Measuring Up To Your Brand Promises in eCommerce Post-purchase

Brand Set Expectations

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. Your brand is what you stand for in the market, and it sets customer expectations - beliefs regarding the anticipated quality of interactions with your firm. For example, if your brand stands for simplicity and flexibility, then that’s what customers expect from their e-commerce experience.

Reality Check

Customer experience is defined as how customers perceive their interactions with your brand. While brand experience is what marketers, brand managers and brand identity consultants design in an effort to achieve the desired brand image, customer experience is its reality check. In summary, brand sets customer expectations for experience and customer experience is a measure how well you deliver on those expectation.

Relationship Doesn’t End at Checkout.

Consumers have made it clear that brand experiences during the post-purchase phase have the greatest overall positive or negative impact on their brand relationship with retailers and their inclination to shop that retailer over competitors. So, it is imperative that you remain ever aware of the fact that after you’ve thanked your customer for his order, you’re just beginning the most influential phase of his brand interaction with you.

Key to Positive Brand Experience and Relationship

Out of three phases of purchase experience (pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase) it is the post-purchase that carries most weight when defining positive or negative evaluation of the total buying experience. The length of delivery time, how your product is packaged, the quality and variety of provided print materials, the ease of exchanges and returns—it all contributes to your brand perception and experience as a whole.

Auditing Post-purchase Experience

Auditing the customer experience against brand set customer expectations is the only way we will know whether the customer and end-user experiences align with the brand experience we intend to create.

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SO DIGITAL GLOBAL E-COMMERCE BRAND EXCELLENCE PLATFORM is a management tool that helps companies formulate, evaluate, and improve their e-commerce strategies by providing a systematic assessment of competitive performance of post-purchase experience across markets.It audits the most influential phase of customer brand relationship by contrasting the customer shopping experience across stages of delivery, tracking, packaging - out of box experience, returns & refunds ( the reality) versus brand set expectations (the promises).

Who is it for?

Brand led organisations and eCommerce leaders who oversee channel execution within a single or across multiple markets. Team leaders who have direct influence, control and responsibility for overall eCommerce performance and continuous sustainable revenue growth. Market level insights from our platform will help especially those who are tasked designing brand experience, customer loyalty and repeat customer segment growth.

Marketing team, Supply Chain and eCommerce Operations team professionals are just some of the examples of those who can leverage insights from the market research and leverage them for tactical improvements, performance gaps identification and/or general market trends tracking.

Why is it needed?

With increasing digital acquisition costs, making sure that your first time customers become repeat ones is a matter of ensuring profitability. Crucial to loyalty, customer (dis)satisfaction, is a measure whether your interactions with the customer exceed his expectations. Those are shaped by brand promises and market level averages. As only satisfied customers become repeat ones, delivering on expectations will mean delivering on profit targets.

After you’ve thanked your customer for his order, you’re just beginning the most influential phase of his brand interaction with you.Auditing the customer experience against brand set customer expectations is the only way we will know whether the customer and end-user experiences align with the brand experience we intend to create. (Mis)alignment of post-purchase experience to customers expectations will have direct impact on your top-line revenue.

How does it work?

Together with the client, we develop a list of implicit promises that your brand makes towards e-commerce consumers. These are the brand values that transcend product features and are the anticipated characteristics for every interaction with the company. These are contrasted to your actual performance in e-commerce post-purchase which is analyzed by our trained researches within a market level benchmark.

As your brand promises (and performance) are always evaluated relative to others, we also evaluate performance of key market and leading industry e-commerce players. Trained researches perform actual purchase of products, recording their every step, while answering standardised scale based scorecard with average 200+ data points to provide insight into comparative performance on selected dimensions.

How do you benefit?

Contrasting the actual customer shopping experience across stages of delivery, tracking, packaging - out of box experience, returns & refunds ( the reality) versus brand set expectations (the promises) taken together with the performance of rest of the market will give you a clear insight whether you're delighting or disappointing your customers. Satisfied customers turn into repeat customers.

Having precise and detailed market level insights you are able to focus your future investments into continuous creation and evolution of features and functionalities of post-purchase experience which will not only fortify your brand, but create market unique differentiators and create sustainable competitive advantage.

How long does it take?

Depending on the number of countries researched and whether it is a standardized or individual client tailored benchmark research average duration of the project lasts up to 3 months. During this time client is able to actively participate and track research progress in the platform. In case markets of your interest have been benchmarked within last 6-12 months you can gain access to this right away.

Once you gain access to the platform through subscription packages, you can use it during the period of one calendar year, after which your subscription and access to the refreshed dataset will have to be renewed. During this period client designated users have an unlimited access to the data and are able to continuously create reports of their choosing.

How much does it cost?

Standard benchmarking contains research results of 20+ leading e-commerce players from a single market. Cross-industry sample usually contains all e-commerce models (marketplaces, pure-players, brands, e-retailers, omni-channel). Access to the standard country research that details into delivery, tracking, packaging, returns & refunds with omni-channel reporting starts at 5000 EUR / year.

In case of a brand audit, we tailor the research so it is more focused on a client's industry, adding brand related question sets, standard pricing will be augmented depending on the size and the scope of changes and markets which are researched just for this client. On average tailoring of research criteria (scorecard or industry) entails +30% per each segment.

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Beyond the "buy now" button

Audit the most influential phase of customer brand relationship by contrasting the customer shopping experience across stages of delivery, tracking, packaging - out of box experience, returns & refunds ( the reality) versus brand set expectations (the promises).

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