How Elkjøp is perfecting their web store customer experience with real-time user feedback

Smiley Digital bring out the customer’s online voice

When it comes to online stores and websites, customer experience can be one of the most important competitive advantages. Since Elkjøp customers are the ones actually using the online services, they know best—and it pays to make improvements based on their feedback.

An average weekday at a single, country-specific Elkjøp web store results in about 800-1,000 feedback responses through HappyOrNot Smiley Digital, whereas weekends and holiday amounts can be nearly double. The numbers rise exponentially, like during seasonal peaks such as Black Friday in 2019, where Elkjøp received over 45,300 feedback responses in the Nordic countries.
Through the Smiley Digital, Elkjøp has uncovered important points for improvement, underlying reasons for abandoned baskets, and challenges with the online purchase or order process.

For example, thanks to customer feedback, Elkjøp has found out about challenges with certain payment methods and delivery options, as well as difficulties customers have faced when searching for and buying add-on products and services. Customers have also been able to give interesting open feedback on campaigns, offering their own suggestions and ideas.

“Our customers give a lot of feedback that can be used to improve our customer experience. For example, through the Smiley Digital our customers suggested adding filters and categories to certain products. It might feel like a small thing, but it’s really useful for a lot of our customers,” tells Tommi Kortman, eCommerce Manager at Gigantti (Elkjøp Finland). “It’s great to have this connection with our customers also in the online world with Smiley Digital, even if we don’t get to meet them face to face.”

Identifying customer experience challenges in real time for fast action

Elkjøp continuously follows the real-time feedback to understand what they could do to improve the user experience. It’s crucial in enabling them to take action when it will make a significant impact to the customer experience, such as with adding filters and categories to make searching for products easy and convenient.

Kortman explains: “I begin my workday every day by going through the open feedback we’ve received online. I want to especially pay attention to the negative feedback: are they about human errors, difficulties with delivery, the ordering process, the purchase itself, or something else? I can then immediately test bugs or problems to see if I can reproduce the issue and fix it right away.”

When the feedback is collected in real time, it offers the opportunity to react fast and quickly change the aspects that seem confusing to customers, thus improving the overall shopping experience. With HappyOrNot, Elkjøp has found a way to hear the voice of the customer directly even in the webstore, and now use the data the Smiley Digital provide to improve their customer experience daily.

Smiley Digital help Elkjøp form data-driven improvement solutions

Elkjøp asks all their customers the questions: “Review our webstore” after the order confirmation and “Review the service you received” after a chat discussion. In doing so, they’ve collected direct feedback on all aspects of their online customer service—from both buyers and non-buyers. By requesting feedback after a purchase, Elkjøp can easily uncover potential improvement areas in the webstore experience. They can immediately identify technical issues and bugs, and discover possible improvement ideas.

With the feedback collected after chat discussions, Elkjøp is able to capture non-buyer opinions—an elusive yet powerful category of insights. The feedback collected at this point gives Elkjøp insight into important points such as reasons for lost sales.

By comparing local feedback, Elkjøp has localized their online experience when needed. They can see, compare, and forecast fluctuations between weekdays, campaigns, peak times, and seasons. They’ve improved their overall online experience from the strategic level to operational level plans and roadmaps.

“We have built a HappyOrNot feedback dashboard in PowerBI with all the feedback we’ve received through the webstore. The dashboard shows us data on both the Nordic and regional level. We can then compare to quickly spot challenges and pain points on both levels. We can also build different types of dashboards and reports based on the data if we need to,” explains Kortman.

“Our customers’ buying behaviors and their expectations of online services are evolving all the time. Plus, there are cultural differences”, Kortman continues. “For example [in Finland], we’ve received regional feedback about order deliveries and payment methods. With this feedback, I can map out which things are really important for our customers, and what kind of changes we can implement in our own region. We work together with other locational eCommerce Managers to prioritize things based on the data and plan changes in the web store globally based on the feedback we get.”

“In addition to this, each eCommerce Manager uses the regional feedback to improve their local web stores. With the great cooperation we have with other Nordic countries and by following the feedback data, we can ensure that the required changes are implemented across the board ,” Kortman summarizes.

Ensuring a consistent, omnichannel experience for customers

HappyOrNot Smiley Digital allow stakeholders and customers to easily give feedback about both online and on-site services. Implementing Smiley Digital on a website can be done quickly and conveniently, and it doesn’t require complex setups.

“We’re definitely going for a true omnichannel approach—whether the customer has purchased or reserved a product online, they can always pick it up at the nearest store. Our customer service works seamlessly throughout channels: phone, chat and in person,” says Janne Henriksson, Head of Operations at Gigantti (Elkjøp Finland).

“We’ve been able to use the webstore feedback to improve the customer experience at our brick and mortar stores,” Henriksson explains further. “For example, if in the webstore somebody has given feedback of a great package deal, or we’ve noticed certain patterns in customer behavior, we’ve been able to use that information at our physical stores as well.”

As Henriksson points out, Elkjøp is focusing on an omnichannel approach to customer satisfaction. They have over 500 HappyOrNot Smileys throughout their Nordic locations. Each brick-and-mortar store has at least one Smiley Terminal or Smiley Touch, and customer satisfaction is measured at exits and after-sales facilities. By combining all the feedback data, Elkjøp can make the customer experience as seamless as possible throughout all touchpoints.

“We share good and bad experiences openly with the whole organization,” Henriksson continues. “This way, we can learn. It’s important to us that the service is top-notch, regardless of where it happens—at the store, on the phone, or in our webstore. This is why it’s great we can measure the customer experience through the exact same method, at brick and mortar stores as well as online.”

With real-time HappyOrNot data, Elkjøp has found out that their customer satisfaction rate is generally extremely high, and customers are leaving great feedback. Sometimes they even thank chat employees by name!

Henriksson adds: “We get so much motivation from HappyOrNot feedback. We read the feedback actively and rejoice together when we’ve really accomplished something that the customers love. It’s a great way to encourage each other.”

He goes on to explain that in addition to this, the organization wants to be as flexible as possible, to further enhance their customer experience. “We just launched a new drive-in service. You can purchase an item online and pick it up from a store parking lot. It’s already proven to be hugely popular.”