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Tips for using the employees’ special skills in your webshop

The personal service and human contact can make a huge difference for the customer’s shopping experience – in particular if a brand, a shop or a company is known for providing excellent customer service. By using the digital opportunities, you can put the commitment and expertise of your employees into play in your webshop and by doing so give the customer journey an extra dimension.

From UX over CX to EX – and back again

For many years, there has been much focus on creating the optimal user journey on the digital platforms in the form of good design and intuitive flows also called User Experience (UX). The purpose is to focus on how the customers interact with your product, your brand and your services – online as well as offline – and through that ensure the good customer experience in all phases of the purchase also called Customer Experience (CX).

However, a concept which attracts more and more focus from company managers is Employee Experience (EX) which basically is about having happy and committed employees and how this strategic focus point can be used for increasing productivity and earnings.

Richard Branson from Virgin puts it like this:

”My philosophy has always been, if you can put staff first, your customers second, and shareholders third, effectively, in the end, the shareholders do well, the customers do better, and your staff remains happy.”

As the illustration below shows also the American retail giant, Wallmart, has experienced that investment in employee satisfaction has a positive effect on the customers’ shopping experience.

Companies and brands with focus on both UX, CX and EX will often experience a self-perpetuating effect because just like happy employees give happy customers, studies show that happy customers give happy employees!

How companies can work strategically to ensure a high level of job satisfaction is a discipline which this article will not go into. Instead, you will get examples of how you can put your committed and dedicated employees into play in your webshop.

Chat with a pharmaconomist

Another way of putting your staff into play is by using chat functions. Bizzkit’s customer, DinApoteker, which is a joint e-commerce solution for 157 Danish pharmacies, offers a chat function that is staffed 24/7 by pharmaconomists.

​​​​​​​This makes it possible for the customers to be in contact with professionally trained staff online which supports the chain’s objective of offering the customers the same good guidance online as in the local pharmacy.

By implementing this type of functionality as described above, the following platform technologies and features are typically used:

Headless architecture

Bizzkit is a so-called ’headless’ e-commerce platform with full API architecture. One of the advantages of this type of platform is the option of integrating with external technologies. For example SurveyGizmo, which is among the experts within online surveys, and which was selected by Matas to deliver the technology behind the questionnaire. By using a ’headless’ architecture, a high degree of flexibility is obtained for example to combine external technologies with content created in Bizzkit CMS. This gives the visitor a cohesive experience.

Granulated product attributes

When products are created in the Bizzkit PIM system, it is possible to work with attributes at many levels: product properties, product descriptions, product titles and product categories. Attributes which are used for intelligent filtering of the relevance of products and thus ensure a fast and correct match for the customer’s requirements.

Target audience

If the questionnaire survey or the chat function should only be used when a customer is logged in, differentiated content is managed by the feature Target Audience. In this way, it is ensured that customers who are logged in see one type of content, whereas customers who are not logged in are guided by a different content.

Rich media

To create a super visual presentation, it is important to use photos, videos, etc. both when creating content in the CMS but also when creating products in the PIM. Visual material which is retrieved from the solution’s Digital Asset Management system. Since Bizzkit is a complete platform, CMS and PIM are automatically connected to DAM allowing the systems to easily retrieve visual material via pickers and drag’n’drop.