Over the past few months, millions of customers across Pakistan have adopted digital solutions to shop for essential and non-essential products. In March, ecommerce platforms witnessed an increase in traffic and demand as the government imposed lockdowns across cities to fight the COVID19 pandemic. As customers remain hesitant to visit retail stores, the trend to shop online has persisted even among customers who had mainly shopped offline before the virus spread.
For customers the primary factor in deciding whether or not they will return to an online shopping platform is the level of service they receive. Customer experience, thus, remains paramount and Daraz, the leading online marketplace, identifies four aspects as critical to running a successful ecommerce platform in the country:
Customer feedback
To curate an effective customer experience strategy, it is essential to understand buyers and the best approach to do so is to regularly review their feedback and pain points.
The next step is to ensure they are incorporated into the blueprint for customer experience.
“The objective is to ensure that the buyer’s journey from start to finish satisfies them enough that they are excited to come back and shop with us and spread the word within their network,” Kassim Shroff, Chief Customer Officer at Daraz Pakistan, says.
Humanizing the brand
An important aspect of customer service is ensuring that customer service officers are able to connect with customers on a personal level and are trained on product and brand knowledge in order to share the stories and information that the brand carries to the customers.
This is central to humanizing the brand; to creating more opportunities for one to share the brand's story and connect with your audience and strengthen the relationship between the two.
The power of social media
“Connection is a two-way street and we use multiple channels to ensure we are available online and offline both for our customers,” Kassim Shroff says, adding the social media has become a key channel at Daraz to ensure that customer queries are being effectively resolved.
Incorporating social media into the customer experience strategy has had several benefits for Daraz. Not only has it helped the brand build relationships with customers but it has also proven to be an important platform through which insights can be gathered regarding issues that customers are facing in real time and how satisfied they are with their purchases.
“We tend to keep an eye on our social media as people are more aware that with the power of social media they can quickly share their experience and tag us in their posts, allowing them to reach us instantly,” Kassim adds.
At Daraz, the community management department is dedicated to ensuring that no query on social media goes unresolved.
Instead of employing a completely automated customer services system, the company has also adopted a hybrid model that promises effective and speedy complaint resolution while ensuring that a personal connection can be maintained with customers. The platform is also focusing on growing the live chat channel and introducing a chat bot through which customers will be able to receive personalised answers to their questions.
Seller education
Operating on a marketplace model, Daraz has a growing community of 50,000 marketplace sellers and therefore, seller education is directly related to customer experience as it helps ensure sellers are able to ship on time, manage stock properly and provide good quality products.
For the leading online marketplace, improving customer experience will remain a core priority. While Daraz has made strides, the platform is dedicated to ironing out the creases that remain to ensure a seamless experience.
