Why Great Customer Experience Is Disrupting E-Commerce Competition

By: Isabella Mongalo, Director of CX Strategy at Transcom

Originally published on LinkedIn, Sept. 6, 2021

I recently wrote a detailed whitepaper for Transcom titled: Why Great Customer Experience Is Disrupting E-Commerce Competition. This paper was a deep dive into how the post-pandemic e-commerce environment is dramatically evolving with a more acute focus on the customer experience (CX).

In this blog, I will introduce the themes covered in the paper and then in my next few blogs, I will focus on some different areas covered by the paper. I will not be reproducing everything included in the whitepaper, but these articles should give the reader a better understanding of what is in the paper.

When McKinsey published their insights into how Covid has changed consumer behavior they noted that the adoption of digital tools and channels has rocketed. Their exact comment was that we have "covered a decade in days in the adoption of digital." A decade in days. Think what that means for the digital evolution of CX.

Every company has seen a different growth path through the Covid pandemic, but as the McKinsey comment suggests, e-commerce has enjoyed a great deal of attention. Where traditional retailers struggled to handle lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, e-commerce stepped in to ensure that customers could still go shopping - even if it was digital-only for many months.

Many commentators believe that this change will be sticky. Instagram is repositioning to focus on creators, videos, messaging, and shopping, rather than photo-sharing. E-commerce has not only boomed during the pandemic, but many retailers - and other companies using e-commerce channels - are now making this a strategic focus.

As more and more companies turn to e-commerce, the experience customers have with these brands is becoming a key differentiator. Great CX has the potential to disrupt and change how e-commerce competition functions.

The whitepaper explores the importance of CX when building and growing e-commerce platforms and solutions. The paper focuses on a number of key topics and these will feature in my next few blogs:

• The State of E-commerce: where is today and where is it going?
• CX is the Differentiator: how do companies stand out with superior CX?
• Designing Modern CX: what approaches do companies need to take to design better customer support and engagement experiences?
• The New Brand Relationship: what are some examples of brands building closer relationships with consumers?
• Transformational Technologies: how are conversational commerce technologies among others changing customer experience operations?

These five topics are critical for all executives planning post-pandemic e-commerce CX. Customers have already moved on from 2019. It's not an option to return to the service levels and quality of the pre-pandemic era. CX is disrupting e-commerce right now.

In the next article of this series about how great CX is disrupting e-commerce, I will discuss the state of e-commerce: where is it today and where is it going?

Read the whitepaper