About the Usabilla by Role series:Improving customer experiences by gathering feedback is a key differentiator between brands that succeed and those that fall flat. With various teams in an organization, your role in this process is unique. That’s why we’re introducing the Usabilla by Role series, so you can see exactly how to play your part and provide the best experience for your customers and attract even more moving forward.
In this episode, we’ll share how you can improve your checkout process for more conversions, all by asking the right questions at the right time.
Your role: conversion optimizers, CRO specialists, e-commerce managers, digital marketing analystsYour goal: to improve conversion ratesReading time: 5 minutes
If you’re looking to increase conversion rates and boost your revenue, taking customer feedback into account is a necessity. When it comes to website conversion rates, one of the most critical and complex parts of the customer journey is the checkout process.
With multiple interactions taking place involving login credentials, payment options, delivery specs and the switch from an online shop to banking app for instance, bringing your customer from point A to point B is a challenge, technically and UX-wise.
Let’s dive in with some best practices and examples for asking the right questions for a more seamless digital experience for your customers and increased sales for you.
The almighty check-out process
Ensuring customers can drop instant feedback when surfing your digital channels is critical, but the last thing you want is to distract them from making a purchase as you try to collect valuable insights.
So here are two options we recommend to gather feedback without hurting your sales targets.
1) Follow up post-purchase
Though it seems straightforward, the best people to provide a critical view of your site are your customers. And for those who have completed a purchase with you, they’re likely more than willing to take that one extra step of providing you with some quick, in the moment feedback for a better experience next time. As Usabilla customer KLM shares,
With Usabilla, we can capture the Voice of the Customer to understand where and how we can improve, to increase the overall adoption and satisfaction of the app itself.
Stijn Bannier, Digital Product Manager at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Be careful not to stop there. By only asking for feedback from those who’ve successfully completed a purchase, you miss the feedback of plenty of potential customers visiting your platform, which takes us to the next option…
2) No sale? Ask why
If you want to know why potential customers dropped off your site, it’s important that you ask them before they do so. Asking your visitors what withholds them from purchasing when they leave your website is a great way to decrease the times this happens down the road.
A drawback to consider here is that it can be difficult making sure the customer is indeed leaving your platform. But more on that later.
For Usabilla client Apollo, ensuring a positive customer experience is essential. As one of the Nordic region’s leading tour operators, the large majority of their trips are booked online.
Through implementing Usabilla, Apollo uncovered a point of friction in their booking process. The feedback received allowed them to instantly address the issue and, in turn, significantly decrease drop-off rates.
How to craft stellar questions
Lacking inspiration when it comes to what questions you can ask? Let’s start with the first scenario. You would like to know how your customers are experiencing your checkout process. In this case, a post-transaction survey is the most common. We recommend starting with a general KPI question to measure overall satisfaction. Here is how this might look:
What do you think of our purchase process?
Can you tell us how satisfied you are with the purchase/checkout/payment process?
It’s important to ask a follow-up question to uncover the valuable insights on why things did or didn’t work. To track improvements, a second KPI is useful. Try including a CES question:
How easy was it to complete your purchase with us?
Depending on the answer, you can also add a follow-up question at the end of your micro survey to show your willingness to improve your processes. For instance:
Can you tell us how we can improve the process?
Stay tailored and objective
The above questions are more general to gather a first overview of what is going on and to measure your KPIs. Usabilla, however, offers you the capabilities to get as specific as possible when it comes to asking questions to your customers.
The next step is to deep-dive into specific issues your customers might encounter. This can be really anything from problems with payment to delivery options or loyalty programs. The most important element is to discover what exactly is happening, whether it’s about a bug or feedback on their experience.
The issue can be technical, but a small change in copy can also make a major difference. These two variations of a similar question may yield differing responses.
For example:
How satisfied are you with our payment options?
What payment options would you prefer?
With these specific questions, it’s also important to have an ‘other’ option.
Here are more sample sets of questions:
Can you tell us what you think of our delivery timelines?
What do you think of our delivery options?
What type of delivery information would you prefer?
What do you think of our loyalty program?
Do you have enough information about our loyalty program?
What kind promotions do you expect?
The numbers are on your side
Remember the second scenario above? Asking questions while customers are dropping off is difficult. You must make sure you’re not scaring customers away from your brand or even disturbing them while they’re mid-purchase.
Be careful with targeting your customers as your analytics can instead show you where your visitors are dropping off in the last stages of the purchase process. This data can provide a great indication of where something can be improved.
Using the Customer Experience Pyramid, for instance, is a great way to kick this off as it looks at customer loyalty from the baseline essentials to more sophisticated business metrics.
If and when you are gathering direct feedback, there are a couple things to remember in asking customers why they are leaving your website:
avoid biased questions and
keep your questions objective
For example:
Were you unable to find something?
Payment options not suitable for you?
Can you tell us why you are not buying with us?
Is anything unclear?
Sorry to see you leaving. Is there anything we can improve?
Putting people first with Usabilla
When it comes to asking for feedback, the best method is to work with both mentioned scenarios to cover all customer journeys, both post-transaction and when they drop off mid-purchase. Using a VoC solution like Usabilla you can gather the right feedback and see clearly what needs to change and where you can improve.
For more guidance on setting up a campaign to collect actionable insights, check out our support page, and be sure to click the ‘Solutions’ tab on our homepage to see how Usabilla is used by different industries and roles.
