With the rise of the internet, retailers need to focus on providing a better customer experience in all areas of their business, writes Stephen Foxworthy*.  

For retailers selling online, the return on investment from customer experience improvement projects becomes evident when measured through analytics such as traffic figures, goal achievement and conversion.

These measurements are at the core of a successful online retailing strategy and monitoring them closely can yield valuable insight into consumer behaviour that will improve the bottom line.

On the internet the cost of a poor experience is directly measurable and it’s possible to build your business case around improving it. For example, you can invest money in improving your conversion rate by figuring out what the return will be based on hard numbers.

Many online retailers focus on this problem almost in isolation – how can we improve the conversion funnel and turn more browsers into buyers? While this is no bad thing, the problem with measuring so closely what’s happening on your website is that it becomes harder to figure out what’s not.

Traditional retailers have always measured the customer experience through research, surveys, and other channels such as their loyalty programs. However, these traditional retailers are now seeing the need to step up their customer experience programs to embrace online, even if they’re not selling directly on the internet.




Increasingly, customers are using the internet to research, rate, review and recommend the products and services they’re buying and it’s these activities which can seriously impact a customer’s purchase decision.

For all retailers, a poor experience online or in-store can now be shared online with thousands of potential customers instantly. If you want to see the extent of this phenomenon, just go to Twitter.com and search for: “#Fail” – you can see literally thousands of complaints happening right now from all over the world, many of them directed at brands, products and services.




In today's networked world, the risks associated with customer negativity are amplified greatly and news travels fast, so making sure your customers are advocates and supporters is becoming of paramount importance.

The core purpose of any business is to find and retain customers. For many retailers the focus for a long time has been on the ‘find’ part of the equation, with big advertising and marketing budgets to shout about their products and services.We’re seeing the effectiveness of such shouting diminishing. Now, a greater emphasis is being placed on the ‘retain’ aspect, and the necessary improvements to the customer experience this involves.

In this brave, new, always-on and always-connected world, the old methods of measuring your customer satisfaction are just that – old. New methods are needed to continuously measure the quality of your product or service across all retail channels. Now you need to actively ask for feedback directly from your customers as often as you can and act on this feedback decisively.

Thankfully, the technology to support this on-going measurement is readily available. Using simple technologies like email, mobile and the web, it’s possible to generate near real-time benchmarks of your customers’ attitudes. By asking them to tell you how you’re doing at appropriate moments, you’ll very quickly get an idea of where your weaknesses lie, what you’re doing well and any problems with your products.




You can start just by inviting your customers to give you feedback after a transaction. You’ll be surprised by how many are prepared to fill in a quick survey and any glowing verbatim responses you get can be used to boost your marketing efforts. You can do this a number of different ways, but email is one of the simplest, most cost effective and convenient ways. Try following up any purchase with a thank you email and a request for their opinions – you’ll get plenty. If you’re an online retailer, you may want to wait a few days until the customer receives their goods, but the principle still applies.

By doing this consistently across all channels and after every transaction you’ll get amazing customer insights and accurate benchmarks that you can use to practically improve your business. All in near real-time.

For retailers who adapt quickly to this changing customer behaviour and adopt real-time customer experience benchmarks the potential benefits are enormous. But for those who ignore the opportunities that the Internet and real-time tools can bring, the costs could be disastrous.

* Stephen Foxworthy is the Strategy Director at Reactive, a global digital agency that specialises in creating effective online strategy and solutions. He can be contacted at stephenf@reactive.com, (03) 9415 2333 or 0425 347 323.