Is this just another recession? How long will it last? Where should we cut costs?
(Spoiler Alert: DO NOT abandon your customer experience!)
If you’re like most retailers, you’re probably preparing for the worst. Paring back costs where you can and bunkering down for a rocky ride through the next few quarters.
But hindsight can often be a beautiful thing. And thankfully for the savvy retailers out there, there’s plenty to be learned by studying tough times of the past and understanding what champions of the industry did to rise from the ashes of a recession, fight off their enemies and come back stronger than ever.
“Customer experience (CX) leaders are more resilient during recessionary periods, experiencing shallower troughs and quicker recovery.” McKinsey & Company recently said.
A McKinsey study into the 2007-2009 GFC showed that businesses with stronger customer experience bounced back far stronger and with an average of 3x greater returns than their CX “laggard” counterparts.
(Spoiler Alert #2: DO NOT abandon your customer experience!)
For some time now, online retailers have put their faith in NPS scores to measure and try to make sense of customer experience. What those in the industry - anyone who’s worked with NPS for an extended timeframe, or taken the time to really understand it will attest to - say is you don’t need to look too hard to understand its shortcomings. Sure, it’s simple, well known, and can provide a way to see trends, but what about the limitations?
First of all it’s outdated. Created before Pulp Fiction AND Donkey Kong (1993), well before online shopping was even a thing.
It’s incredibly difficult to interpret results - A low NPS score might give an indication something is wrong, but it can’t tell you what that something is or, more importantly, what to do about it. Customer experience is complex and difficult, and trying to cram all this complexity into a single basic question doesn’t do it any justice.
Sample sizes are often small - It’s estimated that less than 1% of customers - the “vocal minority”, actually respond to NPS customer feedback requests. Can we trust results from such a small and emotionally driven sample?
Fortunately for retailers, this is 2023. We not only have a far greater understanding of the importance of great CX, but we also have much better ways of measuring and improving these experiences.
The perfect example of this is humii. Launched just under 12 months ago, humii takes the simple concept of in-store mystery shopping and applies this to the complex ecosystem of ecommerce. With a nationwide network of anonymous shoppers continuously shopping Australian retailers online and evaluating their experiences, humii uses this data to provide retailers with a measure of the health of their ecommerce customer experience, with competitor benchmarking and insights on how to improve at the forefront of the product.
Appreciating the value of understanding retail customer experience in-store, and the benefits retailers have extracted from this exercise for decades, humii has devised a method where shoppers capture almost 200 unique data points across the full lifecycle of online shopping – from a Google search, to browsing the site, checkout, payment, delivery, returns, refunds, support, loyalty programs, the whole thing!
Working with a range of ecommerce leaders such as Rebel Sport, Super Cheap Auto, Oroton and New Balance, humii is leading the way in providing retailers with the “why” behind their CX. There are a million tools on the market that can tell retailers “what” is happening in their store - conversion rates, session times, CTR’s, abandonment rates, open rates, etc, but little available that can explain “why” customers do what they do. Humii harnesses the power of real people to do just this, providing retailers with direct, unbiased feedback from real shoppers – data that is simple to understand and can be actioned right away.
If you’re an online retail business and you:
1. Want to understand consumers better
2. Want to improve your customer experience
3. Want to come out the other side of this recession stronger than ever
It’s time you get in touch with team humii.
(Spoiler Alert #3: DO NOT abandon your customer experience!)