Creating a great customer experience is crucial to e-commerce success. According to a survey conducted by PwC, 32% of online customers say they will no longer do business with a brand after just one bad experience. The customer experience encompasses every touch point customers have with your online business — from the time they first land on your website through shopping/browsing, ordering, making payment and possibly returning items.

At each one of these and other touch points, customers may need to try to contact your business. This becomes not only another touch point, but possibly the most important touch point of all. It’s important to gauge how and why customers contact you so you can understand “the voice of the customer” and make sure this is a positive experience for them.

Track, monitor and benchmark customer contacts

There are many different reasons why customers will contact your business. Maybe they need answers to questions about products before they buy, such as the size, colour or fit of clothing. Maybe they have questions about shipping charges or delivery times. Or maybe they need to know how to return items they’ve bought but decided they no longer want for whatever reason.

It’s important to track, monitor and benchmark all the reasons why customers get in touch with you so you can make the contact experience as efficient as possible — for both your customers and your business. Answering and responding to customers’ questions is costly, whether you do this via live call centre agents, online/chat agents or AI chat support. Your goal should be to implement whatever method ensures the best customer experience in the most cost-efficient manner for your business.

According to research conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, difficulty in finding contact information is one of the biggest frustrations experienced by online shoppers. Forty-four percent of online shoppers say they will leave a site if they can’t easily find contact information or a phone number. And according to the Harvard Business Review, 75% of customers say it takes too long to reach a human being for customer service.

These statistics drive home the importance of creating a great experience for customers not only when they’re shopping or purchasing, but also when they need to contact your business.

Design the right customer service response

Be sure you track hard data, not just anecdotal data, in order to avoid confirmation or recency bias. As you monitor the data, look for trends that can help you design your customer service response in a way that helps ensure a positive customer experience while also lowering costs and driving efficiency.

The reasons customers contact your business might not be as obvious as they appear at first glance. A catalog retailer we work with was monitoring customer contacts and classified a large number of contacts as “returns.” When we dug deeper into the data, we discovered that most of the questions customers had about returns dealt specifically with the return process, which wasn’t clearly explained on the site.

Return instructions were not easy to find and written in big text blocks that were difficult to read and understand. Instead of trying to figure it out on their own, customers were calling the company and speaking with a call center agent to let them sort it out.

To solve the problem and create a better customer experience, we rewrote the return instructions, breaking them into individual, bulleted steps that were easier to follow. The new instructions clearly explained every step of the return process, including which items are eligible for returns, how to package items for return and which couriers to use. We added a button to click as the final step in the return process.

Next, we ran an experiment using the old and new return instructions. The result was a 43% reduction in calls to the company that were related to product returns. In addition, to the reduction in calls there was also a boost in the conversion rate because new customers had more confidence that they would be able to return items if they needed to. This resulted in an annual revenue boost of over £1 million for the business.

Create great customer experiences at every touch point

Do you understand “the voice of your customers” when it comes to how and why they are contacting your business? If not, you could be missing out on opportunities to improve the customer experience. An optimisation agency can help you create great customer experiences at every touch point with your business.

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