Want Great CX? Listen to Your Customers, Not Your Hunches!

Do you want to give your customers the best customer experience? After endless meetings and brainstormings, you have figured out what they need. Think again, before you roll out costly upgrades to your e-commerce site, and ask them what they really need. Knowing what your customers crave might be especially important when it comes to delivery, where every team can have a different view of what success looks like. 

Diversity of skillsets in a company is great. It makes companies better. In some cases, however, this can also lead to misleading results, because every team might pursue a very different goal, and might look at customers differently. Or worse, not even care about customers that much, because their KPIs are not directly related to them. 

Speed, Price, Ease Of Use – Every Team Looks At Success Differently

In e-commerce, the post-purchase experience, and within that, delivery, is the most critical touchpoint where the brand promise meets reality. That is why we use this to illustrate the process. Depending on which team you’re asking, they might have very different ideas on what success looks like for them personally: 

Logistics Team: Deliver Packages By Any Means Necessary

Their main KPI might be to deliver as many packages a day as possible. How exactly they deliver these packages might be secondary to them. This can be even more of a problem if you work with an external provider. 

Procurement Team: At What Cost Do We Deliver? 

At the same time, procurement would probably prefer to find the cheapest provider, as long as they deliver the same number of packages as a more expensive one. They might also think that customers will not notice anything anyway.

Growth Team: Sell As Much As We Can

The growth and marketing teams' highest priority is to sell as many products as possible while maintaining a good relationship with customers. It’s easy to make promises such as one-day free delivery, since it (probably) drives the most conversions.

Design Team: Let’s Convert As Much As We Can

Design teams are often aligned with growth teams in their goals, as they facilitate conversions. And the simpler the sales flow, the better the conversion—we all know that! Let’s hope there are no surprises later, and that we really offered the options customers want! 

Of course, these differences are exaggerated. And these goals are logical and necessary in themselves from a business perspective; the problem stems from a lack of harmonisation. Hopefully, the silos within your company are not so rigid, and your teams talk to each other. However, it is obvious that every team can have its own goals, and for the company's success, all of them are valid. But where is the customer in all this? Where is their opinion?

Your Customers Know Best What (Delivery) Options They Like The Most 

Missing the customer’s viewpoint can be a significant problem, because they know best what they need and how they need it. Sure, they probably want quick delivery, simple checkout, and a low price. But what their priorities are is anything but obvious. Maybe convenience is more important to them than speed. Going to a PUDO (pick-up drop-off) location on their way home might also be better for them than worrying about next-day delivery windows. Or they might prefer a more sustainable delivery option to a quick, comfortable one. 

There’s no generic rule of thumb to answer these questions, because the answers might very well vary based on the product you sell, the industry you’re in, and your target group. Your best bet is probably to ask your customers what they want. 

Listen To Your Customers, It’s Easier Than You Think! 

It’s also best to ask them as soon as possible, potentially before you start developing and rolling out updates without asking what they want. Why? Because you might be out of a costly development cycle just to realize that your conversions started falling. 

Lucky for you, listening to your customers is easier than you think! What’s more, they’re also very often keen to give feedback through calls, surveys, or tests. We also have a workflow that can use all their inputs across four phases to arrive at the best UX. 

Discovery Research

This is probably where you should start when thinking about new functions and introducing new shipping options. This phase (and often a 3rd-party service) is aimed at eliminating "risky guessing" by gaining deep insights into the actual behavior and feelings of the target audience. The last part is very important: you actually have to ask your customers or audience about what they want. This can be done by meticulously reviewing analytics and heatmap data, as well as by conducting interviews with members of the target audience. This will be the base of your business decisions. 

Concept Testing and Validation

This part should also be done before the development phase actually starts. This is the phase when you can ensure that what came out of your design research actually resonates with your users. In other words, we validate and make sure that we are designing something good (is this feature needed, do they understand the value proposition). All this before you make any significant changes to your code and make serious investments in development. Believe it or not, you can even do this part with sketches (and of course, high-level wireframe designs). 

UX and Design

This is often where most companies start, but without the previous two steps, it can be a problem. Why? Because here’s where everything you learned during the two previous phases takes shape. If you skipped understanding your users, you’re not going to deliver what they need. It’s also important to remember that you not only have to make something beautiful, but also functional and usable for the user. 

Usability Testing

With that, we got to the final phase: usability testing. This is the real test of what you learned during the previous parts. Great testing should involve your real users and be as realistic as possible. This phase is also a great place to catch potential problems and make changes if needed. In other words, to understand whether we have designed things well (whether they can be used). With proper usability testing you can ensure that you don’t launch solutions that hurt your conversions and user experience.

Why does empathy in business matter so much? 

All of the above ideas are about one thing at their core: empathy. Creating a good user experience is about understanding your customers and giving them what they want. If you step into their shoes and observe their journey through your website, you might discover where they get stuck or leave your page. Are they always quitting when they have to choose delivery options? Maybe you don’t offer them the options they want.

Empathy can help us understand our customers' needs better and bring solutions to market that are important to them, giving us a real competitive advantage. This is a never ending process, and we should constantly strive for doing better.

The very simple idea of “listening” can have a massive impact on companies of any size. According to a McKinsey study, a leading telco’s “customer satisfaction ratings jumped from worst to first in the industry, customer churn rates were cut by 75 percent” by doing this. Or as their CEO said: “It’s amazing the things you can do when you shut up and listen to your customers.”

What does this mean in delivery? 

Going back to our previous example about deliveries, this means that you should listen to your customers. Instead of looking at what teams thing about the topic, follow the four steps above with your customer:

1. Discovery Research: Figure out which solutions they really want. Is it free delivery, one-day delivery, or PUDO access?
2. Concept Testing and Validation: Create a simple design based on their answers that shows them the delivery options they want, where they want them. Does it resonate with them? Great! Not yet? Work on it more. 
3. UX and Design: It’s time to polish those sketches and create something that combines beauty and conversion best practices. Do your users agree? Time for coding. 
4. Usability Testing: One last thing before conquering the e-commerce world with your new delivery options. Test the quasi-finished solution before launch. If you did the previous three steps right, your testers should love what they see and experience. If there’s something they don’t like, you can still fix it!

It’s more than okay to ask for external help

It’s also very easy to get stuck or go through the same loops in a company. Other times, doing all these tests might feel overwhelming with the everyday tasks at hand. Luckily, there are Customer Experience experts who specialize in identifying and solving these problems. CX experts are experienced in understanding the data you have, conducting customer tests, and giving you suggestions on what to change and how, be that the whole customer journey or “just” shipping methods. 

We at Color and Code also have CX experts for exactly these reasons. This kind of testing and understanding customers can help our jobs tremendously, and often leads to much higher quality, which we can be proud of. 

We’re also focused on delivery, as we see it as a crucial point of customer satisfaction. This is the reason we created Delivery Gateway, a simple Shopify plugin that can help you offer a wider variety of delivery options to your customers. Once, of course, you figured out that’s what they indeed need.

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