I am going to be brave and start with TMI about myself by sharing a very personal detail. I recently bought five pairs of underwear online. It was my favorite brand, type, and style, that I got it in five different colors. Why am I sharing this? There was no surprise that after I received my order, I received an email from the company asking me to review the product. “Of course!” I thought, “Good product deserves a review.” Clicked on the link. Happily marked 5 stars, carefully composed a couple of sentences with positive feedback, looked for the “Submit” button, but instead only saw “Next”. Well, since there was nothing else to click, “Next” it was. I expected that there would be another question to complete my review, but instead the same product in the next color showed up with the same review fields I just completed. As you can probably guess, that page had a “Next” button (“Back” was added as well”), but no “Complete” button. Essentially, I would have to complete five review forms for the same product before I could complete the process. Nope. I had no patience for that and did not see the point of repeating myself five times. TMI was requested for no good reason. I closed the window. The company and the product did not get my customer feedback.
Modern retail, including e-commerce, heavily relies on data that drives marketing, targeting and campaigns. But customers’ reviews are not only business facing data, they are also bits of information that other customers can see and help with customer conversion. Well, that particular company just lost one of these bits, the one that might have helped nudge a store browser to become a purchaser. And all because the simple logic in the review flow was missing. No matter how many items were in the order, even if they were all different items, a customer should never be forced to review all of them. It is supposed to be a product review, not an order review. A question “Would you like to review another item from your order?” and the “Next” button to continue, or “Submit” to complete the process is not that complicated to implement.
User experience needs to always be top of mind. Not just on your website, but in all your customer interactions. While Mira Commerce does not specifically develop review applications, we do help our clients to analyze all parts of the user engagement journey and recommend tools and best practices to avoid such minor missteps.
