The personal touch

Touch enables customers to feel closer to their shopping experiences than ever before, and already, touch integration is emerging in the ecommerce industry with the use of tablets for online shopping, and on the high street with the introduction of touch-enabled self-checkouts in supermarkets.

Although touch has incremental benefits for businesses that use this technology to engage with customers better, they must also be aware of just how the motion of touch can psychologically make customers feel closer to their shopping experience.

If customers have a bad experience, they are more likely to vent their frustrations on social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, which can be hugely detrimental to their brand name.

As a result, in the digital age, reducing the customer struggle has never been more vital.

One way companies can ensure they provide the best possible digital customer experience is by using responsive web design to provide a common user experience across different channels and devices.

By adapting their sites for different devices and screen sizes while keeping the layout of the website familiar across all devices, customers will be able to navigate the site quickly and easily.

                      

In addition, companies can also use customer experience management software on touch-enabled devices to collect and analyse a vast amount on information on why customers may have abandoned a transaction, what types of content makes customers buy or convert, and how visitors behave on different devices.

Analysing this data can help them understand customer behaviour and take the necessary steps to improve the quality of customer experience across different devices and channels. 

Future at our fingertips

Customer impatience has grown rapidly over the last few years and is still on the rise, and the next generation of shoppers will see today’s changing shopping habits as the norm.

The marketplace needs to understand and cater for the immediacy that customers expect by beginning to prepare for the next big thing: the ubiquity of touch technology in the commerce industry.

Apple is already paving the way with fingerprint identification technology, but in the near future, we foresee this technology being used for logging into ecommerce sites and for payment transactions, and soon this will become a significant part of the customer experience that organisations won’t be able to overlook.

As a result, they must begin integrating touch into the shopping experience now to ensure they meet the elevated expectations of future shoppers.