Imagine if you could achieve in days what took you a decade?
This is what has happened in ecommerce, where the shift to online shopping accelerated at the fastest rate in 2020. Due to Covid-19, more consumers were forced to shop online for the first time. Emerging consumer behaviors around contactless purchase, value-conscious shopping, and experimentation of new brands and products will only be magnified as we head into the 2020 Holiday shopping season.
While many of the longer-term changes in consumer behavior are still being formed, retailers have a unique opportunity to shape the new normal based on what they do (and don’t do) during the 2020 holiday season.
Most of us can agree that topline growth and profitability are important to the business. But the most successful retailers share a common ingredient: a relentless focus on the customer experience.
Almost a decade ago, Forrester defined customer experience as “How customers perceive their interactions with your company” and between 2010-2015, they found that CX leaders grew 6x faster than CX laggards.
Similarly, here is how Qualtrix currently defines it: “Customer experience (shortened to CX) refers to how a customer perceives your brand based on the sum total of their exposure to it.”
While every shopper’s experience is going to be different and will resemble a maze instead of a linear path, they will all go through these broad journey phases: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.
Keeping the customer front and center, and as a supplement to our 5-part Holiday ThinkShop Series, here are 20 actionable recommendations to improve customer experience for each phase of the customer journey.
