More than four in five (81 percent) of shoppers will pay more in return for an enhanced customer experience, according to an Oracle survey of European consumers. Nearly half (44 percent), said they were willing to pay a premium of more than 5 percent.
The 1,400 online shoppers who participated in the survey said their top concerns were improvement of the overall customer experience (40 percent), providing quick access to information and making it easier for customers to ask questions (35 percent).
“Getting customer experience right can help increase revenue and win customers away from competing organizations,” said Danny Rippon, Oracle CRM business solutions director in a prepared statement. “By creating a consistent and connected experience across all points of customer contact — including the increasingly important social channel — businesses can clearly differentiate themselves and build priceless brand capital. As an absolute fundamental, businesses must ensure that their customer experience systems can support fulfillment and service to the extent demanded by consumers, while at all times making it as simple as possible for them to interact with the brand. This is the key both to winning new customers and retaining them for the long-haul.”
The survey also showed that in addition to driving new revenue growth, a good customer experience is also essential to protecting existing revenue channels. Seventy percent of respondents have stopped doing business with a brand following a poor customer experience. Another important factor is that 92 percent of this number have gone straight to a competing brand and made a purchase.
Eighty-two percent of survey respondents described their experiences as requiring too much effort, which, according to Oracle, suggests that brand loyalty is closely linked to ease of communication. Respondents listed having to use different methods of contact to resolve an issue (26 percent) and using different methods several times (24 percent) as the point at which dealing with customer service requires too much effort. Businesses wishing to benefit from the revenue implications of providing a good customer experience therefore need to focus on making their customer interactions as simple as possible.
With fewer than a quarter of consumers (22 percent) nearly always satisfied with their customer experience, there is a clear opportunity for brands to improve customer service to win market share from competitors, according to Oracle.
Among other factors that respondents said were important for online merchants to offer were an easy return policy (cited by 32 percent of respondents), improvement of overall website usability and search functionality (26 percent) and a tailored/personalized shopping experience (20 percent).
The research also revealed that many organizations are failing to make the most of the customer experience opportunities available to them through social media channels, with only 46 percent of respondents claiming to have received a reply from a company after posting a comment. The research indicates that 29 percent of respondents became angry when the response failed to resolve their issue.