eCommerce Customer Experience (CX) Audit: What Is It and Why Do You Need It?

Customer experience (CX) is the customer’s overall perception of your brand based on all the interactions they’ve had with your business in all environments. In eCommerce, the experience you provide on your site can either make or break your relationship with your customers. But let’s focus on how good customer experience can help your brand.

What is good customer experience like?

Good CX is listening to what customers want and need. It is taking customer feedback seriously and using it to develop a deep understanding of the people supporting your brand. This understanding can then lead to you appropriately addressing customer pain points and reducing friction in the customer journey.

The commitment to delivering good CX is about identifying factors that contribute to a less than ideal experience customers have when interacting with your brand and reducing or eliminating them. This encompasses everything from the loading speed of your eCommerce site to how easy or difficult it is to request for a refund. 

Benefits of focusing on good customer experience

Great CX can help your brand in the following areas:

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty and advocacy
• Business profitability

It simply makes sense that if customers are happy, they will keep supporting your brand and even advocate for it. And that support and advocacy translate to increased sales and revenue for your business.

What makes bad customer experience?

Bad customer experience is the obviously the opposite of what you’d imagine a happy customer experiences when interacting with a brand. But here are some common culprits: poor site navigation, complicated checkout, incomplete product information, unreliable delivery estimates, and inefficient customer service.

If you really want to know how well or badly you’re doing in terms of delivering good customer experience, going straight to the customers and asking them about their experience is the best route to take. But it is not the only way to find out, and you should ideally be complementing it with other methods to ensure you are getting a holistic view of the customer experience. This is where the CX audit comes in.

What is a CX audit and why do you need it?

Customer experience (CX) audit is a combination of quantitative and qualitative data analysis to evaluate user behavior on your current site and identify areas for improvement. If you want to improve CX, your first step must be to identify gaps in the customer experience you currently offer on your eCommerce site.

A CX audit can involve different phases with each phase focusing on a specific area. To give you a clear view of what it entails, let’s look at how we do CX audits at Scandiweb, what questions we ask, and where we look to find the answers.

Benchmarking against eCommerce best practices

We review the entire shopping behavior funnel page by page and benchmark everything against a set of eCommerce best practices to identify which areas require improvements and which areas are doing great.

After the audit, we create a report detailing the overall eCommerce UX score of the site, suggested improvements supported by good examples from eCommerce retail leaders, and the list of benchmarks checked.

Web data analysis

We do a segmented analysis of the quantitative data available in web analytics tools to help answer this question: Where are the problems and which areas can be improved?

In this part of the audit, we look at the following:

• Users
• Device and technology performance
• eCommerce performance
• Traffic source performance
• Content  performance
• Site search performance
• User interactions

And as a deliverable, we create an automated Data Studio report accompanied by the analyst’s conclusions and recommendations.

Voice of the Customer (VoC)

We gather feedback from actual website visitors to answer this question: What problems are customers experiencing on the site?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) involves launching on-site polls and customer surveys. We include all the insights gathered from VoC in the full report we submit to the client, along with the full transcripts of all collected data.

User Testing

We get real people to share their feedback about the website and express their concerns and frustrations by running the following user tests:

• User interviews
• 5-second tests
• Usability testing
• First-click tests
• Tree testing
• Card Sorting
• Eye-tracking

The main eCommerce customer experience report we prepare includes the insights gathered from user testing as well as the full transcripts of all collected data.

Micro-conversions funnel mapping

Our CRO experts conduct special research on the micro-conversions funnel to figure out where and how to best capture lead information. The main goal is to capture it before users leave the website, allowing the possibility to further nurture them with emails and retargeting. Given that more and more restrictions on cookie-based tracking are rolling out, it is important to leverage marketing possibilities that are not dependent on cookies.

We create a lead nurturing strategy and map for the client as part of this audit.

Marketing automation

We revise your existing marketing automation tech stack so we can make recommendations and implement improvements where needed. We identify the best solutions for your eCommerce ecosystem and let you know of the optimal configuration for the tools we recommend.

We include in the final audit report our recommended marketing automation and personalization strategy.

CX Roadmap

We start by prioritizing and targeting users who have shown buying intent or are prioritized by the stakeholders.

The roadmap consists of concrete tasks required to implement the suggested improvements, including:

• Wireframes and designs for improvement
• Updating of copy and content
• Setting up first A/B test and/or usability tests
• Collaboration with developers on low-hanging fruit implementation

Adhering to the Scandiweb Prioritization Framework in making all our recommendations, we make sure that the investment our clients put in can be expected to show returns.

Scandiweb CX audit

We offer 3 CX audit levels that vary in terms of complexity and extent.

If you want to find out more about our CX audit service or are ready to order, write to us at [email protected]. Or hit that orange chat bubble on the right to talk to one of our experts right away.

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