Just like in a store, if a shopper has a bad experience on a retail web site, there’s a good chance the retailer may never see that customer again—and that customer might relay his bad experience to family and friends.
The importance of a top-notch online experience cannot be stressed enough, and retailers that hone a good online shopping experience can use it to stand out from the crowd, says Bruce D. Temkin, vice president and principal analyst of customer experience at Forrester Research Inc.
“Our research on retailers shows they say the customer experience is very important and they want it to differentiate themselves from competitors and other companies,” Temkin says. “But our consumer research shows shoppers don’t think retailers are doing a very good job.”
Temkin will deliver the keynote address, “Making Customer Experience the Differentiator,” at the 2008 Web Experience Forum, held by web performance management firm Gomez Inc. and sponsored in part by Internet Retailer. The forum will be held Oct. 14-16 at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel.
To gauge the quality of online customer experiences, Forrester Research analysts recently reviewed 1,200 web sites, including e-commerce sites—only 3% passed the firm’s usability test.
“The No. 1 failure, believe it or not, is text legibility,” Temkin says. “In this day and age companies are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, in their sites, yet display content in a way in which people can’t read it. Another failure near the top of the list is inefficient task flows. Some e-retailers, for example, have checkout processes that put you through too many steps. The processes simply are not efficient.”
However, Temkin says e-retailers can easily improve their online customer experience. “Over the last few years we’ve seen that sites have gotten much more sophisticated and handle more complex technologies, but we still find rookie mistakes,” he adds. “Text legibility is a rookie mistake. But it doesn’t take a lot to figure out how best to display text.”
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