Four Tips for Using Customer Data to Improve the E-Commerce Experience

E-commerce is one of the fastest growing industries of this decade. Thanks to COVID, digital roadmaps across industries have quickly accelerated. If you weren’t yet online, it didn’t take long for brands to adapt when brick and mortar businesses across Asia Pacific were forced to shut down in 2020 and 2021.  

It’s not been easy for e-commerce brands. After a whirlwind of COVID-spurred digital transformation, rapid brand expansion, and supply chain woes, consumer expectations and their relationships with e-commerce brands have changed before our eyes. So what can these brands do to get ahead of customer expectations? The key is to dive into your customer data. And we’re here to help.

Tip #1: Rethink the Digital Customer Journey

Because of the rapid growth that businesses have undergone, e-commerce brands have not had an opportunity to slow down and evaluate the experience they are delivering. The acceleration of digital roadmaps during the pandemic has meant that many elements might have been half-baked. Now that the “new normal” is underway, e-commerce brands should rethink the digital customer journey.

Tip #2: Invest in Customer Care

A lot of businesses had to scale back their customer care teams during the pandemic because they couldn’t cope with the sheer amount of call volumes enquiring about updated delivery processes and updated policies. We saw in these times of crisis that much of customer care is related to the digital journey. When customers have an inquiry, you need to find ways for customers to self-serve or use technology to reduce the number of enquiries that need to involve your care team.

Tip #3: Upgrade Your Technology

Advanced technology is now available to intercept customers browsing on site, and ask them questions to understand their current experience. Pearl-Plaza’s Digital Intercept solution has the ability to capture rich data from logged in users when they’re taking a survey. 

You can also integrate Pearl-Plaza’s Rapid Resolution Engine, which is designed to analyse customer verbatim in real time. The technology uses tags that are customised to your businesses to provide helpful links, ultimately resolving concern and complaints,  or “solve in survey,” before customers have to call into the contact centre. 

Tip #4: Collect All Pieces of Data Possible: Explicit + Implicit + Operational

Most brands are proficient at collecting explicit data like NPS scores and customer verbatim. But have you considered layering implicit data over the top of it? Implicit data points like customer sentiment, emotion, cursor movement, and more can help you paint a more accurate picture of the customer experience. As a final step, adding in operational data like customer value and  segmentation will allow you to be really targeted to the best place to trigger a digital intercept along the customer journey. 

For more on upgrading customer experiences in e-commerce, check out this eBook “4 Digital Quick Wins” 

Simon Fraser

Vice President, XI Strategy

Simon has designed groundbreaking customer experience strategies at Pearl-Plaza for nearly 10 years. Prior to joining the company, Simon worked at GFK/NOP and Nielsen for over a decade, helping brands make sense of their customers and how to drive ROI on products and services. Simon’s decades of experience and consequent Experience Improvement mastery make him a key strategist at Pearl-Plaza.