Is eCommerce just about selling products? No. Of course, it plays one of the most important roles and it’s crucial to success, but you can’t ignore the fact that you need to impress your customers. Failing to focus on customer experiences, or, even worse, having outright bad customer experiences, can lead to serious problems with sales, leads, profits, and your company’s reputation.

Here’s what you need to know about poor customer experiences and how they can play a major role in your eCommerce company’s goals.

What is a Bad Customer Experience?

First, it’s important to review an important aspect, also known as CX aka Customer Experience.  

CX is all the touchpoints between your company and your customers throughout the buyer journey. It’s directly related to how your customer perceives your brand. A bad customer experience can lead to buyers simply not returning to your website/brand and even sharing their thoughts on social media or just with friends and family. 

Some examples of poor customer experiences include:

• Lacking or poor customer service (this can range from no customer service to using negative language to lacking empathy)
• No or little personalization
• No segmentation (or the segmentation isn’t based on actual data)
• Few product recommendations
• Little support after purchase
• Poorly designed website or interface
• Poor product experience
• Slow response time
• Failing to meet customer expectations

How Bad Customer Experiences Affect Your eCommerce?

There’s no doubt that poor customer experiences can directly impact your eCommerce and profits. 

What can be the main impacts of a bad experience on your online business?

Your Brand’s Reputation

Your brand’s reputation takes years to build, and only one bad experience can tear it. Even if they loved doing business with you previously, that one negative interaction makes 32% of customers go elsewhere.

Bad CX can lead to 1-star reviews, but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg. Many of the potential clients will just go to competitors without letting you know. And even if these customers who had poor experiences with your company don’t leave a review, they are likely to tell others – 62% of customers do just that! And 13% will actually tell 15 or more others!

To turn around your brand’s reputation, you should be focusing on:

• Always getting feedback from current and past customers (and privately address these problems with your team)
• Responding to poor reviews in a professional manner
• Reach out to customers who had bad customer experiences (keep it private if possible)

Your Sales

Of course, poor customer experiences will lead to customers jumping ships, especially if it becomes the norm. This will lead to worse buyer retention, as well as negative word-of-mouth marketing. Word of mouth marketing can be valuable to your business and lead generation, but extremely harmful if you’re not paying attention to every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey and working to right wrongs.

Your business will experience fewer conversions and repeat sales, which in turn can lead to you sinking more money into trying to turn it around. Around 44% of customers will switch to a competitor if you’re not focusing enough on stellar customer service.

To turn around poor sales affected by bad customer experience, your brand should be:

• Using a CRM
• Training your employees in customer service
• Understanding where your brand and team are missing the mark with communications
• Removing silos between sales and marketing
• Develop a customer retention strategy
• Reaching out to customers throughout the journey
• Taking advantage of inbound marketing

Your Employee Retention

Customer experiences don’t only affect your customers – a poor CX strategy can actually impact your employee retention strategy, too! If they’re constantly dealing with angry customers or feel that they don’t have the resources to perform the job to the best of their ability, they’re more likely to feel unhappy in their position and leave for another.

Your best employees may also be required to pick up the slack of other team members, which can lead to burnout and another layer of dissatisfaction. They may also not want to be associated with your company if the reputation of the brand continues to drop or want to get out before things get extremely bad. This can lead to a loss of sales as customers follow your former employees as well as a loss of valuable tribal knowledge.

You can improve your employee retention by:

• Offering a top-quality culture
• Providing the resources they need to perform their job to the best of their ability
• Training new hires and current employees

Your approach to customer experiences and customer service can have a direct impact on your sales, reputation, and brand success. If you find that you’re getting negative feedback or 1-star reviews, it may be time to review your current customer experience strategy and find the avenues that can help you turn it around.

Are you looking to improve your CX and create more amazing experiences for your clients? If so, we’re here to help! Discover how 3D and AR can help you create products and experiences that will enhance customer loyalty while boosting brand reputation.

Did you like this article on bad customer experience? Then check out our entry on how Augmented Reality is changing eCommerce!