Online Checkout: A Huge Market for Customer Experience Improvement

Since the early 1990s, e-commerce has skyrocketed. The success of digital retailers like Amazon and eBay has proven that virtually any product or service is “sellable” online. The soaring popularity of “Cyber Monday,” the digital counterpart of “Black Friday,” is a case in point. In fact, in 2010 Cyber Monday sales totaled more than a billion dollars – the first-ever online shopping day to break through the billion-dollar ceiling.

Once a far-off dream of science fiction, today it is common to purchase airline tickets, conduct banking activities, and even check medical lab results on the internet. Accordingly, the customer experience just as important online as it is in face-to-face interaction. Google’s service aimed at online marketers, Google Analytics, generates statistical profiles of website visitor behavior. Recently, Google debuted an advertisement about the most common customer experience pitfalls on the web.

In the sartorial ad, a man attempts to buy a loaf of bread at the grocery store, with a twist. The cashier acts out the part of a typical web point-of-sale interaction. First, the cashier “times-out” by staring into space, asking the customer to restate his username and password; next, he holds up a poster with bizarre words printed on it to mimic CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) security measures, demanding the customer to read it aloud; finally, when it is time to purchase the bread, the customer has to accept an unintelligible legal disclaimer, only to be charged hidden excess fees by accepting it.

The humor of this advertisement speaks volumes for potential growth in the online customer experience. Are you destroying sales and customer loyalty by chasing your customers away at the last minute? Since e-commerce is a now a permanent fixture of the retail industry, customer experience in this arena is a prime source of competitive differentiation.