Verkkokauppa.com has its own technology stack, where all operations are built around an e-commerce solution: Data and process transparency are well executed and everything the customer sees on the site is connected to the underlying system in real-time.

Pekka Litmanen joined Verkkokauppa.com’s team two years ago. As Chief Experience Officer, he’s responsible for sales in all their channels.

“My focus has always been on the customers – trying to find ways to connect their needs to the needs of the company”, Litmanen says.

“We’ve been very good at serving a certain type of customer demographic: the expert. That’s someone interested in technology who likes gadgets and knows what they’re looking for. Most of the employees and even the company’s founder Samuli Seppälä fit this customer profile well.”

Although Verkkokauppa.com enjoyed high customer loyalty and satisfaction when Litmanen joined, the unilateral target group was limiting their potential.

Many associate Verkkokauppa.com solely with consumer electronics: smartphones, computers, home electronics, and appliances. In addition, Verkkokauppa.com has a wide selection of items in, e.g., outdoor activities, babycare, children, baking, and has even piloted with Bajamajas.

“What people often don’t know is the amplitude of our selection. So although our revenue was already 500 million, with our substantial basket size our sales had room to grow way beyond the expert profile.”

Overlooking important customer groups leaves money on the table

Before Verkkokauppa.com started its customer experience renewal, it segmented its market. From the multiple ways of doing this, Verkkokauppa.com chose clustering analysis that combines consumers’ motivations, needs, and values. This data was quantified to publicly available market data.

“Customer segmentation should not be done through the lenses of a single department or project. The whole company from marketing, sales, offering, and all the way to the supply chain needs to have a shared understanding of who the customer is”, says Litmanen.

The renewal was done piece by piece while operating business as usual.

The company set two types of intentions: goals for what the customer gets and goals for internal objectives. The vision for Verkkokauppa.com’s customer experience stated that Verkkokauppa.com should be inspiring and personal and yet reliable, easy, and fast. 

Internally, the company wanted to support their business’s critical key performance indicators, such as conversion and retention, and simplify adding to the assortment.

“In addition to the expert customer profile, we found 5 other segments: the aesthetics, the socials, the non-consumers, the optimists, and the responsibles. Two to three of these were perfect fits for us, and we chose those as our lead segments in addition to the expert customer. Now, instead of only one, we have three to four key personas to consider”, Litmanen says.

Once the company had done the segmentation, they started linking segments to customer pains and gains. Verkkokauppa.com carefully mapped the customer experience through the lens of each customer persona.

Once the current state and desired results of the customer experience had been determined, the e-commerce team started mapping features and ideas. They defined the ideal customer journey, and the solution space for each phase was mapped: from awareness, inspiration, and finding products to evaluating them, making an order, receiving products and using them. Finally, outcomes were prioritised.

Don’t be shy to publish new things – let the customer feedback guide you

Although the first phase of the development process was dedicated to the problem-solution space, the company wanted to begin implementation as soon as possible. Starting from the second increment, the development team completed the finished designs and put them into A/B testing. 

Litmanen emphasises that getting customer feedback as early as possible is crucial – it will guide you.

“If you’re not a little ashamed of what you’re putting out there, you’re doing it wrong. You can dive deeper into use cases, variances, and the last bits of finesse when you already have things in production”, Litmanen says.

“As soon as you have some sort of a vision for your customer experience, try to make it concrete, into something that is clickable and easy to share among stakeholders. It enables conversation around your vision.”

Eventually, Verkkokauppa.com ended up revising almost their whole site. Navigation, front page, category pages, product listing pages, content concepts, content design, brand page concepts, and brand page design have all been renewed – along with some bonus features, such as simplified checkout and product comparison and an expert chat where the customer can get help with their needs from Verkkokauppa.com’s salespersons.

Along the way, the company naturally updated the way it functions. The e-commerce team’s operating model was updated, and the team was introduced to a new content management system. The operational improvements have allowed business to maintain the site while technology teams focus on more important things. 

As an outcome of the renewal, Verkkokauppa.com was able to tap into new market potential. To summarise their road to this, Litmanen talks about three things:

1. Don’t be product centric

Your website should be more than a fantastic product catalog. Otherwise, customers only come to your site when they already know what they want. The customer journey starts long before that. If you don’t provide inspiration and guidance regarding solutions on your site, the potential customers won’t end up there.

2. Focus on customer journeys

Having your product categories and content individually dispersed over the site will not provide the best experience. You need to have carefully curated customer journeys. Otherwise, your products will be hard to find. Spending all your money on incredible buying guides is pointless if no one reads them.

3. Challenge the technical approach

If you treat your primary sales channel as a technical work of art, its features and performance will fall short. If you want to serve a substantial customer base, consider who your customer is. You might have an intuitive thought about your lead customer persona, but you need to research who else buys from you and why. Otherwise, you’re leaving money on the table.

