While a seamless user experience focused on the customer is the mantra for most brands, there remains a discrepancy between the expectations of the users and the quality and consistency of the experience brands can offer. According to Contentsquare’s 2023 Digital Experience Benchmark Report, one in three website visits are frustrating customers and causing revenue loss.
The report also shows brands are losing customers when it matters most – when they’re trying to convert, particularly on mobile devices. With the region leading mobile internet users globally and nearly half (47%) of ecommerce transactions in Singapore taking place on a mobile device, there is a lot at stake for brands to ensure their web or app provides visitors with a seamless, satisfying experience they’re looking for.
5 simple steps on how to build an e-commerce business in Southeast Asia
Traditional KPIs tell only part of the story
Measuring traffic or the all-important conversion rate provides a good indication of how interested people are in visiting your website and the business generated. Pairing these metrics with an analysis of the average cart and other revenue metrics, alongside a survey of what pages were visited, and which products were viewed and ultimately purchased, gives a fuller picture.
Even though most companies have access to tools that can measure some aspects of the performance of their UX, few take full advantage of what behavioural data can reveal about customer satisfaction — or frustration. Of course, measuring the evolution of traffic and conversions is necessary — but it is only one step in the journey to a great UX. Providing a consistently outstanding experience is key to building lasting relationships with customers. That consistency and excellence hinge on one critical factor: understanding your customers.
Understanding your customer through what happens between the clicks
With an average of 50% cross-industry bounce rate, making a good first impression is a top priority. And with site visitors leaving just after seconds if they are unsatisfied, making an instant good impression is even more important.
Metrics such as scroll rate are a good example of the granularity afforded by Experience Analytics. Beyond answering the ‘conversion question,’ behavioural metrics provide critical insight into why customers behave the way they do on a site or app, what they are trying to achieve and how they would prefer to go about it. By capturing all customer interactions and extracting actionable insights into which improvements to prioritise, Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) software goes way beyond traditional click analytics, painting a much richer picture of customer behaviour across all touchpoints.
The five pillars of customer satisfaction that can help set the standards of an outstanding UX:
- Flawless: does your UX offer visitors a smooth experience without technical performance issues?
- Engaged: do customers feel engaged and like they’re getting the most out of your digital content?
- Sticky: is this the kind of experience visitors want to come back to repeatedly, and how is it helping turn visitors into loyal customers?
- Intuitive: is it easy for visitors to navigate your website or app and to enjoy a great end-to-end journey?
- Empowered: does the experience allow customers to easily find the products and services that are right for them, and to achieve what they are trying to do?
To access this level of understanding, the KPIs you analyse should include both the basics (active users, time spent, views per session, bounce rate, exit rate, conversion rate) but also a set of advanced metrics:
- click/tap rate (the percentage of users that clicked/tapped on the zone at least once. This metric allows to rank zones according to their attractiveness and is useful when analysing zones that can be tapped several times (like a carousel) because it doesn’t inflate the tap rate),
- click/tap distribution (this metric allows you to identify the zones where users most frequently perform a click/tap which helps rank screen zones according to their shares of clicks/taps on the screen, and to evaluate their importance),
- time before the first click/tap (the number of seconds between a screen view event being triggered and a first click/tap being triggered),
- click/tap recurrence (the average number of times an element was clicked/tapped on when engaged during a screen view; measures user engagement and frustration),
- conversion rate per click/tap: revenue, revenue per click/tap, purchase, swipe (fast swipe, slow swipe, swipe rate and swipe recurrence)
Ultimately, an excellent UX goes hand in hand with a deep understanding of customers. Today’s DXA solutions can unlock that deeper understanding by surfacing actionable insights from the interactions of the people who matter the most — the customers. Every click, tap, scroll or swipe is a nugget of feedback — put together and analysed, these gestures form a picture of customer satisfaction (or disappointment!) and help teams understand exactly what to improve and how. At a time when every new wave of disruption resets the rules of digital engagement, being able to move fast and confidently is critical to ensuring an always-relevant, winning UX.
The article titled “How Southeast Asian ecommerce brands can tap Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) to drive UX success” was authored by Alex Llorens, Vice President, APAC Contentsquare
About the author
Alex Llorens is Vice President, APAC at digital experience analytics platform Contentsquare. A highly experienced senior leader in high growth SaaS organisations, Llorens is based in Singapore and leads growth and expansion in key markets in the region. Llorens is also a certified professional coach who works with emerging leaders in fast-growing startups.