5 Ways to Improve Digital Customer Experience

Back when stores were just brick-and-mortar buildings, it was easy to understand how to improve customer experience: create a welcoming environment, display merchandise in an intuitive manner, train employees well, and get to know regular customers by name, among other best practices and strategies. However, now that nearly every retail business also has a website, it has become harder to discern how to improve digital customer experience. The digital customer experience, known as DCX, has become of paramount importance. In this blog, we’ll cover five ways that any ecommerce retailer can create an exceptional DCX online.

Welcoming and Intuitive Web Design

Just like a physical store should be easy to navigate, clean, and welcoming, your business’s ecommerce website should be easy to navigate, error-free, and welcoming. The website’s navigation and menus should be intuitive, straightforward, and they should be paired with a powerful and accurate search function. One great way to evaluate the user-friendliness of your website is to conduct user experience testing, in which developers work alongside users to understand how they move through the website and what difficulties they encounter while there.

Modern, Innovative Technology

The best retail ecommerce websites harness the latest technology to improve DCX. One important new technology to incorporate is artificial intelligence. AI can do everything from providing personalized product recommendations to engaging with your business’s customers through a chatbot to answer FAQ. Connecting a CRM to your ecommerce website can also provide important personalization options. In fact, personalization should always be the goal here: how can your company’s website get your customers to products they’ll want to buy—as quickly as possible?

Easily Accessible Customer Service

Of course, the importance of customer service applies equally to online and in person environments. On your company’s ecommerce website, easily accessible customer service might look like a live chat option, prominently displayed contact information, an extensive FAQ page or forum, and more.

A Streamlined Checkout Experience

All too often, customers will go through your website, find items they like, place those items in their cart … and then abandon those items, never to return. Because of this tendency, it is vital to minimize obstacles to purchasing items in a customer’s cart. Although your company may be tempted to squeeze in a few last advertising or marketing messages, resist this temptation! Aim to allow customers to check out with as few clicks as possible.

System Integration

Integrating your technological solutions may be the single most important way to improve DCX, yet it often gets overlooked. If your ERP, CRM, or other software isn’t connected to your ecommerce platform, your customers may experience shipping delays, see products as available that are out of stock (and vice versa), and be at greater security risk when they enter personal information into your site.

Looking for an Ecommerce Platform? Try Shopify!

Many of our clients have found that Shopify is one of the best platforms to use for retail ecommerce. It is a very popular choice among Sage 100 users. With Shopify, they can access built-in customer experience benefits, a streamlined checkout experience, robust security, and capabilities for growth. Shopify also offers a wide range of built-in features like payment processing, inventory management, and marketing tools.

Take the First Step Towards Improving DCX with ROI

At ROI, we believe that the best way to begin improving DCX is by integrating your ERP and your ecommerce platform. Our IN-SYNCH solution effortlessly integrates Sage 100 with Shopify, Shopify Plus, and/or Shopify Point of Sale, supporting both online and in-person commerce. Integrating these software solutions allows for order status, pricing options, customer data, invoices, and more to accurately transfer between both systems. If you’re interested in combining Sage 100 and Shopify to improve your customers’ DCX, contact us today.