Creating a smooth shopping experience is crucial in today's digital age, where customers expect a seamless journey from start to finish. Digital technology can create meaningful touchpoints in key moments of the journey and can significantly enhance customer experience and increase their satisfaction with a brand. Utilizing existing technology to streamline the customer experience can save time and increase efficiency. With that in mind, we at Lyreco Finland observed the current shopping experience and spotted a point that could be optimised with existing tools and no additional investment.
The problem: Four different delivery statuses for products in one web shop
We currently have items that we stock in our warehouse - these are delivered according to our next day delivery promise. However, we also list products that are currently out of stock (resulting in backorders). These products cannot be delivered on the same day and will have a different delivery timeline. The same is true of the two other product statuses - direct delivery from supplier and special-order products.
The result: not matching customer expectations.
The issue arises when a customer decides to buy products with multiple statuses - some are available for next day delivery, some will be shipped directly by supplier at their own delivery date, and some will become a backorder. This is currently not very evident on the web shop, and thus can result in a surprise for the customer when they receive only part of their order the next day. This creates extra calls to customer service – time consuming and frustrating for the customer.
The solution: Customised pop-up in shopping cart informing customers before completing their order
We used custom code to detect the status of each product in the customer basket, and based on that, we display a message informing the customer whether their basket contains a product that is on backorder, direct delivery, special delivery, or combination of several statuses. This approach is non-disruptive: It gives the customer the information at the right time to make potential changes before ordering. As an extra feature, we are able to highlight the environmental impact - In case of backorder status, we note the possible CO2 emissions caused by the backorders and suggest to the customers to add alternatively the missing item to their next order. In this way, we can reduce the frustration of the customer and, as a bonus, facilitate another aim: Supporting customers in making more sustainable choices.
Analysing the performance
Evaluation and understanding the effect a solution has on the customer experience is key. For us, it was crucial to make sure that this function was having a positive impact and measure it since the launch.
A dashboard with main KPI's, as well as more in-depth insights was created, to measure customer actions on the shopping page with regards to the pop-up information.
We were able to observe that around one third of our customers would remove a product that is not currently available to avoid backorder, however their average order value was still higher than the web shop average, indicating that they potentially replaced the product with an available one. This proved that informing customers and thus saving them a potential negative experience is something of value to them and does not impact our business negatively.
Final thoughts
In today's highly competitive landscape, we need to focus on customer experience such as website usability, fast and reliable delivery, efficient customer support, and most of all - transparent and timely communication. Keeping the customer informed every step of the way builds reliable expectations and trust.
Key to success was the clear identification of a pain point linked to a desire to create a frictionless customer experience. In identifying a problem and a solution we were also able to satisfy our mission to support our customers in making more sustainable choices.
In the end, this was a simple solution, quickly implemented with a demonstrable improvement in customer experience for a relatively small investment in time and resources.
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