After 15 ye
ars of working in eCommerce, one thing is clear: making it easier for customers to purchase and support themselves drives revenue. Too often, companies rely on systems integrations as drivers of change, while neglecting to streamline the actual customer experience throughout their site.
Think of your online store, customer portal, and associated systems as a sales team working around the clock. If the systems are clunky and difficult to use, they frustrate customers and result in lost business. On the other hand, when your customer experience is intuitive and enables customers to get their job done, it delivers measurable benefits:
- Faster Quotes: Businesses with well-designed storefronts and product configurators consistently report cutting quoting and proposal prep times by more than 30%.
- Improved Customer Confidence: 71% of buyers say visualizing products using tools such as 3D significantly increases their likelihood of purchase.
- Real-World Results: Consider a recent example from a prominent healthcare manufacturing company. By improving their user experience and enabling customers to configure their own products, they achieved over 20% increase in sales.
Customers love to help themselves around your site, the digital revolution has proven that in most cases, customers would rather directly handle their own account than work with a rep. Your digital properties aren’t just a point of sale — they are an integral part of your business strategy. Keeping them sharp means staying competitive, driving growth, and enhancing the buyer experience.
In fact, I’ve built a business around helping customers create highly tuned and streamlined eCommerce experiences. When done right, customer self-service enables companies to rapidly scale, and can, in certain situations, outperform a customer service rep in customer satisfaction.
About apHarmony
apHarmony is a Chicago-based custom-software studio founded in 2011. We offer a variety of software development services, and in the eCommerce space, we help companies improve their online stores by streamlining the customer journey and implementing features such as product configurators, quoting tools, and workflow automation—that let both businesses and their customers work faster and with fewer errors.
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