for change but whether their needs are being met, so actively engage with your customers’ feedback and listen to their concerns.
Whatever for the feedback, customers should be given the support they need by providing a phone number or email address so that they have a simple means to contact you with any questions or feedback.
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