Consumers find e-commerce most difficult to deal with, shows study

The study aimed to assess how easy or difficult it is for consumers to do business with companies in these sectors and identified areas for improvement. The report focused on identifying customer pain points in their interactions with brands and offers recommendations to alleviate these challenges.

According to the report, customers experience higher stress levels due to various factors such as iterations, ineffective messaging, lack of visibility and a general sense of lack of control. “These factors can contribute to a negative customer experience and lead to dissatisfaction. The report seeks to shed light on these pain points and provide recommendations for companies to address them and improve the customer experience. By reducing stress and frustration in customer interactions, companies can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy,” said Anil Pillai, the director of Terrangi Consultancy.

The report suggested that brands can reduce customer stress by providing high visibility of outcomes, making it easier for customers to see and understand the results of their interactions with the company.

“The questions that we asked were how easy is it for consumers to do business with the different organisations in India? How much is the ease of doing business for the common consumers? How easy is it for customers to deal with banks, retail organisations, insurance companies and e-commerce companies,” Pillai said.

He added, “There are stories every day on social media where people say they want to return something or are not getting their money back. These are common issues. Consumers are spending their hard-earned money but the brands are causing pains for them.”

Sapatnekar added that they also looked at the technical part such as what brands do to improve their performance and related things. “But we mostly looked into the consumer’s perspective,” Sapatnekar said.

Pillai said consumers find e-commerce out of the four industries that we have looked into — retail, banking, insurance and e-commerce — the most difficult for consumers to deal with.

Pillai added, “E-commerce is digital and it should have been easy for the people but it isn’t. This is because in the digital ecosystem, consumers do not know what they should do when there is a problem.”

The report further said that during the Covid-19 pandemic, everybody was very happy with the digital journeys. “Everybody was very happy going online. Buying grocery, buying insurance, availing banking facilities etc, but post-Covid. There has been a significant amount of fatigue. And this clearly reflected in the study. People now want hybrid journeys. This is also because in a shop, consumers get an assisted journey where the shop assistant is helping you to make a choice. Thereby releasing your anxiety but in a digital world, consumers have to make their own decisions. This adds to significant anxiety amongst customers,” Pillai said.

The report said compared to e-commerce and insurance, banking is comparatively easier digitally. “Banking has been going digital for a very long time now. So, banks have in that sense had a head start when it comes to basic simple, day-to-day transactions. Covid has only helped in the sense that banks have been forced to relocate their journeys. Because the backup of having a relationship manager to go and fix the problem was not available during the shutdowns. So, in that sense, there has been improvement in the journeys. However, even in banking, the customer support function remains very painful for the customers,” said Sapatnekar.