The State Of eCommerce Experience, an annual study on the latest digital eCommerce trends commissioned by Forrester Consulting revealed that 76% of shoppers weren’t happy with their shopping experience.
And this unhappiness comes with a huge cost.
- The cost of abandoned shopping carts is more than $4 trillion annually
- Shoppers look for convenience and engaging experiences
- 4 out of 5 shoppers will leave the brand they are loyal to after three or fewer instances of poor CX
But measuring CX and proving its impact isn’t easy. So, how can you prove that fixing the checkout snag or a payment gateway issue will boost your numbers?
Quantifying CX in eCommerce Is Tricky
- How do you put across emotions as facts?
It’s nice to have happy customers but how does that look on the spreadsheet? We need to find a way to translate that into hard numbers.
- What has impacted the sales?
Did the marketing team do a good job? Or was it the improved checkout process? Isolating the impact of CX can be tough.
- Do you have the right tools?
Data needs to tell the story. It can help the team assess the voice of the customer (VoC). Hence, you need a suitable tool to measure experiences and guide you in making informed decisions.
Despite these challenges, measuring eCommerce experiences is critical.
Significance of Quantifying CX in eCommerce
Here’s how gauging CX using digital experience analytics can help eCommerce businesses:
- Helps Identify Areas of Improvement in Website Navigation: Analyzing customer behavior data like bounce rates, average session time, click-through rates, etc, can unveil cart abandonment issues during checkout.
- Proactively Spots Technical Issues: Using digital experience analytics, eCommerce teams can quickly detect technical issues or bottlenecks on the website that are impacting user experience.
- Helps Them Tailor Their Offerings: Data analysis depicting user preference for a specific category of products can help eCommerce leaders make informed strategies like featuring such options frequently, running targeted campaigns, etc. This can help enhance CX and conversion rates.
- Supports Data-Driven Decision-Making: Analyzing customer feedback and inquiries can help eCommerce teams understand their requirements. This can help make data-driven decisions to improve overall CX.
Leveraging Digital Experience Analytics to Improve eCommerce CX
Digital experience analytics (DXA) helps capture and assess user activities and overall CX within the eCommerce website and application, delving into aspects like navigation, customer satisfaction levels, and overall engagement.
It leverages customer engagement data, such as surveys, conversion metrics, session replay, funnels, click maps, user journeys, heatmaps, and more, to identify issues with the overall CX.
What eCommerce Leaders Can Expect from Digital Experience Analytics Platform?
As an eCommerce leader, you always strive to build and enhance customer experiences. A robust digital experience analytics platform powered by advanced analytics ML algorithms can ease your journey. Here’s what you can expect from advanced digital experience platforms.
Insights from User Experience Data
Today, eCommerce businesses collect a vast amount of data, probably more than they need. The best digital experience analytics platforms help cut through the noise and capture the customer data that matters the most.
With digital experience platforms, you can gain insights into digital experiences without compromising the customer experience. These tools offer a range of auto-capture functionalities that capture a comprehensive array of errors, events, and dimensions without extensive manual interventions. You can gain a holistic view of user behavior, from simple clicks and taps to complex metrics, such as conversion rates and revenue generation.
Powerful Visualizations Tied to User Behavior and Revenue
An advanced digital experience platform (DXP) built with machine learning algorithms can provide intuitive visualizations tied to user behavior and revenue through dynamic dashboards.
For instance, you can gauge crucial metrics, such as bounce rates, cart abandonment rates, session duration, conversion rates, revenue per user, average order value (AOV), and more.
This allows you to identify user patterns and areas of improvement, thus fostering accurate data-driven decision-making to achieve high conversion rates and, ultimately, revenue.
Automated and Aggregated UX Analytics
Data-driven UX design has become a gold standard for the eCommerce industry.
Most reputed eCommerce businesses leverage page analysis, heatmaps, session replay, click maps, customer journey maps, attention maps, and interaction or content analysis maps to analyze user behavior to design UX.
The insights derived can help them understand how distinct user segments engage with your eCommerce platform and products. The designers can determine how page elements like confusing content or poorly labeled buttons impact your eCommerce conversion rates.
Combining these insights with user feedback can help your UX team implement new ideas and see how design changes impact revenue. This approach enables them to create user-friendly eCommerce sites that can contribute to better conversion rates.
Accurate Alerts for Technical Issues
It’s crucial to proactively address issues before they impact users negatively.
For instance, real-time alerts about technical problems like failing APIs and user frustration resulting from a poor redesign can help take hold of the situation and maintain a seamless user experience.
Robust digital experience analytics platforms leverage advanced ML and AI tools, including anomaly detection. These digital platforms offer pre-configured alerts and the flexibility to customize alerts in real-time based on user behavior and other crucial metrics.
Anomaly detection, informed by historical benchmarking, empowers digital experience analytics platforms to trigger accurate and timely alerts, enabling teams to identify and resolve issues proactively.
A/B Testing
The right digital experience analytics platform can help your design and development team analyze how users interact with distinct versions of your eCommerce website.
With digital experience platforms, they can perform thorough A/B testing experiments and evaluate user responses to various website features, layouts, or content. Besides, the digital experience analytics platforms can enable them to compare vital metrics, such as conversion, click-through rates, churn rates, and more.
Limitations of Digital Experience Platforms
Though a digital experience analytics platform is a great tool to include in your tech stack, it’s not the only tool you need to deliver seamless customer experiences.
While a digital experience platform provides insights into overall digital customer experience, it does not offer specialized capabilities for resolving technical errors, especially those directly impacting revenue on eCommerce websites.
Their session tracking capabilities could be leveraged to identify areas of improvement, but they lack the context to resolve them. DXAs do not provide error-resolution features. This makes it difficult for businesses to resolve revenue-impacting issues before they escalate. Moreover, these tools provide insights from a UX point of view, but not any technical information that is required by developers to resolve bugs.
Noibu - The Advanced Tool to Monitor Your Digital Experiences and More
Noibu is much more than a standard DXA. Noibu is an eCommerce error monitoring platform that proactively detects revenue-impacting website errors in real-time and flags them to your team. Apart from error reporting, Noibu also provides all technical details required to resolve the error, down to the exact line of code that needs fixing.
Ariat, a popular eCommerce brand in performance footwear, has been employing digital experience platforms and Noibu to improve its website usability and functionality.
Here’s what Todd Purcell, Senior Director of eCommerce Engineering at Ariat has to say about it.
The result?
In less than 5 months of adding Noibu to their eCommerce tech stack, Ariat was able to resolve 77 critical website issues and save $2,569,412 in annualized revenue. Read more about Ariat’s experience with Noibu here.
Let’s look at some of Noibu’s capabilities that allow eCommerce teams to deliver frictionless shopping experiences:
User Impact Analysis: Noibu can help you analyze if the error disrupted a crucial shopping journey or affected only a minute percentage of users. User impact analysis guides your decisions by tracking the issue’s impact over a given timeframe: occurrences, annual revenue loss, and revenue loss. Noibu allows you to investigate and enhance poorly performing pages.
The Way Ahead
Digital experience analytics platforms have long been leveraged by eCommerce leaders to monitor digital interactions and website performance. However, these platforms offer a broad overview – they lack the depth required to pinpoint specific issues impacting revenue and conversions.
If you are using a digital experience analytics tool, consider adding Noibu to your eCommerce tech stack to boost your capability to resolve specific types of technical errors, especially those directly impacting your revenue. Sign up for a demo of the platform to understand how it can benefit your team.
