Why Must E-Commerce Focus on Customer Experience?

Delivering a positive customer experience (CX) is something every e-commerce team and marketer is responsible for. Today’s organizations will not survive the fierce competition they face without focusing on customer experience across all aspects of their business, not just marketing.

18 Aug 2018

According to a recent article in Shopify, CX as it relates to e-commerce is, “Providing an exceptional ecommerce customer experience involves creating relevant, meaningful, and memorable events for customers which in turn, translate into increased brand loyalty and positive brand favorability.”

That sounds about right.


Why has CX become such a big deal lately? Don’t all organizations want to ensure their customers have great experiences? Yes and no. Driving CX means committing and understanding that the “experience” needs to be planned for and executed from early on in product development to marketing to sales to post-sales support and even to the packaging and delivery of a product. Customer experience today is a holistic understanding of how to engage the customer from well before the sale to well after the sale into advocacy and brand loyalty. And the brands that are achieving this are seeing big gains in revenue.

How much revenue? Data from the Forrester indicates that improving CX increases profitability at a rate of 5.1 times more than that of laggards. In addition, CX helps not only improves top-line revenue but bottom-line as well with lower customer and employee acquisition costs and a lower cost to service customers. That equates to big dollars for even a small e-commerce company.

How should e-commerce organizations think about improving customer experience? Bake it into everything and always focus on the improving the actual customer experience, not just being able to connect with customers in more ways.

They are not the same thing.

“CX is about delivering on the brand promise,” said Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of VisumCX, a customer experience strategy firm. “Too often we look at CX from our own departments instead of from the customer’s perspective.”

This is in fact, one of the biggest challenges for companies that try to focus on CX. Simply connecting across more channels isn’t necessarily improving the experience for the customer. In fact, it could be having the opposite effect if the content or engagement isn’t relevant or personalized based on their needs.

E-commerce organizations and their teams can differentiate themselves from the competition by focusing on the elements of CX holistically, not just at certain points, and working to incorporate them throughout the customer journey.

Hear more insights from customer experience expert Carlos Hidalgo on the PIMtalk podcast. Download it right now or subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an episode!