From being bumped and jostled as you work your way through aisles, to long checkout queues, to searching shelves and rails for the right items — shopping is stressful. And online shoppers aren’t immune to stress, either. Those offline stress factors have simply found their online counterparts. An online store must have an efficient checkout process in order to close the sale.
Being bumped and jostled has been replaced with frozen pages and 404 errors. Long queues have been replaced with slow-to-load websites and no human support. Finding the right items has been expanded to an unscalable mountain of choice. Indeed, according to Clicktale.com, 15% of today’s consumers have gone as far as to say they have ‘lost their temper’ when shopping online.
So, what can be done to appease the stressed online shopper? This article investigates some of the top online stressors that harm the customer experience, and how to solve them.
Stressful online shopping
When they shop online, customers are given the opportunity to interact with your business in a familiar, comfortable environment. They don’t have to face high-street crowds, or risk being jostled up to 1.9 times a minute. They can even shop in their dressing gown and slippers if they so choose.
Yet this doesn’t mean that your customers are immune to stress when they shop online. It’s true that there are less physical stressors to trigger a negative experience online than there are on the high street. Online, however, stress levels rise as shoppers navigate the digital customer journey – typically reaching a peak at the checkout process.
The fact is, when we’re stressed online, even the smallest triggers can have a huge impact on our mood. Our digital fuses are short. And the more stressful our situation, the easier and smoother our experience needs to be to calm us down.
Online stressors
We might be at home, lounging in our pyjamas with a brew, but we still don’t want our time wasted. That means we have no patience for pages that (seemingly) take forever to load. Nor will we waste time trying to figure out sites with poor usability. And when it comes to being unable to find the content we need or answers to our questions, we’ll simply abandon site.
In fact, a single second delay in page load has been proven to downgrade our experience. 38% of us will stop engagement if we find content or layout unattractive. According to KoMarketing.com, a further 44% of us will leave if we don’t find contact info right in front of our eyes. It doesn’t take much to stress us out online.
So, when we’re stressed by these kind of niggly website factors, our online experience takes an inevitable hit. So too do the website’s conversions. But what can be done about it?
There are two key ways to appease stressed online customers. The first is by ensuring a real-time, readily available support system. The second is with clean website design to make the browsing experience as easy as possible.
Human help
When we’re stressed, we need support, understanding and reassurance. In store, this would come from an attentive shop floor assistant, able to point us to the product we’re searching for and answer our burning questions. Online, this is achieved with accessible customer service — particularly through channels that offer on the spot help.
A live chat channel can be particularly useful for appeasing stressed customers. It also provides a private space for you to support a stressed customer at any point of their journey. Proactive chat invitations allow you to approach your stressed customers and offer support, just as a shop floor assistant would.
Whether they need you to help them find the product they’re looking for, answer a question, or reassure them of your returns policies, you can guide the customer in real-time. There’s no stressful waiting for your customer, just empathetic human service. By being able to guide the customer through their journey, you can neutralise any stressors they encounter. You can show empathy, while ensuring an easy, stress-free online experience.
Irritating navigation
Online, your website design and performance can act as a similar stressor to navigating the shelves of a store. Rather than rummaging through rails and battling the crowds, shoppers must click, scroll, and search to get what they want. Any navigational impediments will work to create stress for your online shoppers.
So, another way to appease stressed online shoppers is by ensuring your website performs well. Good UX design can help guide users through your website – ensuring online journeys are intuitive and stress-free. Your products should be easy to find and sort through, and pages should load quickly.
Make your content as easy to access as possible. A live chat channel can enable your team to help customers find the right product, but most customers will want to find the product themselves, and could get stressed if they can’t. This means that your customers need to have a useful search function and the ability to filter the results down to the most relevant products for them.
83% of customers have reported feeling stressed by slow loading speeds. Load speed can be optimised by enabling browser caching, reducing the pixel count of your images, and stripping your site of unnecessary elements. These tactics reduce the energy and time it takes to load a page, meaning that it not only appeases stressed customers, but helps save the environment too.
The mood of the customer
It isn’t always easy to manage the mood of your customers. Ultimately, the way they feel about your quality of customer service is down to their mood. But, when it comes to stress, offering fast web pages and real time support can go a long way to appeasing your customers and injecting some calm into ecommerce.
