Is it possible to bring down cart abandonment rate to zero?

Cart abandonment is a major problem in today’s volatile world of ecommerce. It is a phenomenon that plagues all industries and economies: on an average, about 77% of customers abandon their shopping carts instead of completing their purchase. This rate only seems to be rising with time. Businesses are at a loss to understand why only 3 out of 10 people complete their purchase—even if the businesses have followed through all the hygiene practises, such as page optimization, pricing strategies, search ranking, and perfecting their information architecture among others. No doubt, businesses are engrossed in deciphering why cart abandonment happens and how to recover abandoned carts.

A much discussed topic

Reasons behind cart abandonment have been researched, categorized, qualified, and weighed. The market too has been flooded with many tools and applications to automatically target abandoners by sending communications and employing retargeting tactics. Although the success of these tools and tactics continues to be debated upon, businesses need to evolve strategies to nip the problem of cart abandonment quite early in the shopping journey. In fact, it is actually the best starting place to demonstrate your core values to the cart abandoner, who has already spent time interacting with your site and putting an order together.

Reasons for cart abandonment are much more than forgotten passwords, payment issue, etc. A recorded customer session may not be the ideal starting point for devising your response. Businesses have to first visualize the journey by seeing it through the customers’ eyes and by optimising online experiences. In fact, businesses are losing sales due to poor customer user experiences online—with issues ranging from a complicated navigation and a problematic shopping experience to other difficulties. When businesses realize that customer buying behaviour drives revenue, data-driven customer engagement takes precedence over traditional retargeting or re-marketing tactics. This realization helps businesses to streamline the online experience factor and deliver better service.

Enhanced customer experience management

Bringing down the cart abandonment rate to nil is possible with the use of advanced customer experience management solutions. For instance, tools such as IBM Tealeaf Customer Experience (CX) focus on customer involvement, action, and choices to resolve roadblocks during customer journeys. By linking users’ actions to business results in real-time, businesses gain the much-needed visibility into buyer behaviour. Customer Experience (CX) management sums up all the experiences that a user had or currently having during the visit over a particular e-commerce application. It provides deep insight of your infrastructure and the much-need customer intelligence.

Businesses need to perform the following tasks to address issues relating to cart abandonment:

  1. Monitoring the KPIs of customer experience
  2. Proactively examining and responding to known technical issues
  3. Listening to customers
  4. Prioritizing customer experience issues based on business impact
  5. Qualifying and validating actual customer behaviour

By tackling the issue of cart abandonment head-on, CX is playing an important role in redefining the CRM function. Today, successful online retailers rely on using CX as a launchpad for CRM marketing programmes to support customer value growth, ensure retention, and foster loyalty.

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