5 ways to improve your customer website experience
5 ways to improve your customer website experience
Customer experience is the most important thing you can invest in to ensure long-term success for your eCommerce store.
More than anything else, customers prioritize a great experience when deciding who to shop with. In fact, 58% of customers say they’ll pay more for a guaranteed good service.
Giving your customers the best customer experience whenever they shop with you ensures they’re more likely to return into repeat clients, and advocates for your brand. One report by Dimension Data even found 92% of companies committed to improving their CX saw an increase in customer loyalty, while 84% saw an increase in revenue.
The question is, how do you deliver the online consumer experience your audience is looking for?
Start with these simple methods.
1. Personalize the Shopping Experience
The easiest, and most powerful way to transform the online customer experience journey, is through personalization. Around 80% of consumers say they’re more likely to do business with a company offering personalized experiences. Plus, personalization increases impulse purchases and average order value significantly.
Personalizing the shopping experience allows you to present the products and solutions most likely to benefit your customers to them as soon as they arrive on your site. Today’s ecommerce tools make it easy to create dynamic pages which adapt according to the needs of your individual customer.
For instance, with NowDialogue, you can add personalization to virtually every stage of the customer journey easily. You could start by changing what customers see on your homepage according to the products they’ve looked at in the past, and follow up with:
Personalized product bundle recommendations
Relevant “People Also Bought” recommendations in the checkout
Custom post-purchase recommendations to increase upsell opportunities
The more personal the interaction, the more your customer wants to spend. Around 40% of customers say they’re likely to spend more when presented with a personalized experience.
2. Design Your Site Around the Customer Journey
While personalizing the shopping experience is a fantastic way to enhance customer experience, it’s also worth thinking about how customers interact with your store during their journey.
All it takes is a few broken pages or a clunky shopping experience to put your customers off working with your company in future. In fact, 1 in 3 customers will leave a company they love after just one bad experience on their website. Plus, 77% of customers leave a site without buying if they encounter an error on that website.
Look at your customer journey map and consider the various steps your customers take to find products, add them to their cart, and complete the checkout process. Make sure you remove everything and anything which could cause friction in the purchasing process. This means eliminating:
- Complex navigational systems
- Confusing pages
- Unnecessary form fields
Any factor which detracts from your digital customer experience should be removed or fixed.
3. Prioritize Fast Loading Times
One of the main factors influencing the online customer experience for today’s digital shoppers, is speed. Customers are rapidly transitioning into the online world for retail because buying products online is often easier and quicker than visiting a store in person. With this in mind, it’s important to ensure your site is as agile as your customer expects.
Remember, a 1-second delay in loading times can be enough to cause a 16% reduction in customer satisfaction, and a 7% decrease in conversions.
Start by making sure any of the apps or tools you use to enhance customer satisfaction are as lightweight as possible, so you don’t overwhelm your site. It’s also worth ensuring your hosting provider is giving you enough bandwidth to manage all the customer data you want to collect.
Other ways to ensure your customer journeys are as fast and seamless as possible include:
- Compressing images: Compressing images on your website can reduce the amount of time it takes for them to load.
- Using a content delivery network: A CDN stores information for your website on servers closer to your customer, to help reduce HTTP requests.
- Run speed tests: Every online business should regularly run speed tests to check their pages are operating as quickly as possible.
Consider taking a test run through your website from the perspective of a customer, paying attention to every area where load time suffers. Remember, the entire journey should be as seamless as possible, regardless of whether your customers are visiting a mobile site, mobile app, or desktop page.
4. Upgrade Your Site Aesthetic
There’s more to reducing customer churn and enhancing customer experience than designing an attractive website. However, you’re more likely to generate negative feedback from many customers if your site doesn’t look the part.
Customers expect brands to have high-quality, modern websites which adhere to the latest design trends. Even if you have the best marketing strategies in the world, you may struggle to delight customers if your ecommerce site looks too old fashioned.
Compare the appearance of your online business to some of the top-ranked companies in your industry. Where does your site lack visual appeal? How can you use imagery and design changes to improve customer sentiment? Remember, an attractive site isn’t just more likely to make a strong emotional connection with your customers. Well-designed web pages also offer a better user experience too.
Choosing the right visual hierarchy for your content, structuring text so it’s easy to read, and using images to add context all give your audience a more straightforward online experience. When you’re analyzing your business website, think about:
- Visual strain: How comfortable will users feel looking at your content? Are you using the correct design principles of contrast, balance, and color psychology? Is your font large enough to read on all devices, and is everything legible?
- Brand image: To make a strong emotional connection with your audience, you should be using the same brand assets throughout your entire website. Each page should use the same consistent color scheme, and display your logo clearly.
- Accessibility: Think about the needs of people with visual disabilities. Is your site organized in a way that all users can enjoy the experience? How does the desktop version of your site compare to the mobile site in terms of aesthetics?
5. Enhance Your Website Content
Content is often considered to be one of the most crucial tools for attracting customers to your online store. The right long form content can demonstrate thought leadership, highlight the benefits of your company, and improve your chances of ranking in the search engines.
However, content has an impact on user experience too. Creating the right FAQ content and guidelines for your store will not only create more touch points between your company and consumers, it will also make it easier for them to make a purchase. Having a section on your website where you cover topics like shipping and delivery rates, or refunds can increase sales, and significantly improve consumer trust.
If you want to create a positive customer experience for everyone who visits your store, reduce your bounce rate, and improve your chances of customers returning to your website, start creating a content strategy. Some of the types of content you’ll need to think about include:
- Long-form content: Guides, reviews and articles are an excellent way to build brand loyalty and develop stronger customer relationships. Find out what kind of questions customers are usually asking in your industry, and create content to solve their issues.