Join Qvik’s next Digital Product meetup?

This article is based on Qvik’s Digital Product Meetup held at Qvik’s office on October 5th. The DiP meetups are a place for product managers, product owners and people in product management to discuss and learn about relevant themes.

The next meetup will be an afterwork event on November 5th. There Emilia Ala-Kurikka, the Product Lead of S-kaupat, will share insights on how a common vision and shared goals enabled S-kaupat to reach market leader position in food e-commerce and what S-kaupat’s development model is like.

Contact us for more information!

The post Verkkokauppa.com’s secret to a successful e-commerce renewal: Broaden your horizons but stay loyal to your most important customer segment appeared first on Qvik.

Only one in ten prefers a fixed-term subscription, and only 15% of Finns prefer to pay for mobile services with one-time payments.

So far, subscription-based business models have been most common in entertainment and educational apps. As most Finns are willing to use a subscription-based payment method but only have one to three active subscriptions, other industries too have a great opportunity to leverage the subscription economy.

Suunto Sports Tracker Premium got a 68% increase in premium users in a few months, and 70% of the new users continued after the free trial

One great example of a well-executed subscription-based application is our client Suunto’s Sports Tracker Premium. Sports Tracker was one of the first mobile sports trackers and has hundreds of thousands of active users each month, with over 700,000 users just in Finland.

Suunto acquired Sports Tracker in 2015. To change the app from a money sink to a viable business, they started building a subscription-based premium model around it in November last year.

The design work for Sports Tracker Premium is done by Qvik’s Minna Nurminen and Oona Lindqvist. In the beginning, the team consisted of Suunto’s product owner Antti Sorvari, Nurminen and Lindqvist, Qvik developers Kate Khudzhamkulova and Joel Pöllänen, and one developer from Vincit.

The work started with surveys and benchmarking and ended with a ROI of over €110,000/month

As Suunto wanted to keep Sports Tracker partially free, the team needed to strike a perfect balance between keeping the app viable and usable for everyone and still giving enough value for premium users so they would pay for it.

The first step was to find out how interested Sports Tracker users would be in certain content and features that the team already knew were popular and possible to deliver.

“Then we asked if the users would be willing to pay for that content, and if so, how much. In addition, we asked background questions to get an understanding of what types of users would be willing to pay”, says Qvik’s product designer Minna Nurminen, who had a crucial role in the concept, validation and design work of Sports Tracker Premium.

Benchmarking and user surveys confirmed the existence of a market and an audience for Sports Tracker Premium.

“Our work in defining user personas and value propositions helped us stay focused on the user’s needs. Together with the survey results and user data, this helped us decide what features to include in the premium subscription.​”

Minna Nurminen, Product Designer from Qvik

As stated in the subheader, this story has a happy ending: users see the value of Sports Tracker Premium, are willing to subscribe, and the premium feature produced €110,000 in revenue to Suunto already in May 2023. Since then, the amount of subscribers has increased steadily and, naturally, so has the revenue.

Get ready to improve acceptance rates with network tokenisation

When we studied the reasons why Finns cancel their subscriptions, we found that almost a fifth (18%) stopped using a service simply because the service period ended and they did not renew the subscription – so they didn’t even actively decide to cancel. 

One way to make it easier for the user to continue a subscription is to use network tokenisation in the payment flow. Google Pay and Apple Pay already rely on network tokenisation, and soon, it will be available for all card payments.

“The health and prosperity of a merchant’s business are closely tied to the authorisation rates of payment cards. When the card authorisation rate is higher, there is an increased probability of repeat customer transactions, leading to higher business revenue”

Sami Nurmi, Payment Specialist from Qvik

With the growing adoption of subscription-based business models, the significance of a secure and seamless payment solution for handling recurring transactions cannot be emphasised enough. Network tokenisation plays a vital role in this, as it substitutes sensitive card information with unique tokens.

These token values safeguard cardholder details and maintain the capability to execute transactions even if the physical card is lost, blocked, or expired. Essentially, this incorporates a card-updater functionality and protects recurring payments.

This article is written based on Qvik’s and Paytrail’s event The subscription revolution: Exploring the future of digital business. Paytrail offers a mobile payment SDK that supports recurring payments through payment card tokenisation. The technical implementation of Paytrail’s mobile payment SDK is done by Qvik’s developers.

Download Qvik Insights report of the most attractive business models for mobile apps and digital services.

Building mobile business on facts

We studied how the Finns want to pay in applications, how willing they are to pay for applications, and what expectations they have for customer service and signing in to applications.

Find out how Finns use digital services.

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If you wish to learn more about how network tokenisation would benefit your business, feel free to contact our advisory team’s Mikko Vahter or Sami Nurmi.

