Talk to Customer Service

I try to make the effort of talking to the customer service department on a regular basis, not only to help educate them on the promotions and efforts the marketing team engaging in, but also to educate myself on issues the customers are facing. These issues could be bottlenecks to the customer experience; they often hinder the customer’s views and impressions of the company. One example of this is with a recent promotion through the affiliate channel where we launched a campaign with a promo code. On the checkout page of the website there were two fields; one for promotional code and one for coupon code/gift certificates. Within the company coupons and promotional codes are two separate codes with two separate meanings; coupons are usually distributed through the customer service or retail channel, where promotional codes are offered via other channels. After speaking with customer service it was realized that customers think of promotional codes and coupon codes as one in the same. The issue they were having is a customer would enter a promotional code in the coupon code field and receive an error of “invalid coupon,” because the promotional code was not a coupon code. This is an issue; we are adding a road block to the customer experience, which is deferring customers that were brought to the site because of that promotional code. This road block turns into trust issues and false advertising and more often then not the customer abandons the shopping cart!

Now we are getting into issues that rack e-commerce’s brains – shopping cart abandonment rates! The other day a company told me their shopping cart abandonment rate was close to 80%! 80% of the people who have started their check out process do not finish. There is potential for 80% more sales!

Taking a look at the road block presented by the two fields, promotional code and coupon code, we can see we need to look at the logic of the shopping cart to fix the issue. Maybe it’s by combining the coupon code field with the promotional code field and keeping gift certificates separate.

This website has been in place for nearly 3 years with minor tweaks and upgrades here and there. The practice of separating coupon codes and promotional codes has been in place for at least 5 years. Customer service has received about 10 – 25 complaints per month in pervious months regarding this issues. Think of all the people who leave the site and don’t complain. Working with the customer service team to educate and to solve provides in essential to providing an excellent customer experience, and I guarantee when problems like this are addresses and fixed shopping cart abandonment rates decrease dramatically.

Another way to see why customers are leaving your site is to send a cart abandonment email. This simple email encourages visitors to come back to your site to complete the shopping process. Many companies offer an incentive such as 10% off or a discount on shipping. Customize these emails to make them as personalized as possible; include name, items in the shopping cart, recommended items, facts about your company/products, ect.

Tried the abandonment emails and still having problems? Try sending a questionnaire with your abandonment email? Ask a few questions to see why visitors are not turning into customers. MOST IMPORTANTLY! Listen to feed back! If only 10 customers are complaining about a problem, imagine how many visitors left yourself without even thinking about letting you know there was an issue.