The customer experience of online grocery shopping

A visit to the supermarket features low on many people top ten list of days out. Fortunately the supermarkets have responded to this and developed online grocery shop windows allowing you to complete your weekly good shop from your sofa and await its delivery at a prescribed time. Tescos (www.tesco.com) and Sainsbury's (www.sainsburys.co.uk) lead the way in home delivery food services with advanced web portals that try to ease the customer journey for food shopping. The functionality behind the sites are advanced and builds on the loyalty card systems bringing some value to the consumer by auto populating your favourites in your list. There are obvious filters for searching and complex search tools that allow you to refine your list from the 1000's of proud a available. All this online wizardry does not come for free as the delivery charge imposed aims to recover some of the cost of this but you are paying for convenience with the time saved of not visiting the store. Unlike many other delivery services you are also gifted with delivery slots accurate to a specific hour meaning you need not sit in at home waiting and wondering when your food will appear. Online grocery shopping certainly a luxury but for £6 maybe one worth considering. Epic with a price. 

The customer experience of Black Friday

As is often the case this Friday I find myself mostly working alongside the majority of the adult population of the UK. What this means on Black Friday is that my online buying is likely to be curtailed by the daily chores of work that will be getting in the way of my interweb purchases. This distraction doesn't seem to have affected the retailers who seem to be bombarding my inbox with email reminders about the merits of today while I have zero opportunity to act upon it.  If these emails are intended to result in a call to action for me to pick up my credit card and start spending then they are mistimed. If these reminders/prompts/aids were timed for this evening when I am not consumed by all this work related then I might have some chance to take advantage of them but given the volume of these emails by this evening I will have lost the need. Filing up my inbox so I have an excess of Mail while a work will not help conversion rates but irritate me by their volume. 

The click & collect customer experience

As the world of online shopping continues to mushroom taking huge chunks of business away from the high street the suppliers of these digital products need to continue to evolve to meet the ever demanding needs of their consumers. An emerging model is the click and collect service where you but online but then elect to pick up the product yourself in store. This solves the issue of missed deliveries and also allows shops to align their digital and physical sales channels bringing customers into their stores to collect products and then having the footfall opportunities to sell to then while they have them in store. The customer experience is improved and puts the customer in the driving seat to manage the transaction. It also helps keep delivery costs down for all as the products are added to the regula store delivery run. Could this approach help keep the high street alive? Click and collect, epic saviour of the high street? 

Safer shopping - the customer experience of paying online

The world of e-commerce has moved on at a fierce pace crushing conventional shopping thinking and destroying the high street in its wake. As more customers become increasingly comfortable shopping over the Internet so has the maturity of fraud activity working to exploit this digital channel and the naivety of many of its virgin users. As a result epic experiences demand both convenience and security when providing payment details now that they can no longer rely on the assurance a conventional shop would provide.  There are many rivals to the secure payment arena with tech start ups such as PayPal (www.paypal.com) founded as recently as 2000 competing with traditional banks like Barclays offering new services such as PingIt. The customer requirements are simple, wanting to be able to shop on line as simply as possible while making it as difficult as possible for fraudulent activity to corrupt that experience. From a customer perspective we don't really care how or who manages and owns this payment connection, in fact to the customer this should be invisible and merely a background activity that can be relied upon in the same way as sending an email. For an epic customer experience make it meet the requirements but don't shout about it. Just get it done so we don't have to worry. 

Buying online - the final mystery purchasing step

When using a company website to purchase products you hope for epic customer experience but the reality is you are prepared to settle for straight forward. One of the ultimate fails on this is when you have been through all the pain of buying a product to complete the purchase then unsure if it worked. Did they take my purchase request?  Have they taken the money?  Did they get my size details correct?  By using the website in the first place you are making the lives of companies easier. They don't need a big flashy shop. They don't even need a team of experts on standby in a call centre. So when the online experience is so bad you don't even know it has finished the company has failed and it is lazy in wanting your business. The customer journey should be clearly sign posted with progress tracking. Completion should result in a succinct email with all the right details and the website should leave you in no doubt that you have done everything right and your products will be on their way. Make sure the customer journey ends well otherwise you are just driving traffic to the phone or worse to a competitor.