Sami Nurmi

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Mikko Vahter

Advisory & Payments

+358408094505mikko.vahter@qvik.com

The post Lessons from Suunto Sports Tracker Premium: How to build the best subscription-based model for your business appeared first on Qvik.

“Smooth payment is an important piece in acquiring and retaining donors. All the hard work done by communications and operations will be for nought if this step is handled poorly and the donor is driven off in the payment phase”, says Ilkka Harjula, non-profit specialist at TietoPiiri Oy.

TietoPiiri supports the work or organisations by offering them a customer management system and consultancy to make the donation process and mobilisation of volunteers easier. Their system helps with segmenting and targeted communications and reduces the organisation’s internal workload by automating functions.

Payment cards expire and e-invoice payments are often poorly implemented

E-invoices and direct payments are popular in Finland and have been good ways of ensuring donor commitment, but they are held back by slowness and manual work that can put unnecessary strain on non-profits.

“Potential donors who favor e-invoices are easily scared off if they have to jump back and forth between the online bank and donor site at payment”, Harjula says.

“Instead, you can automate recurring e-invoices, so that the donor just needs to complete the monthly donation form on the website and approve the e-invoicing agreement in their online bank.”

Another popular donation method, card payments, also has its issues: cards eventually expire, and when they do, many donors forget to update their payment information. According to one study, as many as one in four non-profits don’t even try to restart a recurring donation after the credit card expires.

“Many of the new payment methods would eliminate this problem. For example, the solutions offered by MobilePay keep card details up to date because people use the payment method for lots of other things than just their donations”, says payments specialist Mikko Vahter of Qvik.

“New payment solutions also feature useful functions for organisations, which eliminate manual work and free up time for other, more important things. For example, starting a recurring donation will not require any manual work, but can be done automatically with an API call.”

From one-time donor to monthly patron: Which payment methods support monthly donations?

Converting one-time donors to monthly patrons is one of the most important goals for non-profits. That is a lot easier to do if the payment solutions make the transition as effortless as possible for both the donor and organisation.

Management of donor relations with both one-time and monthly donors is an essential part of a non-profit’s work. A well-cultivated relationship improves the odds of a one-time donor signing up for a monthly donation.

“There are many best practices available for the management of donor relations. The most important points are listening to the donors’ needs and wishes, knowing your donor base, targeted donor communications and, above all, thanking every donor with a personal message”, Harjula says.

And when you know your donor, it will also be easier to ask them for more help in the form of further donations or volunteering.

Messaging app payments

SMS donations have long held a prominent role in fund raising. In a nutshell, the donor replies to the SMS with the sum they want to donate and pay for their donation in their phone bill.

SMS donations have upsides for both parties: they are effortless for the donor and can give the organization access to the donor’s phone number. They are not perfect, however. Firstly, many employers block SMS donations on their employees’ work phones. Secondly, SMS donations take a long time to land in the non-profit’s bank account. The organization only gets the money when the donor has paid their phone bill, which can mean a delay of over a month.

SMS donations are also expensive for the non-profit. They turned out to be the most expensive option in Qvik’s comparison of fifty-euro donations in terms of the user experience and the costs incurred by the non-profit.

But user-friendly and cost-effective payment solutions are available in other messaging apps too. For example, a payment feature can be integrated into WhatsApp or Telegram. A demo by our Senior Developer Roman “Rommi” Mikstais shows how you could implement payments in WhatsApp.

A donor relationship or payment can be initiated in a messaging app in a variety of ways, depending on where you first encounter the future donor. Messaging app payments can be set up in a face-to-face situation, over the telephone, via a website or directly in the messaging app.

“When you initiate the donor relationship in a messaging app, the donor can choose their preferred payment method and invite their friends to donate too. Messaging apps also let the non-profit tell the donor more about its mission and the recipient of the donation”, Vahter says.

Shall we continue the conversation?

This article is based on the “A sustainable donor relationship requires a smooth start” event hosted by Qvik, Vala and TietoPiiri. The event was held at Qvik’s office in January.

Do you need consultation about your organization’s fund raising? Qvik and TietoPiiri offer a two-hour fund-raising workshop free of charge. Contact Mikko Vahter at mikko.vahter@qvik.com or Ilkka Harjula at ilkka.harjula@tietopiiri.fi and let’s talk more!

The post New digital payment methods support sustainable donor relations: Here’s how to do it right appeared first on Qvik.

Over fifty years since the very first email was sent in 1971, the deluge of email traffic is only growing bigger by the year. Over four billion email users send more than 300 billion emails every year according to Statista.
Our Finnish consumer data collected in The Digital Everyday Life in Finland 2022 survey corroborated the fact that email remains the number one digital channel for all Finns over 25. No wonder that, in marketing, email campaigns are only increasing.