- Helpful content: Relevant content about your production processes, refund policies, returns requirements, and anything else your customers might need to know will make it less likely they’ll need to reach out to you for guidance. You could even use tools like Dialogue to create custom content for different users based on the demographic data, helping to guide them to the right products or services in store.
- Website copy: Don’t forget to consider the copy throughout the rest of your website too. Everything from your homepage to your “About us” page should help you build relationships with your target audience. Your copy should offer an insight into your company’s personality and values, as well as the benefits you can deliver to customers.
Make sure you proof-read any content on your website before you publish it. Even the slightest grammatical error or spelling issue can harm your business reputation, or cause confusion which leads to a bad customer experience.
6. Upgrade Customer Service
One of the biggest problems many people have with the ecommerce customer journey, is the lack of support they get during the purchasing cycle. Although shopping online can be convenient, it’s also a huge headache when something goes wrong, and you can’t access the help you need.
With that in mind, think about how you can provide more support to your audience when they need it most. There are a few ways to bolster the ecommerce user journey with great service, such as:
Installing a chatbot: Chatbots can quickly respond to customer questions at any time of day, so they don’t have to wait around waiting for an email response. If you’ve already got plenty of information about your store and products you can use to populate a chatbot’s knowledgebase, it doesn’t take much time or effort to implement one of these tools
Create a contact page: Throughout the buying process, your customers might encounter issues they might not be able to address themselves. Creating a content page with information on how your customers can reach you on digital channels (like social media and email), as well as over the phone will have a profound impact on brand trust.
Try live chat: If you have a slightly larger team of professionals working with your ecommerce brand, or your store is growing, implementing live chat can be an excellent way to communicate with your audience in real-time, and give them the peace of mind they need when making a purchase.
Today’s companies need a lot more than just a valid email address to enhance the overall customer experience. The more you can assist your customers in reaching out to you, the more likely you are to achieve your business goals.
7. Improve Your Product Pages
One of the most important tools for any ecommerce website is the product page. It’s where your customer does a significant amount of their research before making a purchase. Unfortunately, a lot of companies fail to provide the right amount of information on their products.
If you want to increase your Average Order Value, and convince your customers that your products are right for them, upgrading your product pages can be a good way to get started. Try to use these pages to answer any questions you think your customers might have about your product.
Your pages should include:
Plenty of pictures of your products from different angles
Information about ingredients or materials
A complete description of the benefits of the item
Ratings of your product left by other customers
Information on how to use the product
Videos showcasing the product (if possible)
You can also improve your chances of an average higher order value on the product page by suggesting other items customers typically buy alongside the product. For instance, add a carousel to the bottom of the page showing some of the most popular bundle combinations.
8. Simplify the Checkout Process
One of the main reasons customers spend so much time shopping online these days is the convenience of being able to browse through products and purchase items anywhere, without having to move from the sofa. However, there are still a number of ecommerce websites out there that haven’t mastered the art of a smooth checkout process.
When exploring the customer journey process, it’s worth remembering a complex checkout can be enough to lead to higher cart abandonment rates for your stores. Something as small as adding too many form fields for your customers to fill out before they can complete their transaction could be enough to destroy your profit margin.
When working on the digital customer experience, focus on making the checkout as simple as possible. Remove any fields asking for information you don’t need, and try to avoid sending customers to a new window or tab to enter their checkout details.
You can also improve the checkout experience by allowing customers to use a “guest checkout” option when they don’t want to create an account, and suggesting product add-ons within the cart itself, so they don’t have to click out of the cart to find something they’ve missed.
The more streamlined your checkout process, the more your conversion rates will grow.
9. Gather and Act on Customer Feedback
Finally, one of the best ways to improve customer experience consistently and effectively on any ecommerce store, is to listen to your target audience. Implementing tools which allows your business to collect reviews, testimonials, and feedback will help you to keep your finger on the pulse of your users’ needs. There are countless apps out there to help you gather feedback from clients today.
If you’re struggling to convince new customers to leave reviews for your business, you could always consider offering them a free discount or free shipping in exchange for their comments. The more information you can collect from your target audience, the more likely you are to improve your Net Promoter Score, and your brand reputation.
Not only does customer feedback give you an insight into the customer mindset of your target audience, but it can be an excellent tool for marketing too. Reviews are a fantastic source of social proof, which you can display on your site to highlight your exemplary customer experience. This can reduce customer churn, and help to boost sales and conversions.
When collecting feedback from customers, remember to:
· Make it simple: Make it as easy as possible for your users to leave a review. When they make a purchase, create a custom “thank you” page asking for a five-star rating, or a message about their purchasing or service experience.
· Collect different insights: You can use different tools to collect insights from various touch points in the customer journey. For instance, an automated system can allow you to ask for reviews after a customer uses a self service tool or speaks to one of your agents. You can also use social listening to collect more feedback from social media.
· Respond to all feedback: Don’t just collect information from customers, use it to constantly improve customer experience. Listen to the negative comments customers have about your store, and find ways to fix their problems. Thank your clients for their comments, and show them you’re willing to do anything to enhance the customer experience.
Go the Extra Mile for Great Customer Experiences
Ultimately, today’s customers don’t decide which companies they’re going to buy from based on feature sets or pricing alone. More often than not, it’s the experience you can give your target audience which determines whether you’ll make the sale.
Understanding how to define your customer journey pain points and eliminate them for your target audience is one of the best steps you can take in improving your profitability.
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