How many shopping days to a bad customer experience?

There are now only 20 online shopping days to Christmas – fewer of course if you bear in mind that the chances of things making it through the postal system to you in time for Christmas are minimal after around the 20th of this month.

So Monday 4th December is a big day. Today is the day that an estimated £183 million worth of products will be bought online – or at least that's what the analysts are predicting.

If they're correct, then that will the most ever transacted in a single day, and 40% higher than last year's high of £131 million. Last year, online shopping peaked on Monday 12th of December, so this year we're shopping early for Christmas – which is presumably linked to the fact that so many packages didn’t arrive in time for Santa last year!

Spending was predicted to peak during the 1pm to 2pm –lunchtime, of course! - with sales expected to top £14 million. If you missed that window, then you have another chance to join the throngs between 7pm and 9pm when more than £22 million is expected to be spent.

The most popular purchases will include mobile phones, digital cameras, iPods, games consoles, DVDs and books while Bratz Dolls and Cyberman voice changing helmets from Doctor Who are the two most popular toys of the season – and among the hardest items to lay hands on.

The numbers are encouraging especially since it seems that e- commerce still has a long way to go to earn the trust of the public. On the one hand, there’s a lot of activity online, A study commissioned jointly between the Interactive Media Retail Group (IMRG) and Hitwise looked at online retail activity during October in the run-up to Christmas. Amazon UK is top of the tree, followed by Play.com. In the top ten, only Tesco and Argos have both online and offline presences.

But a separate study of 999 adults commissioned by Enterasys Networks, NOP found that the public has a deep distrust of using the Internet to shop online. Just half of the UK population have ever shopped online and 43% of us are putting off shopping or banking online because of security concerns.

It showed that more men than women have bought something over the Internet - 54% versus 47% - and that the younger we are the more confident that our information will remain confidential. The 16-24 year age group are most confident, with 84% professing to be happy with security compared to just 54% of the 65+ age group. Are you an active e-shopper? Then you’re probably a married 'thirty-something', working full-time and living in London or the South of England – apparently!

Whoever you are, you need a good customer experience – and that's where customer management expertise comes in. Or rather, where it should come in. Unfortunately, all the signs are that this is not a message that’s hitting home to date.

Blast Radius analysed the top 28 UK online retailers according to traffic volume in order to grade the customer experience of their service in the run up to Christmas and the results are not encouraging with even experience online retailers such as Amazon and HMV letting the side down.

"The study results show that investment by online retailers tends to focus on what they care about most, securing the sale," said Lee Feldman, Blast Radius’ Chief Creative Officer. "For consumers the bad news is that the online shopping experience even with those judged to be the best fails to satisfy in many ways."

But he added: "The good news for even the top online retailers is that there are still many opportunities to differentiate their customer’s experience of doing business with them. Anywhere in the buying/delivery/return process that you serve your customer better than your competition can set you apart and provides you with the ultimate marketing tool – satisfied customers."

OK, so far, so good – in theory. But how do you translate this into practice – and how do you ensure that customer management is a key concern when the transactional, sales-oriented online store front is being created?

Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor RightNow offers up some tips on how CRM and customer management executives can make a valuable contribution to site design and ensure improved customer experiences.

RightNow advocates:

(1) The provision of self-service functionality

Customers need to get knowledge when they want it – up to an including Christmas Day. You need to ensure that your site is easy to navigate and that your Frequently Asked Questions section isn’t just a static portal of data. It’s a stressful time of year anyway and the last thing any customer needs is to be hunting around your web site looking for basic contact information.

(2) In stock notification

Ensure that your site is clearly marked with the availability of products and information such as how long delivery will be. Again this will help to reduce stress levels when a product customers were expecting doesn’t arrive and leave them the opportunity to look elsewhere for those hard-to-find remote controlled K9s…

(3) A visible order tracking system

Does your site enable customers to see where they are in the order process? Are they able to get help at every step of the purchasing process? You need to ensure that the order process is transparent so customers know how many steps they have left, enabling them to gauge how long the process is going to take. This is one of the strengths of sites such as Play.com and Amazon where every step of the order and shipping process is tracked and the customer notified by email.

4) Context-sensitive help

Does your site support your customer to enable them to go from ‘browse to purchase’? By providing context sensitive help; knowledge relevant to each page, you will ensure that the online experience is positive for your customer and abandonment rates are lowered. Sites that force customers to fold back on themselves or to spend time hitting the back button on the browser, then finding you’ve lost the information in your shopping basket are likely to lead to a loss of the sale.

5) Live chat facilities

Does your site enable your customer to have direct contact with your contact centre via an instant messenger capability that remembers your last live chat conversation? This will enable your customer to raise any incidents that can be immediately resolved via an online agent that knows the customer’s interaction history and avoid the off-putting ‘please hold for assistance’ experience that alienates customers.

If your company is doing all these things, then your customer experience rankings should be positive and you can pat yourself on the back for having an online sales strategy that maps on to your CRM strategy. If you’re not doing these things, you know what you need to put on your letter to Santa next year….

UK’s Best Online Shopping Experiences – 2006

The top ten:
1. Amazon UK
2. Dell EMEA
3. Apple Computer UK
4. Next
5. Comet
6. Tesco/ QVC UK
7. Currys/Littlewoods
8. Asos
9. John Lewis
10. Hewlett-Packard/Marks and Spencer