We then held ten semi-structured interviews to get more insight on top of the quantitative data. These were a follow-up to Qvik’s survey, Digital Everyday Life in Finland 2022. The purpose of the interviews was to gather qualitative data regarding people’s email habits and attitudes alongside the quantitative data on digital communications channel use.

We interviewed both women and men aged between 41 and 70. The interviews were conducted online by one researcher and analyzed by two independent researchers. 

Findings: Checking your email is a daily routine

Nearly all interviewees read their emails at least once a day, some even multiple times per day. Notification settings depended on the device – none of the interviewees had notifications on desktop, but some used them on mobile. Many tend to have a morning or evening routine for reading emails, which is why they manage without notifications. 

“I decide when to read my emails – I don’t want to use notifications.”

Man, 64

Conversation history and availability beat one-off chats

The interviewees use email to communicate about complex and serious topics, often with unfamiliar people. For example, many of the interviewees used email to communicate with their bank and insurance company. In these contexts, chats were also seen as a convenient way to communicate, but email had the advantage of storing the conversation history. 

Nearly all interviewees chose email over chat due to the conversation history aspect and over phone because of the possibility to reply at their own convenience.

“I prefer to use email for important messages since it creates a ‘receipt’ of the conversation, making it easier to recall details afterwards.”

Woman, 66

Response expected in 2 business days

One disadvantage of email use cited by the interviewees is the slow response time. This is where phone calls beat email and why people use other channels, such as WhatsApp, to communicate with people they know.

However, all interviewees expected to receive a response from unfamiliar parties within a couple of days, and in three days at the latest.The interviewees also expect a formal, but friendly corporate tone of voice in email communication – just like they would in face-to-face customer service contexts.

“I now only use email for formal messages, not to communicate with family or friends.”

Woman, 41

Storage for important documents

Several interviewees said that their email usage has changed with the appearance of other communication channels, such as WhatsApp, which has decreased email communication with familiar people a lot.

“In the past, we used to catch up with friends by email during the work day. Nowadays we talk on WhatsApp.”

Woman, 67

On the rare occasions on which interviewees did use email to reach friends and family members, it was because of the topic. Some of the interviewees preferred to share links via email rather than in WhatsApp. In these situations, no answer was even excepted from the recipient.

“My father was looking for a new vacuum cleaner and I found a suitable option for him. I shared the link with him by email and did not expect a reply, even though I knew that he bought the vacuum cleaner and was happy for my help.”

Man, 53

Formal and friendly tone of voice expected

When a consumer runs into the limits of self-service, they have to contact the company in some way. Email is overwhelmingly the most popular communication channel for this purpose, regardless of the respondent’s age. 

The text format in general was considered to cause more misunderstandings than face-to-face meetings or phone calls due to the need to shorten the message and different levels of textual skill.

“Email is suitable for topics that do not require much explanation – challenging subjects are easier to handle on the phone.”

Man, 42

“You may say things more abruptly than you would face to face, as you are trying to put it briefly – the friendly tone of voice gets left out. Especially, if the other message is copy-pasted and very generic, I tend to respond with less decorum. You need to think about the tone of voice more carefully than in phone calls.”

Woman, 66

From companies, interviewees expect a formal but friendly tone of voice in their email communication – just as they would in face-to-face customer service contexts.

“I expect companies to respond in a friendly way, but people can do as they like…”

Man, 42

Conclusions: future of email

People over 25 prefer email over other communication channels and, based on our interviews, email users are quite happy about the channel. It seems that email still has its purpose –communicating about meatier topics,  mostly with unfamiliar people.

As other communication channels are gaining ground and the younger generation is using email very actively, it will be interesting to see how popular email will remain as a communication method in the future.

The post Why is email still the preferred daily communication method for older generations? appeared first on Qvik.

The challenge is in ensuring that the parties trust the marketplace rather than third parties.

Lack of trust, or elements that create friction in the feeling of trust, have a massive effect on the likelihood of users choosing a certain payment method. One way to build trust is to have the platform control, curate and manage the relationship and facilitate the payments.

Earlier this month, Qvik hosted a roundtable meeting to discuss payments, platform apps and open banking solutions with over thirty professionals. The discussions were hosted by Joonas Tomperi from Enable Banking, Luis Orozco from Schibsted and Perttu Kröger from MobilePay.

We wrote three articles based on the discussions – this first one is about trust, second will be about taking advantage of PSD2 and open banking and third will be about platform apps.

Transactional models enable safer and user friendly business opportunities

Facilitating payments makes the marketplace generally a payment institution, which requires a licence. Applying for a licence is not rocket science, but can take a while. Marketplaces that facilitate payments are called transactional marketplaces. Customer funds are first transferred to an escrow account, where they can be transferred to the seller.

“We have seen that during the past few years online fraud cases have increased, so it’s important for online marketplaces to have better ways to deal with misunderstandings and possible frauds”, says Schibsteds Director of Product Tori.fi, Luis Orozco.

