The importance and results of transparent and effective communications with customers
These days, there’s a growing range of people starting to shop online. This is in part due to the pandemic moving things online and to a shift in browsing behaviour. Over the last year, we’ve seen companies and businesses quickly adapt to a variety of situations to ensure that their customers can do what they want to online. E-commerce businesses in particular have had to make shopping easier for a wider audience and ensure customers are confident in the timely shipping & delivery of their orders.
As an e-commerce marketplace focused on helping customers discover beautiful products, we made it a priority to ensure clear communication was a pillar of how we approached changes over the last year. Through this work, I was able to rediscover the power and importance of communication in design.
In the next two examples, I’ll approach how we used contextual messaging as a way to educate our users on important changes and, the values that guided us. How we validated our work through quantitative and qualitative data. And, the importance and power of reusing design system behaviours in the process.
Reassuring users impacted by Brexit
One of our goals at Trouva is to create a space for independent curators across the UK and EU to reach a global audience. Because we operate across both regions, we knew we would be impacted by Brexit. We worked hard to make this as seamless as possible for our customers (while doing a lot of work behind the scenes!) We didn’t want to negatively effect the experience from browsing to receiving the product. This meant ensuring customers wouldn’t need to pay extra fees or deal with any kind of worry after purchase.
Our goal for handling Brexit on site was to avoid a drastic drop in conversion and a reduction in UK <> EU purchasing. The impact of this is currently being felt across the industry. With this goal in mind, we focused on:
- Providing clear information around taxes and duties before customers committed to our checkout process
- Transparency and education towards the new policies
- Ensuring information was contextual (international vs. non-international shopping) and available at the right moments throughout the flow
In order to achieve the goals listed above, I went back to the messaging patterns in our design system. Back in March 2020 when the impact of the pandemic was first felt in the UK and EU, our team focused on creating patterns for informative messages that provided key information to the customer. We used this to communicate COVID-19 related information on our product and basket pages. I decided to adopt this same component because customers already knew where to look for key updates and it also required minimal engineering support. We needed to deliver this quickly and be able to edit the text as needed.
The strategic placement of the component higher on product pages also allowed for increased visibility and reinforced trust in our platform. In order to craft the right message for our customers, we used what we knew our customers would want to know while asking ourselves some questions: how does Brexit effect the customers? Are there going to be any extra fees? What are the crucial / most viewed pages to display this information? Do they need any extra details on the company policies regarding this topic?
Offer our customers the free shipping option
Last year, it was clear that we wanted to offer our customers the option to receive free shipping on orders above £60.00 (in some specific countries). Our assumptions were that by adding this we would improve conversion rate and increase the average order value per boutique.
As we started to work on the project, we realised that it would require a lot of communication updates around the website. Once again, we focused on empathising with our customers while educating them to some of their doubts, with a powerful and clear message. However, we were uncertain about some assumptions that we were making, and we kept questioning ourselves what was the desired information that users wanted to see across multiple steps of the experience.
To validate our thoughts, we decided to do our internal usability sessions as these are ideal when you want to make quick decisions on a budget. We wanted to understand the response to the whole communication approach that we were taking.
Over the sessions, completed in a week, we were looking to understand a bit better some of our defined goals.
- Identify problems with the displayed information
- Understand the impact of the displayed information
- Learn more about the target user’s behavior and preferences
We got confident that our solution of reusing our informative messages was the right solution. We were seeing positive learnings that were what we needed to understand that we were going into the right direction.
We ended up validating that our free shipping promotion is not always straightforward as it requires a minimum spend and, it can be confusing when buying for multiple boutiques. People really like to receive promotions so, to make the process the easiest as possible for our customers we:
- Reused the informative messages component described before. We also tweaked the copy based on internal testing feedback to be even clearer and transparent.
- Created a colour scheme for this component to educate the user
- Ended up presenting this information in more pages such as the basket page
All of these changes, had a visible immediate impact:
- Average order value increased from £53K to £60K
- Percentage of buying from the same boutique increased from 22% to 39%
Conclusions
Both of the examples shown above had the complement of a top app banner reinforcing the message. It’s important to complement these specific messages with global components. This will help the user get crucial information no matter what their journey through pages is. The main takeaway here is that values as transparency, consistency and empathy drive clear communication which is very important in order to create trust with customers.
As a final side note, we should be careful about adding too many informational messages to avoid making the application harder to browse for users with accessibility issues.
