Ideas For Improving Customer Experience
Customer experience is like a date. If the first impression is good, there may be more interactions to follow.
If your customer experience doesn’t live up to expectations, you shouldn’t be surprised that your conversion rates don’t look quite as satisfying as expected.
You have plenty of opportunities to delight your visitors and just as many to put them off forever.
As the owner of a website, you’re likely to be naturally biased somewhat when it comes to evaluating the customer experience that you provide.
Data, on the other hand, won’t be biased. This is why you should take a closer look at it, both qualitative and quantitative.
So, how can you improve the customer experience on your website? Let’s go through some good practices, terrible mistakes and some examples. We’re happy to share our best ideas for improving customer experience.
Why customer experience is important for your website
Providing your visitors with flawless customer experience is crucial for your business. The more hassle-free of an experience your visitors have, the greater the chance that they will return or recommend your website further. It goes without saying that this also decreases the number of complaints your clients may have.\ \ Good customer experience has a positive impact not only on customer satisfaction but also on customer loyalty and recommendations. According to a report from PWC, almost 73% of customers say that their experience influences their attachment to the brand.
No matter if you run an ecommerce store, a SaaS business or even simply use a website as your business card, the rules are still quite similar. Every interaction is a chance to make someone stay. If you put some extra effort in creating top-notch customer experience, it’s sure to prove fruitful. Dimension Data’s report shows that 84% of companies who work on improving CX experience an increase in revenues.
How to provide a good customer experience on your website
A website’s customer experience is like a marriage between customer service and a user’s experience. To deliver a satisfying customer experience, you need to make sure that both of these elements are well-optimized.
Below you’ll find some ideas for improving customer experience on your own website:
Make the most of customer feedback
Apart from helping you understand your customers better, their feedback can draw your attention to those elements of your website that require action.
If someone decided to let you know about their issues, it’s definitely worth looking into. Some of the suggestions may even encourage you to perform an in-depth analysis of your website.
There are different methods of collecting customer feedback. Some of the most popular ones include:
- Review websites – You can invite your customers to share their thoughts on websites like G2 or Capterra.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – A very simple and commonly used method. It’s all about one short question: On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this website to a friend?
- Social media – Be sure to monitor all activity related to your brand. A universal social media inbox may come in handy.
Oh, and one more tip: not sure which stage of the user journey needs improvements? You can implement multiple levels of in-the-moment feedback (e.g. pre-, during and post-purchase).
Social proof is not a buzzword
Social proof on your website can convince even the sceptical visitors. When you add this part to your online brand management strategy, it can help you make a better first impression and, ultimately, increase conversions.
So, how do you tackle this? Start from the easiest solution: you can add customer reviews on your website. See how we do this at LiveSession:
Another easy, but an effective solution would be to mix up your client’’s testimonials with those from industry leading experts. This method was successfully used by FirstSiteGuide.
Take care of user experience
The aesthetic-usability effect is a real thing – users may tolerate inconveniences better if the design is pretty. They won’t forgive you for everything, though. Good customer experience is much more than just good looks.
Results from HubSpot’s research confirm this thesis: only 10% of respondents consider the appearance itself as the most important factor in the design of a website, while a whopping 76% agree that the success of a design amounts simply to the ease of finding the necessary information.
There are a few more points for you to take into consideration:
- Highlight your offer. No one wants to spend too much time trying to find out what your services or products actually are. Good customer experience is based on the principle of least effort.
- Remember that the user is there to achieve their goal and become a customer. Use visual and verbal clues to help them proceed through the sales funnel and take the desired actions on your website. Using the right words is just as important as a well-designed layout.
- Speaking of content, make it scannable. Torrey Podmajersky, an acclaimed UX writing expert, suggests using headers that are ideally shorter than 40 characters. It’s also good to divide text into shorter blocks for better readability.
- Test your design on both desktop and mobile. Responsive web design is no longer a luxury, it’s a must-have. It’s no longer just a customer experience requirement – it’s also crucial for SEO. Starting September 2020, Google will switch entirely to mobile-first indexing.
- Keep in mind that colors matter. Put your personal preferences aside and dive into color psychology, no matter how weird it may sound to you. Each different color has some psychological impact and can influence the customer experience. For example, if your website is covered with red buttons, they may appear like alerts that cause potential clients to exit your website without taking any further actions.
Identify bottlenecks
All the insights you need are already there in your data. Digging into it is the best action you can take.
We know that analytics can be overwhelming at first. Luckily, you can make it easier with tools to help you understand your users’ behavior. Your users won’t always tell you directly that something is wrong. What’s more, tracking customer behavior can help you catch them before they fall! Qualitative analytics will help you find hidden issues.
RocketLink, one of our clients, is a brilliant example. For instance, they found out through session replays that their customers are using the wrong format of the Facebook Pixel ID. Without this method, they wouldn’t even be able to identify this major issue. If you’d like to learn more, you’re probably going to enjoy their case study.
If you don’t identify such potential issues regularly, finding and fixing them later may become a struggle, and your business could be hit hard before then.
By solving specific problems and challenges faced by customers on your website, you will minimize the risk of putting the audience off altogether. Tools like LiveSession can help you get back on track.
Strive for spotless customer service
Give your clients a chance to contact you directly from the page that they are on. When they encounter a problem, they need help right away. Making help easily accessible is one of the best ways to improve customer experience.
The solution? A live chat widget. This way, they can instantly turn to you with additional questions, instead of exiting your website when they can’t find what they are looking for. By providing flawless customer support at every stage of the customer journey, you will make a huge step towards building trust and loyalty.
In an era when having a competitive offer is no longer enough, it turns out that an omnichannel customer service strategy is the key to success. This also includes customer support on your website.
Work on a customer-centric company culture
Statistics speak for themselves: less than 40% of customers feel that employees they interact with understand their needs.
Empathy doesn’t just happen. If you don’t train your team about your values, your website won’t reflect them either.
By advocating a client-centric mindset within your company and creating a special customer experience strategy (that is widely shared with the team), everyone will be made conscious about their role in the overall customer experience. Here are some actionable tips to make that happen:
- Share customer insights within the company. For example, a collaboration between your customer support agents and the UX team is sure to bring good results.
- Measure your efforts and the effects of your work. This way, the employees will be able to see how what they do actually makes a difference.
- Facilitate direct contact with customers. If it’s not possible, watching session recordings of users interacting with the website is the bare minimum.
Find the golden mean between personalization and automation
As much as customer experience is a mix between user experience and customer service, it’s also a mix between personalization and automation. You can automate many processes, especially repetitive tasks, but you can’t automate everything.
Chatbots and automated emails can make the experience smoother, as long as everything goes according to a certain scenario. Don’t forget about adding that human touch to your website and responding (preferably in person, when possible) to any feedback that you receive.
These are some of our best ideas for improving customer experience. What do you think? Maybe there’s something you would add? Let us know in the comments!