Transactional models enable new business opportunities, like onboarding partners, earning commissions and delaying or speeding money transfers.

These could come in handy for example if you buy a second hand item from a transactional marketplace with home delivery. The marketplace can offer you the possibility to accept the merchandise after delivery, so in case the item would have a scratch or flaws that were not mentioned in the description, you could agree to a price reduction or return the item.

The past few years have changed the way we shop online, and this challenges marketplace builders to find new business concepts and enable new consumer behaviour.

Also merchants that are only selling specific goods and services have many ways to benefit from becoming a transactional marketplace. For example, a travel merchant could offer car charging and washing while you are abroad and sell tickets to your destination’s favourite attractions in the same transaction.

Join our next event on alternative payment methods?

Qvik facilitates roundtable meetings and panel discussions on a regular basis. In the most recent one, held on Wednesday, September 7, we gathered at Erottajan Kasino to discuss the role of marketplaces in digital e-commerce from the point of view of payments.

The topic of our next event on November 16th is going to be the rise of alternative payment methods.

If you would like to hear more and join the next event, please contact advisory@qvik.fi and we will keep you posted!

The post Marketplaces are built on trust –  this won’t happen without secure payments appeared first on Qvik.

Sounds rough, right? Unfortunately it is true.

In a recent study, 78% of B2C customers reported being more loyal to brands that truly understand them. Correspondingly, a study by Salesforce showed that 52% of consumers would switch brands if they felt that they weren’t getting a personalized experience.

In light of these findings, it is alarming that over 60 percent of consumers feel that the brands that should know them simply fail in very basic areas of customer insight, such as purchase histories and personal preferences.

Customer expectations create a challenge – but also a great business opportunity

According to our recent nationwide survey, investing in digital loyalty is now more important than ever. People are spending more time and money on digital services as a result of the current pandemic, and around 35% of Finns say that they are more interested in digital loyalty programs than before.

So how can a company build a loyalty program and personalized services that customers find valuable and engaging – and how should this be positioned in the company’s business strategy?

We sat down and asked Hanna-Reetta Luukkainen, who works as Development Manager at K Group, focusing on the data-driven development of customer experiences.

“As a company, we have renewed many parts of our loyalty program but there is still a lot to be done. It’s been an interesting journey so far, since customer needs for a ‘loyalty scheme’ are very different today compared to 1997, when our K Plus program was launched. Understanding the new era of customer loyalty requires a lot of cross-functional and multi-method analysis at all steps of the development projects”, Luukkainen says.

Put a high priority on customer loyalty – and use data for your customers’ benefit

Building loyalty begins with understanding who your customers are. What they do and don’t like, what they need and when, as well as when they want to interact with you and how. Careful data analysis can reveal surprising things about your customers, their needs and preferences.

Read how data revealed the means to personalize booking for Tallink’s most loyal customers, resulting in an award-winning customer experience.

Luukkainen knows the power of loyalty programs and customer data in service development. According to her, the need for accurate, updated and securely stored data is now bigger than ever.

“With over 3.5 million loyalty members, 2.4 million weekly visitors of our K-Ruoka.fi  website and the K-Ruoka mobile app, K Group’s digital service is the biggest food media in Finland. This is the size of the audience for which we need to deliver a personalized shopping and browsing experience.”

And the digital business is growing fast: during the pandemic, K Group has seen an incredible 800% increase in their online sales. According to Luukkainen,  building and offering a personalized customer experience has a high priority in the company’s strategy.

“We aim high when it comes to developing the loyal customer’s shopping experience, and our strategic target is to offer a personalized and seamless shopping experience in all our channels. To achieve this target, we need to improve our processes at all stages of the customer journey.”

In addition to this strategic position, K Group’s team has a pioneering approach to utilizing customer data for the customers’ own benefit.

“Customer data needs to belong to the customers, and information about yourself and your choices can be a starting point to a better lifestyle. We embrace this approach and have given our customers access to their enriched shopping history data in our K-Ostokset service. In the service, users can view data like the CO2 footprint of their purchases.”

After its first year, the service has more than 130,000 unique users.

Adopt the right mindset: it’s not a one-off project but ongoing development

Besides the change of mindset regarding who should benefit from the use of customer data, you should accept that investing in the customer experience is not going to be a project but an ongoing journey:

“Bringing the user and their data to the core of different processes requires systematic work and improved awareness from various stakeholders, especially because the regulatory and technological landscapes are changing fast and more solutions for managing user identities are constantly being developed.

In summary, I think that managing your customers’ lifecycle and data is not a sprint but a marathon. It should be at the very core of your business strategy.”

If you’d like to learn more about data-driven design, join our webinar on profitable service design on June 16 to explore it through our Tallink and VR case studies. At Qvik, we have a long history of obsessing about customer needs and building market-leading customer experiences in digital services. This has resulted in several success stories together with our clients: read for example how Qvik helped Aurinkomatkat improve conversion by 60% through focusing on customer needs and personalization.

