Organisations across Southeast Asia are risking US$144b in revenue because of poor customer service, with consumers across the region increasingly cutting spending after receiving a poor experience.
This finding from Qualtrics XM Institute highlights the significant business value of great customer experience (CX). At a time when brands find themselves under pressure to drive greater business impact in challenging market environments, delivering a superior CX is one of the most impactful, sustainable, and efficient ways to achieve this. And within this context, the role and value of digital channels and e-commerce platforms cannot be overstated.
Consumers are ever more digital
Consumers continue to conduct more brand interactions through digital channels. For example, in the last year 56% of consumers in Singapore opened a bank account on their mobile phone – up from 48% a year previously; in healthcare 42% of people used a telemedicine service in the last 12 months, up from 35%; and 26% of superapp users say they use one every day, up from 22%.
Great digital support also has an outsized impact on consumer loyalty, with consumers more likely to return when they get great digital support compared to in-person. The challenge for brands, however, is consumers are less likely to be satisfied by their digital customer support experience compared to human support.
As brands, consumers, marketing and CX teams increasingly adopt and mature their e-commerce platforms and digital capabilities, organisations that invest in improving the services, support, and experiences delivered through them are well placed to pull ahead of the competition, unlocking greater customer retention, satisfaction, brand awareness, and ultimately revenue.
5 steps to e-commerce success and impact
Forge partnerships with digital stakeholders
For marketing and CX teams looking to drive improvements across e-commerce platforms, a critical step is identifying and getting to know potential partners across the business – such as web and app development teams, digital marketing, UX/UI, data analysts, product managers, and IT. Understanding the internal digital landscape highlights collaboration opportunities, generates organisational alignment and support, helps define roles and responsibilities, and enables faster-decision making to accelerate progress and business impact.
One of the most successful ways we see CX and marketing teams partner with digital teams to improve the performance of e-commerce platforms is when they begin their collaboration with a focused use case, such as high cart abandonment. As part of this collaboration, the teams combine CX insights from surveys, reviews, and support conversations with operational data, such as web analytics, and customer segmentation, to understand the issue, outline recommended next best steps to resolve it, and demonstrate the business impact to garner greater support in broadening the project scope.
Map the customer journey and understand their behaviours
To improve CX across digital channels and e-commerce platforms, brands need to understand consumer behaviours for these types of offerings, and their preferences when using them. For example, research shows the majority of consumers in Singapore prefer to speak with a representative directly when purchasing a TV compared to online or mobile. In contrast, when booking a flight the preference is to self-serve using a digital channel.
Most customer engagements span multiple channels and departments; for e-commerce these often include account management, purchasing a product, resolving an issue, research, and getting a status update. Taking the time to understand the customer journey and behaviours for specific use cases ensures teams prioritise their investments and efforts in areas where they will have the greatest impact. Looking at digital CX in the context of a complete journey helps teams remove siloes that might otherwise hinder progress and impact, cultivate strategic alignment, and uncover unmet needs and opportunities.
Capture customer feedback in the moment
Early in the partnership between CX and marketing teams with digital, it’s important to establish a set of passive listening posts across all digital channels and e-commerce platforms – these should supplement the existing customer feedback programs CX and marketing teams traditionally manage, such as surveys. Common examples of passive listening posts include having a visible and easy-to-use always-on feedback button, or using modern AI-powered experience management technologies to analyse feedback shared by customers across social channels, online reviews, and through calls to the contact centre.
Giving customers the ability to share feedback in the moment helps uncover authentic, targeted, actionable insights and enables teams with real-time, focused insights to drive improvements when and where it matters most.
Use digital analytics to understand online consumer behaviours
Digital analytics help teams capture behavioural data from all site visitors, such as rage-clicking, mouse thrashing, and click-paths. This data is more objective and accurate than traditional feedback data – it reflects what people actually did rather than what they think they might do – and it can be captured continuously and in real time. All these benefits make digital behavioural insights critical for helping develop a dynamic understanding of digital journeys and pain points.
Take action on feedback when and where it matters
Using AI, CX and marketing teams can benefit from workflows that automatically route feedback to the right stakeholders to take action on. These automated workflows should integrate with the systems and processes stakeholders already use as part of their everyday role, such as Jira, Slack, or Salesforce, to ensure swift adoption. AI will also empower teams to instantly identify and support customers encountering difficulties online, such as using digital analytics data to flag customers that might not be able to find what they’re looking for, or advanced conversational analytics to escalate online chat conversations.
AI will help teams deeply understand the emotion, intent, and effort behind every engagement, and become more pro-active and predictive to resolve problems before they arise. The keys to optimising the impact of AI-powered workflows is identifying the initial triggers driving action – which can be metrics including CSAT, effort, satisfaction, digital analytics, or even key words – and ensuring ticketing notifications are routed to the correct teams.
AI accelerates and expands e-commerce impact
As organisations and consumers increasingly adopt and embrace AI, there are significant opportunities to drive improvements across every aspect of the customer experience, including digital and e-commerce.
Right now, organisations are focusing on where AI can have the greatest impact on their business – be it growth, productivity, or operational efficiencies. From these starting points we will see AI programs scale, and there will be a first-mover advantage for those leading the way. Organisations already using AI in their e-commerce and digital offerings – or about to begin – have a head start on the competition, and will be better positioned to deliver great CX in the moment, across every channel, and across every engagement.
This thought leadership is written by Eleanor O’Dwyer-Duggan, CX Solution Strategist, Southeast Asia at Qualtrics
MARKETECH APAC is leading the conversation on the future of e-commerce marketing strategies this 2024 and beyond with the E-Commerce Marketing in Malaysia 2024 conference on July 25, 2024 at Sheraton Petaling Jaya and the E-Commerce Marketing in the Philippines 2024 conference on August 14, 2024 at Crowne Plaza Manila Galleria. Join us and become an integral part of a dynamic community committed to pushing the boundaries of innovation and fostering unparalleled growth in the e-commerce domain.
