Eric Feinberg thinks a lot about how customers relate to stores, whether they’re strolling the aisles or shopping online.
He’s the marketing vice president at Foresee, an analytics company that helps retailers understand and improve the experiences they are offering customers. And while no retailer would purposely insult its customers, some might be disregarding the effort customers put in when they go through the process of shopping for an item.
In the brief video interview below, Feinberg talks about the difference he’s seen between the effort that most retailers put into acquiring and converting customers and the effort they put in once that customer has clicked the buy button. And he provides a few tips for some basic steps retailers should take after the customer actually makes a purchase.
Maybe it makes sense that retailers focus so much on the part of a shopper’s experience that leads up to a purchase. Think of how closely ecommerce operations focus on conversion and conversion rate. They are metrics that directly result in revenue and provide a measure of return on investment.
But a customer’s shopping experience hardly ends at the buy button. For one thing, they don’t have the product they purchased yet. In fact, for a buyer, the most stressful time might be the time between clicking “buy” and receiving the order. Doubts creep in. When is the order coming? Will the product live up to expectations?
But managing the post-purchase customer experience can be squishier than getting a customer to buy something. The post-purchase experience is about making sure the order isn’t slowed down, that it’s processed quickly. It’s about getting a customer his or her order within the time it was promised. It’s about being available and responsive should questions arise for the customer. It’s about having clearly defined ways for a customer to return an item if it is not satisfactory.
Put another way, ecommerce isn’t all about attracting a new customer. In fact, it’s as much about keeping the one you’ve already won.
Photo by Mike Cassidy
Contact Mike Cassidy at [email protected]; follow him on Twitter at @mikecassidy.
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