With global ecommerce sales value forecasted to grow by 50% over the next four years compared to the 2021 figure, there has never been a more important time to understand retail customer frustrations.
Why do you need to understand retail customer frustrations?
Understanding the reasons that consumers choose to shop with competitors is key to determining areas for improvement and growing customer loyalty. Without this information, you will lose customers to competitors that are able to outperform you.
Most common retail customer frustrations
We will now take a look at the situations that respondents found the most frustrating, in each stage of the purchase journey.
Pre-purchase retail customer frustrations
During purchase retail customer frustrations
Post-purchase retail customer frustrations
What frustrates customers most?
Communications SaaS provider Gnatta has gathered data around the customer service frustrations of the general public when shopping online. Surveying 1,000 people, Gnatta investigated the whole journey to purchase and asked customers to score how frustrating they found certain situations on a 0-10 scale, based on experiences at each stage of the journey: pre-purchase, during purchase and post-purchase. We will now take a look at the most common retail customer frustrations.
Findings
- Almost half (46%) said that it would take just two bad experiences for them to stop purchasing from an online retailer, closely followed by 2 in 5 (40.1%) who said that it would only take one bad experience.
- It seems like ‘three strikes and you’re out’ applies here, with a huge 96.2% of respondents stating it would take either one, two or three bad experiences to boycott a retailer.
- Customer service at all journey points is key – out of pre-purchase, during purchase and post-purchase, the majority (57%) said that all three are as important as one another.
- Over a quarter (27.6%) said that post-purchase is the most important time when it comes to customer service.
- Time is of the essence! Just under a third (66.4%) stated that within a day would be an acceptable timeframe to hear back from an ecommerce retailer’s customer service team.
- Just under 1 in 5 (17.4%) said that within an hour would be an acceptable time frame. A small handful (4.8%) were even wanting a response from ecommerce retailers within 10 minutes of contacting them.
- Gen X and Boomers are the internet’s most dissatisfied customers, whereas Gen Z were the happiest online shoppers
Top tips for the ideal ecommerce journey
Gnatta also revealed their top tips to create the ideal ecommerce journey. By removing retail customer frustrations and pain points, you are able to creative positive and memorable shopping experiences online that boost customer loyalty.
What’s next?
Begin by finding out what your customers’ frustrations and seeing which areas of your ecommerce journey could be improved to remove or reduce these retail customer frustrations.
Holly brings a wealth of experience in both print and digital publishing. As Modern Retail’s Content Editor, Holly is passionate about helping independent retailers to thrive in today’s ever-changing market.
