We analyzed 12.000 online shopper questions during Peak Season and here’s what we found out
Every year around mid-December, I know two things are about as inevitable as hearing Mariah Carey belt out that song on the radio.
My family will come together and attempt to make our (nearly) world-famous “Œufs en brioche” after my grand-mother’s recipe, and I really need to hurry up and finish my Christmas shopping…
Reassuringly, I’m not the only one checking out my favourite website for ideas — or last-minute delivery options for, well, hope.
It’s seems we’re all flocking to our favourite brands and retailers’ online stores. During Black Friday in the US alone, over $6.2 billion was spent online (*). Holiday Sales are predicted to be the biggest ever (**), with the Winter Sales, and Valentine’s Day just around the corner.
It’s a frantic time for customers who are looking for the best deals or the nicest gifts. It’s frantic too for e-tailers and brands who want to make sure all runs smoothly for their clients.
Over the 2018 Black Friday week, we saw shopper questions coming in through our clients’ community chats double or even triple.
***For those of you who don’t know us, the TokyWoky Community Chat is essentially a 24/7 live chat that allows visitors on your website to talk to each other, answer questions, and give advice***
Our team analysed 12,000+ questions shoppers asked over our clients’ community chats.
These questions usually revolve around inspirational questions: advice, gift ideas, etc.
This completely flips during peak season.
Anything promotion-related was the leading category of questions asked. This may seem obvious, but every “operational question” saw significant lifts. These represent a smaller proportion of questions during normal shopping season.
Our findings suggest that during peak season, customers behaviours shift and become more transactional, as shoppers look for instant operational information.
Out of 12,000 questions asked, and I analysed this in a previous post, here were the top 3:
- “Can I use the loyalty program and the Black Friday promo offer at the same time?”
- “I cannot seem to add the product to my basket”
- “Is it possible to return an article bought on Black Friday?”
We’ve worked on these issues with our clients as we’re helping them gear up for peak season. Along the way we’ve created some best practices I wanted to share with you today.
Here are 7 ways you can use your customer community for identifying and fixing issues on your ecommerce website during peak season.
1. Duplicate key info as much as you can
Again, this might seem obvious. But we see that it’s not yet industry common practice.
Do you have info about special Holiday Deals on a few strategic pages on your website?
Given how it’s the number one question asked by Black Friday shoppers, I recommend you make that info available anywhere you can: homepage, product page, shopping cart, payment page, FAQ, etc.
One of our clients in the beauty sector even made a dedicated page about it and made sure it was visibly available from every page on their website.
2. Track and analyse customer questions as they are happening
Google Analytics and the likes might be your best friend when it comes to identifying pressing issues on your website.
It’s ours too. They’re great at showing you which page isn’t converting and how much traffic (and sales) you’re losing.
But, they might be great at finding the “where”, not so much when it comes to “why”.
Is the link not working to your product page? A technical mistake? Is the product info not clear?
When you find an issue on your website, you need to find that “why” quickly and set up the right solution.
There’s two ways you can go about this rather quickly.
If you can analyse questions asked through your chatbot, you can figure out what’s happening on your website and why.
For those of you who are working with us on your customer community, we’ve been perfecting our Content Analysis Tool which allows you to spot pages your customers had the most questions about, and what kind of issue they were experiencing.
You’ll see what kind of problem they’re having in seconds.
3. Don’t let your customer support team out of your sight
The other way to quickly spot issues, the more old-fashioned way perhaps, is by working with resource you might have right down the hall, or on another floor.
If you want to find out why your page isn’t converting, become best friends with your customer service team.
They’re the guys (and gals) on the frontline, interacting with countless of customers every day. They will know when an issue keeps coming up with different shoppers.
I knew an e-commerce director who, on peak traffic days, would set up hourly calls with his customer support director to stay up to date.
So don’t be strangers, you’ll need your customer support team more than ever.
4. Set up keyword alerts
According to our research, we know clients tend to use the same words when they’re experiencing difficulties. Think “can’t”, “basket”, “impossible”, “cannot”…
You want to limit conversion issues as much as you can. You can manage this by quickly identifying pain points and fixing them.
One way to do this, is set up keyword alerts.
If you have TokyWoky or a chat tool with content analysis, we recommend you set these up before going home for Christmas.
Set up triggers like “can’t” or “issue” and spot problems immediately.
One of our clients in the DIY sector created specific keyword alerts on words such as “basket”, “impossible”, “cannot”, “can’t” the morning of Cyber Monday.
In under 15 min, they received 5 alerts.
At least 5 customers had used the TokyWoky Community Chat to find a solution for their checkout problem.
We noticed all alerts came from mobile users.
Sure enough, our client’s dev team saw there was an issue on their mobile checkout page and solves the issue. In under an hour. On Cyber Monday. Imagine the sales lost hadn’t they spot that immediately.
And if you don’t have your dev team readily available to fix issues, here’s what you can do.
5. Communicate quickly with your customers on social
If you have a problem and cannot fix it right away, let your customer know.
We see that customers are much more forgiving when they know what’s going on and what’s being done about it.
I especially like Gymshark’s approach. During Black Friday, their UK & US online stores had an issue on the check out page, and thousands of customers were affected.
Ben Francis, Gymshark’s founder, took to social media and delivered a message to all their customers.
In a quick one-minute video, he took the pressure of his customer support team and, above all, informed his customer community they would soon be able to complete their purchases.
6. Update your chatbots / tools / FAQs
This is such a simple thing to do but many sites aren’t doing it (yet).
E-tailers often have a chatbot, or another plugin customers can interact with. Making sure your FAQ tool or chatbot is updated with relevant promo info before big Holidays will ease customer frustrations.
At TokyWoky, we’ve included the Dynamic FAQ to our Community Chat and have seen recurring questions like promo or delivery related questions fall by as much as 50% for some of our clients.
Usually with these tools, you can update the tool yourself and add info in minutes. No need for a dev team anymore.
7. Inform your community in advance
If you already have a customer community hub or you’re maybe even working with us building your customer community, don’t forget this final step.
You may call them core-customers or brand ambassadors or super clients. One great way to engage them is by giving them “exclusive” information.
Inform your community of any issues and/or temporary promos so they can answer other shoppers’ questions.
This is a great way to make sure your core customers stay engaged and loyal to your brand, even through the issues and bugs.
***
“All I want for Christmas is…” admittedly, forgetting that song ever existed. Above all, we’re aiming to make sure peak season marathon runs as smoothly as possible for our clients in retail.
Hopefully, this helps. Let me know what you think.
Also, we’ve made a webinar about getting your website ready for peak season. You can check it out here!
I originally posted this on LinkedIn, let’s connect there!