If you feel that your company’s loyalty & customer experience development may not be in line with your company’s growth strategy or are not sure how to start the journey, we are happy to help.

The post Without personalization, your digital loyalty program is failing. Time to fix that. appeared first on Qvik.

More than eight in ten Finns are buying products or services online according to our recent survey. Over half (55 percent) experience poorly functioning or difficult-to-use online stores as more annoying than before. Nevertheless, over a third (37 percent) of Finns believe that they will continue to shop more online after the COVID-19 emergency.

E-commerce evoked stronger feelings in certain categories of respondents. More than seven out of ten (72 percent) self-employed people admitted being irritated about usability issues in online stores. The smoothness of shopping online is also important to stay-at-home moms and dads, 67 percent of whom said that poorly designed online stores get on their nerves.

Correspondingly, 70 percent of Finns appreciate well-functioning online stores more than they used to. As many as 80 percent of self-employed people and practically every (93 percent) mom and dad reported such sentiments.

“When customers get used to good online services, their standards increase and clumsy online stores must feel even more annoying than before. It could also be that entrepreneurs are comparing the quality of digital services to that of their own. When you invest in providing well-designed services yourself, you have the right to demand quality from other service providers as well”, says Qvik’s CEO Lari Tuominen.

Young people want to support their favorite brands by shopping online

In addition to frustration, online commerce also evokes feelings of solidarity and loyalty in consumers. According to the survey, nearly half of Finns want to support their favorite store, brand or hobby by shopping online. A total of 49 percent of respondents described doing so.

Young people are more enthusiastic about support shopping than their elders. Almost six in ten under-25s (59 percent) reported showing loyalty to their favorites. Fifty-five percent of the 25–34 age bracket reported doing the same. Finnish ownership was not an especially important criterion for online stores, however. Just 15 percent of respondents appreciated domestic online stores.

“The challenging economic situation is directly reflected in the results of our survey. When asked what they value about online stores right now, Finns cited free or affordable deliveries as the single most important factor, valued by nearly half of respondents. The popularity of discounts is another indicator that budgets are tight right now: almost a third of Finns appreciated discounts in the features of online stores”, Tuominen says.

But the results indicate that speedy deliveries are currently even more important than discounts, placing second in the ranking of most important factors in e-commerce. A large selection mattered to slightly more than one in four respondents, while ease of use was important to every fourth respondent. A wide range of payment ranked fifth on the list of features.

Many customers still abandon online purchases

“The coronavirus epidemic has lifted e-commerce to an unprecedented role in Finnish everyday life, although business is still not as smooth as it could be. We first charted the Finns’ attitude to online shopping in October 2019. At the time, more than half of respondents had interrupted a purchase at the payment stage in an online store or mobile app. Now, a little more than a third of respondents had abandoned a transaction”, Tuominen says.

In the October survey, the most common reason for interrupting the payment of an online purchase was a technical error. This reason was cited by more than one in three respondents, 35 percent to be precise. The incidence of technical issues has decreased somewhat according to the recent survey. According to the results, slightly more than a quarter, or 27 percent, of respondents had abandoned a purchase because of a technical failure.

“But Finnish online stores are still plagued by a lack of choice in payment methods. Last October, more than a third of respondents reported having abandoned a purchase because they couldn’t find the payment method they wanted in the online store. Nearly as many people still mentioned the same issue in the recent survey”, Tuominen continues.

Tech company Qvik charted the Finns’ attitudes to e-commerce with a national survey in mid-April. For purposes of the survey, “e-commerce” was defined as websites and applications that sell products or services.

More than 1000 people aged 18–75 took the electronic survey. Half of the respondents were men and half women, and the sample was representative of Finland’s adult population. The electronic survey’s margin of error is 3.1 percent. The survey was implemented by Bilendi, one of the leading research service companies in the Nordics.

Illustration: Aija Malmioja

The post Survey: Corona has made online shoppers tense – half of customers report being annoyed more easily appeared first on Qvik.

When physical interaction has been replaced by digital contact during the coronavirus pandemic, the immediate winners have been companies that already had a strong digital presence. The rest are (or should be) now racing to digitalize their operations and channels as the only option to keep their business running.

Qvik recently asked consumers about their preferences regarding online shopping and how their thoughts have changed during the pandemic. According to our nationwide survey, over 37% of the respondents believed that they will keep on making more online purchases after the epidemic. Furthermore, around 35% of respondents said that, during the epidemic, they are more interested in loyalty programs than they used to be.

While customer acquisition may have been the main sore spot for many marketing and sales teams, one could say COVID-19 took care of making your digital service relevant for customers.

Once society eventually opens, will your customers continue to use your digital services?

