By Niki Hall, CMO Contentsquare
Online shopping is great. You can find great deals, it’s very convenient — and you can do it on the move. Given all the benefits, you’d think that consumers are happier than ever shopping online. But sadly, that’s not the case.
We conducted global research from among 4,000 shoppers in six countries and found that just 15% of consumers say that shopping online makes them feel happy.
So, given how much money is spent on customer journeys, customer experiences and ensuring customer satisfaction — why is it that customers still aren’t happy online?
According to Contentsquare’s research, visitors to websites feel unhappy when a site uses pop-ups or adverts (49%), when they can’t find what they’re looking for (42%), when a site or app crashes during checkout (48%), when a discount code doesn’t work at checkout (45%) and when a website or app goes offline (43%).
With digital taking up more and more space in our lives , now is the time for brands to get serious about ensuring their online experiences are just as good as — or even better than — those in-store. So how can brands put customer happiness at the heart of their digital experiences?
To go beyond contentment and ensure that digital shoppers leave satisfied and enjoy their shopping experience, brands should focus on three key things:
- The right metrics
Do the words “How likely are you to recommend us to your peers, on a scale of 0 to 10?” sound familiar? It’s the famous Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey question every customer has been asked at least once in their life.
Typically, NPSs scores have been the go-to metric for customer satisfaction. However, only 13% of marketers actually believe that these scores provide an accurate representation of how their customers feel.
To understand how visitors to our sites (and apps) really feel, metrics should go beyond just asking customers how they feel. Most of us are terrible at recognising our own emotions, let alone understanding the logic behind those emotions. As such, today’s brands need to look beyond NPS surveys, using real-time analytics to create new metrics for digital happiness.
At Contentsquare, we’ve been working on the creation and industry adoption of a “digital happiness score”, a metric to provide true insight into customers’ states of mind by analysing their behaviours while shopping.
If brands are ever going to crack digital happiness, they need to focus on metrics that reflect their customers’ moods in the moment, including whether their experience has been engaging, intuitive, flawless or even frustrating.
We should never give up on understanding what makes our customers happy. What brings customers joy can be measured — if only we have the right metrics in place.
- The right data
Digital happiness isn’t like bounce rates or conversions — it’s an emotion. But without physically seeing your customers, how can brands honestly measure their customers’ happiness?
Accurately measuring emotions is difficult, but it can be done by the use of sophisticated analytics tools that can spot sources of satisfaction and frustration, identifying confusion, “rage clicks” and, yes, even happiness across their apps and sites.
This doesn’t mean giving up on metrics like retention, market share or brand awareness altogether, but rather to start thinking about those objectives in the context of satisfying customers and building experiences they’ll love.
- The right technology
Technology plays a key role when it comes to boosting digital happiness. But brands shouldn’t have to rely on just one solution. Instead, the right combination of technologies must be identified that will work best for them.
Customers today will not hesitate to review a poor user experience or give one star for a session that doesn’t meet their expectations. But they are also giving you continuous feedback on your site or app through their interactions — with every tap, click, scroll or hover, they are voicing their feelings about your customer experience.
In order to capture these subtle signals, brands need to right tools and technologies in place across every page of their site — and every touchpoint in the online customer journey. Data from these technologies should be centralised and easily accessible to any team who can help fix or improve the customers experience — whether it’s marketing, IT, customer service, UX or CX teams.
Right now however this isn’t the case, with a staggering 76% of businesses say that they lack the tools to accurately measure whether digital customers are happy.
Putting happiness at the heart of digital experiences
The abstract nature of happiness makes it a hard thing to measure. But with the right tools, the right insights and the right metrics, it can be done.
To refocus on digital happiness, marketers have to simplify by focusing on those tools that provide the clearest insights into their customers’ wants, needs and behaviours online.
In this increasingly digital landscape, it’s the brands that focus on customer happiness that will have the greatest competitive edge — capturing new customers at lower costs, strengthening loyalty, and ultimately boosting customer advocacy.
