Don’t let your support team be your only line of defence when it comes to maintaining a positive eCommerce user experience!
While your eCommerce and marketing teams may be in charge of website performance, it’s your support team that ultimately has to hear about and handle any customer-facing issues that arise.
As challenging as customer complaint tickets can be, they can also be helpful in creating and maintaining a healthy website that offers positive experiences to its customers.
Being alerted to a bad experience, or a broken flow on your website, gives your team the opportunity to resolve an issue they might not have known was there and to improve their overall website performance. Unfortunately, support teams aren’t always getting these alerts: only 1 in 10 customers take the time to create support tickets when they experience an error.
So while tickets can be frustrating, they do pose an interesting opportunity for companies.
In this blog, we’ll explore the positives and the negatives around customer support tickets as it relates to eCommerce website issues, and dive into how teams can better equip themselves to handle site errors and the tickets that come with them.
Why It’s Good to Hear About Errors
As we mentioned, customers that experience a site bug while going through their online shopping experience will only create a support ticket 10% of the time. More often than not, the customer will just abandon the website.
Now 10% isn’t really a lot, but it’s certainly better than not knowing about any customer-impacting issues, right?
Every opportunity to make an improvement to user experience, or to unblock a conversion, should be prioritized. Hearing about issues through tickets provides an avenue to do this.
The Common Downsides to Customer Tickets
No, we’re not meaning to contradict what we just said above. What we mean is that customer tickets usually don’t come with a lot of helpful information. The tickets that are coming in, while they alert the team to something being wrong, usually don’t provide a lot of context to actually act on a resolution quickly.
A lot of the time, a customer ticket will come in with a line saying, “Please help, I can’t add these shoes I want to my cart,” or, “Your website isn’t loading.” Depending on the ticket collection form, the support team may be able to see the general time frame in which the error occurred, the URL it occurred on, and the resulting action the customer wasn’t able to take.
That’s not an awful lot to go on for the support team, or for the development team, to action!
Getting to the bottom of a reported error from a ticket that doesn’t contain the right information takes a lot of investigation work, trial and error, and patience. It takes time for the support team to understand what’s actually going on, and then even more time for the development team to gather enough data to begin working on a resolution.
The Impact Beyond Customer Tickets
If your company’s support team is hearing only about 10% of the website errors impacting your customer, what about the other 90%?
Site errors, when left undetected and unresolved, can turn into a massive revenue drain.
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- A navigation menu not working could lead to a potential customer bouncing from the site before making a purchase.
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- An infinite loading loop at the View Product step could stop an interested customer from adding an item to their cart.
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- A faulty redirect from the View Shopping Cart button could block customers from beginning their checkout process.
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- A PayPal integration failure could stop customers from being able to give you money.
However, without hearing about these types of issues through customer tickets, or through an error detection platform, your team will miss out on countless sale and conversion opportunities. Your potential customers are going to get frustrated, and your business growth will suffer.
Check out The Impact of Hidden eCommerce Errors to learn more.
When You’re Not Hearing About Errors, Others Are
While customers may not be quick to fill out a support ticket, they certainly have no problem talking about it online and with others!
Brand engagement on Twitter, especially when it comes to poor experiences, is a big thing now. More and more, brands are being hit with public tweets complaining about errors prospective customers are experiencing.
In a world where word-of-mouth recommendations and customer reviews rule as king, having tweets like these attached to your brand can be detrimental.
How can support teams avoid this kind of publicity, better mitigate incoming tickets, and make their lives easier, all while helping to create a seamless eCommerce experience? By utilizing eCommerce Monitoring Technology to be more proactive.
Using Error Monitoring Software to Maintain Site Health
Having a website monitoring system in place, one that detects all customer-impacting site errors, can be one of the most helpful tools you could give to your support team.
With software that can identify every customer-impacting error on your website, the support team can rest assured that the site is operating as expected, and when it isn’t, they will be alerted to it immediately without having to wait on customers to do it for them.
Error monitoring platforms, like Noibu, also provide the added benefit of collecting all the data needed to resolve an error. This not only helps in decreasing time to resolution, but it also helps support staff understand the error itself. Access to this level of data also allows support staff to directly tie customer tickets back to detected errors, which helps them better address customer complaints.
With tools like Noibu in place, online retailers and their support teams have seen impactful changes in their ability to maintain a healthy site, grow their business, and decrease the number of tickets coming into their support team.
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- For Champion, the team was able to move off of user-generated error reports and onto a more proactive approach: “I think the impact that has been positive is that we have been able to resolve and address issues, without waiting for customer generated tickets, proactively and become better aligned on the impact of what we’re working on.” This has resulted in an 18x ROI for the company. Read the Case Study →
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- For Scrubs and Beyond, the team noted that their number of complaints went from 5 or 6 tickets a day down to 1 every couple of weeks. Quite impressively, the team has achieved a 123.36x ROI since partnering with Noibu’s error monitoring platform. Read the Case Study →
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- For Moschino, their Customer Experience Specialist noted a definitive decrease in error reports from customers after partnering with Noibu: “when we started the collaboration, the customers were reporting a lot less errors… no news is good news.” The Italian fashion brand has achieved an ROI of 99.57x with the platform. Read the Case Study →
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- For DLT Trading, it only took a matter of days for the team to experience a “significant reduction in customer complaints” after getting the platform set up. The company has seen a 47% growth in sales and has achieved an ROI of 13.01x. Read the Case Study →
Click below to learn more about how Noibu has helped top eCommerce brands like Barstool Sports, Carrefour, and more!