That is a question companies and investors are asking globally. What we do know is that the situation has forced us to adopt new ways of working, purchasing, managing our businesses and spending our free time – and some of the services have succeeded in proving their value or convenience during this time.

It is likely that some of these services will stay in our new habits. Investing in building customer loyalty will make that scenario even more likely.

As an example of the huge change going on, Yle recently reported how the corona crisis has raised the popularity of online food shopping to a record high (figure). According to Yle, customer volumes for example in Kesko’s online food store K-Ruoka have been more than 800% up some weeks. We are talking about an unseen change in customer behaviour – providing a valuable opportunity for companies who are able to react quickly and invest in customer loyalty.

Image: Samuli Huttunen / Yle

Every marketing expert knows that retaining existing customers is much more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. This means that right now, companies witnessing strong growth rates in customer volumes should put extra effort on keeping the customers they are now gaining. What makes it challenging is that today’s consumers have more options than ever.

Switching from one digital service to another is effortless. That is why we are obsessed with customer loyalty – and personalized customer experience as its driver. 

If your company is among those that have already invested in digital channels in the past and are now witnessing strong growth rates in them – congratulations! Take a sip of that champagne and get back to work – because now is not the time for rest, but for investing in keeping those customers and building loyalty.

Here are some questions that can get you started:
How to do systematic habit building to become a part of your customers’ everyday life?
How to build multiple communication channels to better reach your customers?

[contact-form-7 id=”9137″ title=”Loyalty Coffee Break”]

Illustration: Niina Nissinen

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But consumers do seem to want digital loyalty programs. According to a recently published Nordic report by payment service provider Nets, one in three Finns registered with a loyalty scheme use a loyalty application.

“All too often, the digitalization of customer loyalty means switching the plastic cards and stamp coupons to your mobile”, says Qvik’s Head of Design, Matias Pietilä. “We should instead be thinking about the personal value that a digital program can create for its members, and how it could improve the communication between service providers and their customers.”

“All of a sudden, you’re a cat person”, and other observations

Last Thursday, we held an event on this subject at our office. At the event, Tallink Silja’s Club One Director Hanna Michaelsson told us how to serve more than one million loyal customers digitally, on sea and land. For her part, Musti ja Mirri’s CRM Manager Satu Puumala talked about how to build a digital customer loyalty program for people when your customers are in fact animals. We finished the night with a panel, recorded as a podcast, joined by founding partner Elias Aalto of Wolt.

In the podcast, we talk about the automation of personalization…

“We learn from artificial intelligence and automation every day but also, sometimes things happen. Like, I have a big dog and my friend has a cat. So when I started to browse the cat products and bought a present for the cat, then all of a sudden I was in the cat program – and this happens to someone using our services every week”, says Satu Puumala of Musti ja Mirri.

…the different channels for reaching customers…

“E-mail marketing might be dead somewhere, but not in our company – it’s absolutely alive and kicking. It sounds outdated and old-fashioned, but we really make an effort on personalizing and providing right content for every client segment, and see good results”, says Hanna Michaelsson of Tallink Silja.

…and the definition of customer loyalty for startups.

“We don’t really ever use the word loyalty, because in startups it’s all about retention and frequency. But I think our biggest investment in loyalty is our customer service. One of the main driving factors of Wolt’s loyalty is that we are super good in customer support”, says Wolt’s Elias Aalto.

The podcast’s other topics include collecting customer data, doubts about the usefulness of wallet functions, gamification and the weather.

Still ground to cover in the digitalization of customer loyalty

According to our Head of Design, Matias Pietilä, companies are attacking the mobile channel’s customer loyalty potential from a variety of angles, just not always very successfully. For example, the idea of the Cardu service is that users can store their loyalty cards in one app.

“These types of external loyalty-management services haven’t been a hit”, Pietilä says. “They are not very easy to find, and maybe need too much effort to adopt to break into the mainstream. For the service providers, on the other hand, they don’t offer enough possibilities for personalizing the experience.”

The use of mobile payments at the counter has been deterred by the fact that the loyalty programs have not been integrated into the payment applications. Customers need to get their loyalty cards from their wallet, which kind of defeats the convenience of paying with your phone.

Google Pay and K-Plussa point the way

The wallet applications of Apple and Google help with the adoption issue and offer features that can’t be implemented with regular apps. For instance, alongside with Google Pay it’s easy to use loyalty cards such as K-Plussa. Apple Pay delivers customer loyalty information in connection with payments as a value added service or VAS, and Google Pay has a corresponding feature called Smart Tap.

“But one can question if it makes commercial sense for a service provider to direct users away from its own app to a third-party wallet application”, Pietilä says. “Such wallet apps also have limited support in POS systems, because NFC payments have not been standardized to the same degree as chip-based payments.”

