How Brands Can Avoid Customer Frustrations Online This Holiday Season

With holiday shopping beginning earlier each year, now is the time for brands to identify and understand their customers’ behavior online to stay competitive during the busiest time for retailers. A new study indicated that six out of 10 consumers will mainly shop online this holiday season, and more than half plan to start before Halloween to avoid potential supply chain disruptions.

As the volume of online shoppers starts to increase, e-commerce sites will need to evaluate the functionality and ease of their online stores. Reports show 88 percent of consumers say they will not return to a website after only having a single bad experience, and one of the best indicators of a poor online shopping occasion is when a consumer starts "rage clicking."

The Importance of Identifying 'Rage Clicks'  

Rage clicks can be defined as incessant clicking in a very short time span, and occur when a user struggles to perform a certain function on a website or get a mobile application to work properly — inevitably causing frustration and pushing consumers away from that specific brand. Rage clicks can ensue from a number of factors, including messages being slow to load, browser issues, misleading buttons, broken elements, dead links, certain bugs and design flaws, etc.

On top of indicating that there are errors within an e-commerce website, rage clicks also reveal to brands that shoppers are receiving a poor user experience when visiting their online store. With more than 50 percent of the consumer population shopping online this upcoming holiday season, brands that wish to increase their revenue and customer pool will need to quickly identify where their customers are experiencing rage clicks, why and where it occurred on the company’s website, and how it impacted their buying decisions.

How to Understand Online Consumer Behaviors

Since the factors that cause a rage click event are impossible to evade altogether and can happen at a rapid pace, brands looking to have a competitive advantage during the holiday season can deploy a behavior analytics platform that provides both user recording and event tracking. While traditional analytics platforms that provide one of these capabilities are being used across the industry, brands that possess both will be able to identify poor user experience in real time and repair customer issues immediately.

Additionally, brands that hold the capabilities of both event tracking and user recording will be able to further pinpoint if a certain rage click is taking place multiple times, if it’s in a certain country, city or area, and if it’s happening on a specific browser. With these capabilities, retailers are also able to detect if there are any rage click anomalies — which occurs when a consumer experiences a rage click at a time that doesn’t seem to fit the usual pattern — and allows them to quickly react and fix the problem immediately, further providing retailers the abilities needed to improve their online operations.

Poor user experience is costly for anyone involved, from developers and marketers to customer associates and support teams. As shoppers increase their online purchases, brands will need to optimize their websites and mobile applications to withstand the upcoming onset of users. By identifying rage clicks, understanding their inception and how they're affecting consumer buying habits, retailers will be able to stand out amongst the masses and have a successful holiday season.

Petr Janosik is the co-founder and CEO of Smartlook, a provider of session recording and behavioral analytics tools.