With Black Friday behind us and less than two weeks left to Christmas, this is the perfect opportunity for online retailers to reflect on what they have done to delight (or not) their customers as they endeavour to find that ideal gift for their loved ones.

The world’s largest online retailer has suffered an outage this year that cost it upwards of US$1.2-million/minute. Here in South Africa, things haven’t gone much better, and online customers are pulling their hair out. This begs the question: isn’t it time that online retailers paid closer attention to the quality of the overall customer experience?

In one sense, Covid-19 has been a boon for retailers in South Africa. For a period, they had a captive audience who were forced to engage online, get acclimatised to the idea of buying everything from cars to milk via e-commerce platforms, and ultimately grow quite used to the idea. Those without an online presence rushed to be part of the opportunity but in many instances ignored the need for providing the same level of customer experience.

What are these poor experiences I talk of and have personally experienced over the last 12 months? The online experience many customers have had would equate to the following in-store scenarios. Most customers would not accept such poor service from a brick-and-mortar store, so why should the same customers accept this from their online experience?

What’s in the box?

You walk into a store with a specific purchase in mind. The salesman confirms that they have the product in store. However, it is contained in a non-descript brown box with no labelling or images. Furthermore, you are unable to open the box to confirm if this is indeed what you are after, but the salesman assures you that you can trust them. Despite misgivings, you complete the purchase, and upon arriving home you discover to your dismay that it is not what you purchased.

The second-hand car salesman syndrome

Having found your dream product, you arrive at the till to make payment. To your horror, the price at the till is not what was advertised on the shelf. After much haggling, the store finally agrees to honour the advertised, massively discounted price. Your joy is short-lived as just down the road you see the same product at an even lower price, and it is not even discounted!

Is it Black Friday again?

It’s a normal day, but upon arriving at the store you find queues snaking out the door. Your first thought is that you inadvertently missed the Black Friday notifications. However, the store informs you that only one employee arrived for the day and can only attend to customers one at a time.

The trolley shortage

Having spent a significant amount of time filling your trolley, at the till you are astonished when an employee commandeers your trolley for other in-store shoppers. They do kindly offer to assist you to your car and proceed to deliver your items to the car one at a time.

The absentee store manager

Having identified an issue with your purchase, you try in vain to locate the store manager. This is surprising, as every other store has a manager to acknowledge and respond to queries from their clients.

The case of the disappearing product(s)

The store apparently has a problem with mischievous elves as products that you know were in your trolley have mysteriously disappeared by the time you get to the till. Even worse, they have now started pilfering from your vehicle after you have paid! You must now spend significant amounts of time investigating and communicating with the store to refund your hard-earned money.

Trust issues

Arriving at the till, you are confronted with a credit card point-of-sale device you have never seen before, above which is mounted a security camera, and you start to develop serious trust issues.

While the above examples may seem ridiculous, they are happening across our e-commerce landscape daily and are borne out by the many frustrated reviews of shoppers. Even the most seasoned of online stores regularly inconvenience their customers. Is it any surprise that even the country’s flagship e-commerce platforms do not show a growth in profit despite significant growth in revenue year on year? The biggest differentiator for any online retailer will continue to be delighting their customers.

The first thing we need to do is to give customers more credit for knowing what they want. As much as technology has enabled retailers, it has also empowered customers to quickly perform cross-site product comparisons, evaluate reviews of your service levels and decide whether to spend with you.

The second thing we need to do is evaluate, extensively and with a great deal of honesty, the entire customer service experience. While brick-and-mortar may be, in our minds, a thing of the past, there are many valuable lessons learnt over decades that would immensely benefit our ability to delight customers.

In our next article, we will unpack the challenges facing online retail and then close off with how these scenarios can be optimised to ensure that the quality of our online experience is one that will lead us to the Holy Grail of the 5-star review.

To find out more on how we can help improve your customers’ online experience, feel free to contact IT Ecology.

About IT Ecology
Founded in 2004, IT Ecology made it its mission to provide technical testing and monitoring competencies to the sub-Saharan African market. The company excels at delivering against unique customer requirements. Customers call upon IT Ecology as the solution thinkers and advisers. Coupled with a can-do attitude, our team has delighted our customers, again and again, exceeding their expectations. For more information, visit www.itecology.co.za, or connect on LinkedIn.