True size Blog » usability improvement

Better customer experience leads to competitive advantage and higher turnover

Kelvin Divendal — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:17:05 +0000

It was often believed to be true, but now it’s also proven: companies that have better customer experience management capabilities, along with a strong customer orientation, enjoy a real competitive advantage. 81 percent of companies with a ‘high customer-experience maturity’ reported they outperform their competition and companies that reported outperforming competitors also reported plans to spend more on future investments in customer experience capabilities. This follows from the Customer Experience Maturity Monitor, a study of the current state of customer experience management within Fortune 500 companies by Peppers & Rogers Group, Harris Interactive and SAS.

40 percent of European companies integrate customer satisfaction as a Key Performance Indicator for rating their management, which is almost twice as much as the rest of the world. Companies that establish a customer orientation to enable a focus on the customer experience realize benefits in the short-term, but also position the company for enhanced long-term success.

Below you see the Customer Experience Maturity Model, which shows how companies progress in the maturation of their customer experience excellence along a continuum ranging from product centricity, to customer focus, to experiential mastery.

Retailers can convert 11% more digital window shoppers

Kelvin Divendal — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:54:46 +0000

A McAfee study released today found that a majority of shoppers are “digital window shoppers”. The study of 163 million shopping transactions found that 65% of all shoppers will wait a day or more to complete a purchase. This behavior may appear to be shopping cart abandonment, but it could also be the sign of a cautious shopper. Sales conversions were also 11% higher for digital window shoppers when McAfee’s Trustmark was visible to a consumer.

The top reasons for abandoning shopping carts found in a Paypal survey last July shows similar concerns. 21% of buyers reported that they had stopped shopping on a site because of worries about the security of their credit card data.

McAfee recommends three interesting strategies to combat abandoned shopping carts:

Make consumers feel safe on every page: use transparent privacy policies and security seals throughout the entire shopping experience.
Be patient, don’t panic: there is a risk in approaching shopping cart abandoners too soon. Merchants should factor in realistic timetables for shoppers to complete their transaction.
Optimize the entire site: retailers should not neglect a larger site abandonment and focus only on optimizing check-out.

Women take the lead in online shopping

Niels Hoogendoorn — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:23:30 +0000

Research by Blauw Research for webshop Bol.com has shown that nowadays women account for 51 percent of online buyers where in 1998 nine out of ten online shoppers were male. This shift in gender also influences buying behavior. Internet used to be a male concern, but women have different demands when it comes to e-commerce. Women tend to focus more on product and price orientation. Inspiration and experiences are more important here. The males however, want to choose quicker and therefore require a well-organized shopping process.

The combination of focal points of the different genders is key for today’s webshop development. Special attention for the female approach requires more focus on inspiration and ‘the experience’ during product visualization.

Forrester: ‘Dutch online shoppers will spend €8 billion in 2014′

Kelvin Divendal — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:21:04 +0000

Only a few days after Dutch market researcher Blauw Research stated that “despite of the economic crisis and decreasing consumer trust, in 2009 we expect the Dutch online consumer spending to reach € 6 billion”, Forrester Research publishes its online shopping predictions for The Netherlands in 2014. In its report Forrester expects that, by 2014, nearly 10 million Dutch online shoppers (out of a 16 million population) will spend more than € 8 billion via the internet.

Forrester asked more than 1.000 Dutch consumers about their satisfaction with Dutch websites on thirteen large retail websites. 69 percent reported that they were satisfied or very satisfied with their experiences.

Bol.com (86 percent) has the highest satisfaction rates, followed by Wehkamp.nl (76 percent) and Neckermann.com (75 percent). Bruna.nl (58 percent) came in last.

Dutch consumers were mainly frustrated by sites that made it hard to find - or didn’t have - the products they wanted. Another pain point for Dutch consumers was lack of/not enough pictures of products. Forrester recommends retail websites to prove that fixing usability problems is good for their business.

Especially the small, simple improvements can cause a fast improvement of the ROI. A good starting point is to show the board how other companies make changes which lead to improvement of the conversion, more and larger orders, better churn and online sales.