The decision to adopt MobilePay’s Bluetooth-based payment solution indicates that the S and K groups don’t want to wait around for NFC support to improve, but are willing to migrate consumers to an entirely new payment solution to solve the loyalty issue.

RIP individual customer loyalty cards?

You don’t necessarily need a separate card to identify a loyal customer. For example, you can link loyalty to the customer’s ID card or identify users by stored payment card information, with the points accumulating automatically in the background.

“From the business perspective, this raises the issue whether customers will remember their loyalties well enough without a specific card or identification step”, Pietilä says. “Some service providers offer traditional cards because of this concern.”

Finally, no payment topic without a link to PSD2: in the future, service providers can let customers pay with their loyalty accounts, whether they have physical cards or not. In the spirit of PSD2, the money would be debited directly from the customer’s account instead of a card, reducing the middleman’s cut.

Illustration: Aija Malmioja

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When we started working with Tallink Silja, their mobile strategy was in need of a makeover. The mobile booking website and application provided only an average user experience, which was reflected in less than stellar sales figures. The statistics even showed that people would rather use the desktop solution on their mobile devices than the mobile-optimized service.

“We knew how fast mobile usage was growing in general, and we knew that our services were not performing on the required level, so the decision to invest in this was based on very simple calculations”, says Tallink Silja’s Business Development Manager Argo Ohvril, who has been working with the project from the beginning.

In 2014, Tallink Silja created a far-reaching mobile strategy with the help of Qvik. The entire customer journey was mapped across different channels, and opportunities for mobile services were discovered in multiple phases of the journey. Of these, a truly mobile-first booking service was considered the most impactful commercially, so that was the first thing we implemented.

From an early stage, it was clear that mobile web would be the way to go. Nobody should have to download an app just to book a ferry trip. However, after the order has been placed, a native app can be a natural way to serve customers along their journey.

The concrete value of UX

“Our old mobile booking service actually had more features than the new one”, Argo says. In the new strategy, the functions were narrowed down to what the user actually needs, making the service simpler and nicer to use. “Now we have less functionality, but it’s much, much better than what we had before.”

Between the old and the new service, the marketing methods and investments have remained on the same level or even decreased a little. However, in just one year from the launch of the new service, the new booking service had tripled mobile revenue.

“So now I know exactly how much UX is worth”, Ohvril says.

The execution of the mobile strategy has continued since the launch of the booking service. In addition to the mobile booking service, Qvik has helped Tallink create mobile apps for Android and iOS, a service for changing bookings on the mobile and desktop web, the My Journey service for onboard information, and a digital Club One loyalty card.

“I like the integrated nature of our mobile services and the fact that everything is talking to each other”, Argo says. “What I am personally proud of is that we begun end implemented this process right. We did a lot of research before, so we knew what we were trying to build and why we were doing that. And it paid off.”

Better customer satisfaction and undeniable growth in revenue

The mobile booking service started to create value from the beginning, and continues to do so to this day. The native application also brings together several web-based services – mobile booking, check-in, booking changes and My Journey – while adding native benefits like notification support.  

“The project has also been very well thought through overall, from strategy to development, execution and customer feedback, everything is in a good loop.”

After the digital Club One card was released, app downloads increased and the app’s uninstall rate decreased, since there was a reason to keep it installed after the trip ended. The app is still in its early stages, so results are still coming in. But it is getting close to its first 200,000 downloads and new users are finding it at an increasing pace.

The app’s overall rating is very good. Ratings have been steadily over 4/5 on both platforms since publication.

Designers and developers in perfect alliance

Qvik’s main role in the Tallink Silja co-operation has been in the field of design. Though our developers have also worked on the project, it was mostly implemented by Tallink Silja’s inhouse team. Other agencies from as far as Belarus were also commissioned to support the development.

“This was a fantastic project in every sense. I was a bit worried when we put the team together – there were our own people and some people abroad, two different design companies, and we didn’t really know how well they would be working together. But everything turned out great. There haven’t been any real challenges and the results are outstanding.”

Our designers are known for working very well with developers. This time, the credit goes to Matias Pietilä, Dung Nguyen and Eeva Erkko.

“What you don’t find in so many companies is people paying attention to details, it’s not easy to achieve. When hiring it’s always a lottery – people either do pay attention or they don’t, and everybody here does”, Argo says.

Tallink My Journey tells the passengers the relevant info when they need it

An agile development culture sets requirements for designers as well. You need to find the way to create just the optimal amount of documentation and be comfortable with adjusting the plans as needed.

“Our developers really love Qvik’s design process because of the level of detail and how well everything is prepared for them. The designers are also great at solving problems on the fly – like really, really fast.”

Indeed, one key factor in the success of a project is that we keep the feedback loop as short as possible: whenever questions arise, Qvik is ready to answer without unnecessary delays.

“The project itself is something to be proud of. Even if this was a big investment, it totally paid off on every level.”

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