Direct-to-customer (D2C) brands have managed to create a niche for themselves in an already-crowded retail market. While initially people were heavily shopping from offline retail stores that they trusted, after Covid-19, the market started tilting in favour of D2C companies.
While the initial popularity might help your D2C brand with positive sales numbers, consistently improving and maintaining customer experience is important for growth.
Making sure your customer’s shopping experience is not compromised is especially important during the festive season and beyond. Customers are on a shopping spree and if you give them a bad shopping experience, it’s going to leave a long-lasting impression.
If you want to improve your customers’ shopping experience, we have some practical tips for you to follow.
How D2C brands can improve customer experience
Customers love D2C brands because they offer something new compared to old and established companies that rarely experiment. For many customers, especially the youth, D2C brands represent uniqueness, digital-savviness, and being conscious about the environment with their product offerings.
On top of these elements, customers expect to have a top-notch experience while shopping from these websites. Anything short of pampering will not cut it for these customers.
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So, here are a few tips that you can use to ensure your customers have a great time shopping from your online store:
- Customer journey: This is a back-end job, but it is the most important one. You need a plan to improve the customer experience. That’s why you should know the landmark points of your customer’s journey when they shop from you. Go one step beyond and find out if they have left any reviews or comments on social media about your product or shopping experience. Ear-mark all those points where they interact with your website or your employees. Look at those engagement points and review how you can improve them. For example, check if you are using the right kind of language that promotes your brand ethos to your customers, it should have the latest product updates or news about the industry, check if all the links are working, etc. Most importantly, always include the unsubscribe button in your emails.
- Simple navigation: Your website is the first platform where customers interact with your brand. Keeping it simple and easy to navigate is the key to ensuring customers keep browsing products on your website. Don’t throw pop-ups of discounts or other promotions on your customers’ screens the moment they open the website. Searching products by name or category should be simple with the right search results. D2C customers are tech-savvy, and they expect you to have mastered these aspects of online shopping.
- Transparency: Do not hide information related to products, services, pricing, logistics, etc from your customers. The product page should clearly list all the product-related information along with pricing that includes logistics charges. Install a pin code input on the product page that can tell them how long the delivery will take. Clearly list out your return policy. If your brand sells apparel, footwear, or furniture, ensure that the product description has accurate measurements as well as a measuring guide. These are some of the basic etiquettes that customers expect from D2C brands, and it’s imperative that you follow them.
- Personalisation: One simple and easy way to make your customers feel valued is to communicate with them with a personal touch. Make them feel special. People will value your brand when they see that your website is showing them tailored offerings based on their last purchase or browsing history. Once a customer buys a product from your website, reach out to them for feedback and help them if there is any issue with the product. Such initiatives will go a long way in terms of building customer loyalty.
- Secure digital payment: One of the biggest parts of sophisticated customer experience is offering them a safe digital payment option with all payment modes and a high success rate. If possible, ensure that your payment gateway does not redirect customers to a different page to complete the payment. Plus, offer them as many payment modes as you possibly can. All of this is extremely important for your business as these will ensure you get repeat customers.
If you are looking for a payment gateway that your customers can trust, look no further and integrate Paytm Payment Gateway. It will considerably improve your customers’ shopping experience.
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How Paytm Payment Gateway can improve customer experience
While shopping from a D2C website, customers prefer to pay via online means when they see the name of a well-known payment brand on the checkout page. The first and foremost thing that Paytm Payment Gateway does for you is making your customers feel comfortable about using their cards or other payment options to pay digitally.
Now that the main hurdle is swept out of the door, let’s talk about the other advantages of Paytm Payment Gateway:
- All payment modes
If you want to improve customer experience, the simplest and toughest way to do it is to offer them a large variety of products and services. This is true for digital payments as well. Different customers prefer different ways to make payments.
Paytm Payment Gateway does exactly that. Your customers will be able to choose from a variety of payment options including net banking, debit and credit cards, wallet, UPI, QR code, and Paytm Postpaid.
With Paytm Postpaid, you will be able to offer your customers a truly easy way to pay even if they are short on funds at the time of purchase.
- Industry-high success rate
You don’t want your customers to go through failed payments because as a new brand in the market, there is no coming back for you. That particular customer who faced a failed payment is unlikely to come back to your website.
When they make their payment using Paytm Payment Gateway on your website, there is a 99.99% chance that the payment will go through. The industry-high success rate also gets amplified because Paytm is also the acquiring payment service provider (PSP), issuing PSP as well as the owner of the payment gateway.
- Saved cards
According to the RBI rules, you can’t store your customers’ debit or credit cards without tokenising sensitive card details. This means that your customers will have to enter their card number, expiry date, and CVV every time they purchase from your website.
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However, with Paytm Payment Gateway you can tokenise your customers’ cards and quickly let them save so that the next time they shop they can pay in just a couple of clicks.
- Easy subscription payments
If you run a subscription model, you would ideally want your customers to pay for the product or service periodically without fail. That is where Paytm Subscriptions comes into the picture.
Paytm Subscriptions will allow your customers to subscribe to your product and pay for them automatically. They simply need to enter their payment details and grant permission to automatically deduct a fixed amount from their account periodically. Once a one-time permission is provided, they don’t need to worry about paying for their subscription every time the deadline comes.
And, if they ever need to cancel their subscription or change their plan, they can easily do that from the payment page.
- Bank offers
Paytm has partnered with a large number of banks and brokered deals with them that provide customers with special discounts. These add-on discounts and offers are based on the card that the customer uses.
For example, when a customer, at the checkout page, finds out that a particular bank’s debit card will give them an additional 10% discount, their shopping experience on your website will get a boost.
Conclusion
To improve customer experience, all you have to do is reduce the friction for your consumers in terms of product selection, communication, convenience, speed, and digital payments.
To make your digital payments fast, secure, and convenient, partner with Paytm Payment Gateway today.
