Like most consumers, I do a lot of my shopping online. And I always make an effort to purchase from vendors I know. “Make an effort” is key because, inevitably, I abandon one vendor in favour of another, leaving current purchases and future potential behind. Whether I’ve found a better price, had trouble navigating a website or the purchasing process simply took too much time, staying with a vendor out of loyalty wears thin. There always are other vendors who try harder.
Across industries and channels, businesses have an 69.89% average online shopping cart abandonment rate. Visitors abandon the checkout or purchase process for many different reasons. Let’s consider those you can control when you have insights into online behaviour.
1 – Unable to find what they want
Understand when customers are headed down the wrong path, are lost on your website or are on the verge of cart abandonment. When you’re able to engage with them in real-time, you’ll have a more successful website and happier customers. Let’s say your athletic shoe business automatically follows a website visitor. You know that he’s a new prospect and his behavior suggests that he can’t find what he wants. With predictive insight into how this consumer is shopping, you can guide his journey to the right products. You also can present the best running accessories based on his preferences or fitness level. Show him relevant offerings from partners, or even the best running paths in his area. Personalized engagement opens opportunities for cross-selling, creating connections with valued partners and for building customer loyalty.
2 – Can’t interact on their channel of choice or switch between channels
Consumers change their minds midstream and expect you to keep up. According to Gartner Research, even late in the purchasing stages, most customers still access digital channels. Adapting to changing engagement channels while shaping journeys requires an omnichannel platform that captures all prospect conversations and interaction history. By connecting the dots among all interactions, you can discover, analyze and understand customer behaviour in real-time. In addition to meeting customer expectations, you can use this valuable cross-channel insight to inform sales and marketing strategies.
3 – Personal distractions and interruptions force them to start over
Consumers expect convenience and the ability to multitask when life gets in the way. Their journeys may span seconds, days or any number of hours in between. Blending the experiences between automated and assisted service—self-service, bots, microapps and live agents—enables conversations to exist across time and channels. Not only do these connected conversations save you and your customers valuable time, they enable you to start new conversations for new business opportunities—now and in the future.
4 – Checkout procedures are too long and complicated
Customers like fast and simple processes, whether engaging through a desktop or mobile device. Consider mortgage and line-of-credit application and approval processes, which are notoriously slow and complex. This introduces a greater risk of abandonment. But customer journey analytics gives you a full view of the customer application process, determines where bottlenecks threaten the timely closing of a deal, and even visibility into marketing campaigns that brought the customer to your website. These deep insights into the customer journey also enable you to measure multiple touchpoints within that journey and make improvements, the referral source, the initial landing pages—all the way to conversions and tracking outcomes.
5 – Repeating information to agents, or waiting for them to start work, wastes time
Augmenting your workforce with bots means that some part of your workforce is always available to handle individual interactions and associated requests in a hyper-personalized, cost-effective way. Bots can analyze behaviours, along with entire buying journeys, and figure out what they should offer. They also boost conversion rates by capturing every sales opportunity and, when available, assign the best-fit human at the right time, then assist humans as needed. For a customer wanting to do business with you, unattended bots can listen, recognize and capture valuable information.
Identify and Engage With Your Customers
It’s not easy to predict or control how consumers will behave in real life. But it is possible to do a better job with online customers. Automatically predicting online behaviour, personalizing customer journeys and engaging with customers at the right time reduces the risk of abandonment and threats to top-line revenue. For customers with large shopping cart values, those high-value sales conversions quickly add up.
Author: Brendan Dykes
Brendan has over 25 years of experience in the customer service industry, in both business and technical roles. This broad experience has allowed him to see first-hand the importance for both customers and organizations of delivering consistent omnichannel customer experiences. Brendan has both graduate and postgraduate qualifications in Business Management from Bristol Business School. He has been with Genesys since 2007, before which he worked in the energy and telecommunications sectors.