The ultimate guide to creating a positive CX for mobile

Customer experience (CX) has the power to shape a consumer’s perception of your brand, with research showing that a positive customer experience can have a huge impact in terms of brand loyalty, conversion rates and sales. For this reason, creating a positive CX – by providing customers with an enjoyable and simple buying journey – should be a key business priority.

While CX is important across all retail platforms, the ongoing growth of m-commerce indicates that mobile interfaces are where an increasing number of consumers are going to interact with your brand. The channel accounted for two thirds of e-commerce traffic over Christmas 2018 – a 13% increase in one year alone – highlighting the importance of great mobile CX in driving success. However, in such a flourishing market, it’s possible for sales to come too easily and CX to fall by the wayside.

Our recent research report supports this. It found that there are still a number of brands that are failing to prioritise CX and instead are letting their standards stagnate. For example, almost a fifth of retailers are failing to optimise their search functions and two thirds of businesses are not making use of live chats. Worryingly, this is a decline on last year’s figures. So, how can you ensure your brand’s mobile CX is up to scratch?

From adopting simple search features to creating a seamless payment journey, there are a number of tactics that can be incorporated to boost digital customer experience.

With this in mind, let’s explore which retailers are leading the way in terms of innovative CX and how you can ensure your mobile devices offer customers an enjoyable shopping experience.

Meet the mobile CX pioneers

Retail giant Kurt Geiger has been very proactive in its approach to mobile CX. According to our research, the company has fewer steps to purchase than the average retailer and has adapted its mobile search functions to make locating products as easy as possible. Both of these features are just a few ways that the brand maximises the level of ease for customers throughout their shopping journey.

How can you follow in these brands’ successful footsteps?

Minimise steps to purchase – every additional step to purchase, from reviewing selected items to entering personal details, is likely to cause customers to drop out of the sales process. Brands must therefore keep these to a minimum. As it stands, we found that one in 10 retailers have eight steps to purchase – a very high figure.

Design effective search features – brands should ensure search platforms include autocomplete, well-targeted product suggestions or relevant recommendations to enable shoppers to locate what they want quickly and easily. Also, search tabs should be made clearly visible on all pages of a website.

Provide 24/7 assistance – retailers must utilise live chat or virtual assistant services. This will help provide shoppers with any extra information or guidance, should they require it. What’s more, studies show that incorporating this “humanising” aspect into a mobile brand – which provides customers with instant responses to their queries – can boost conversion rates by as much as 40%.

Welcome guests – where possible, retailer’s mobile platforms should offer a ‘guest checkout’ option. This should only require shoppers to enter essential details – such as their name, delivery address and payment information – and should not ask users to create a password. Instead, customers should only be offered the option to create an account once they reach the order success stage. This could prevent up to 35% of shopping basket abandonment.

Avoid manual logins – to save time and increase efficiency, retailers must enable users to login using previously saved details on other online platforms such as Google, Facebook, PayPal and Amazon Pay.

Measuring your success

After implementing the above changes, it is equally important to assess how effective they have been.

Key to measuring this is collecting customer feedback on a regular basis. In doing so, you can identify which aspects of your mobile presence is working and areas that need improvement. Monitoring your NPS benchmark and encouraging customers to fill out a concise survey to rate and review your brand, are just a few ways of obtaining such information.

Going forward, you must remain mindful of the fact customer experience strategies need constant monitoring and adaptation. In doing so, you can expect to keep up with changing customer expectations and trends, altering your mobile CX accordingly. This will put you in good stead to maintain high customer satisfaction levels for the foreseeable future.

By Dale Higginbottom, head of CRO at eCommerce digital marketing agency, Visualsoft