Let’s start with a “fun” fact!
According to a market-based research report, 80% of companies believe that they provide a “superior” customer experience. However, when the customers were asked about it, only 8% of them agreed to this fact. You can call it a “delivery gap”.
Well, we are going to talk more about this CX or customer experience in web design but before that, let’s sort out the confusion between user experience (UX) and CX. Even though it is not like that UX and CX have been introduced in the market recently, yet in many cases, some stakeholders incorrectly believe them to be the same thing! So, check out the following diagram to clear the confusion first if you have any.
As per a report by Forrester, “Unmet customer expectations are resulting in churn; the lack of digital transformation gains is translating to a loss of market share; and longstanding, durable business models are failing.” So, organizations have to embrace a creative approach to digital optimization so that the “delivery gap” is diminished and conversion rates become higher.
Great America reports that 70% of shopping experiences revolve around customers’ feelings along with the journey from being a casual onlooker to a brand promoter. So, offering adequate CX services to both recurring and new customers has become pivotal for businesses. Thus, the web design trends are evolving towards the latest buzzword, CX (customer experience) these days.
So, Why Customer Experience?
Source: marketoonist.com
Today, customers have a plethora of information available at their fingertips. Doing business remotely, purchasing overseas, or finding another service, etc. are no longer barriers. This has changed their habits of purchasing or consuming.
Every interaction with your business is a decision point today. This is why creating delightful and smooth customer experiences from the very start to the end has become almost a necessity these days. Here CX comes into the picture. In CX design, the customers’ needs at each interaction point are considered.
Source: genesys.com
The customer experience (CX) brings the following benefits to the table.
- Greater brand authority: When you offer adequate CX, building your brand’s reputation becomes easier. It will help you to reinforce your position in the global industry.
- Omnichannel customer servicing: Be it a startup or a small medium enterprise (SME) or a large enterprise, integrating customer experience processes into your business website helps you in customer servicing on multiple fronts including messaging apps, social media, and email.
- Business and stakeholder alignment: CX helps to align the business’ objectives with what the customers needs and/or wants. Interacting with business stakeholders through constant customer servicing helps to shape your brand into a customer-centric and unique entity.
- Customer feedback collection: Collecting relevant and actionable customer feedback becomes easier with CX.
How To Design Best CX For Your Website?
Well, if you can make sure your customers are at the heart of your design strategy, creating unique experiences that make your customers want to convert becomes effortless. Here is a list of some smart tips on how to design the best CX for your website.
Use Personalized Tone In Website Content
Throughout your website content, you can adopt a casual or a more personalized tone to convey your messages to your potential customers. For instance, the navigation bar, your landing page along with the product pages and blog posts should contain a friendly tone and should come off as inviting. Similarly, words such as we, you, community, and collaboration should be included in your vocabulary.
It is better if you can avoid using an overly-professional and robotic tone while writing your business website content. Give your customers the impression that your business is customer-centric with a personalized tone.
Rely On Social Proof
Anything from reviews and testimonials to customer interviews can be the social proof for your product or business. To allure recurring customers to make another purchase or to seal the deal with new audiences, this social proof is remarkably effective. Such social proofs will add a lot of trust and credibility to your brand.
Source: mopinion.com
You will find a handful of options of different platforms that can help you to shape customer comments and reviews into such content that can be highlighted on your website’s landing page.
As you can see in this image, this feedback form has an innovative touch with all the smileys representing how a user or customer feels about your website. If the customers are happy about your website services, they can give a ‘smiling’ smiley as their feedback. If they are not at all satisfied with your services, the ‘unhappy’ smiley is there for them. You can do it for your website too.
When you provide proof of your service and product quality from your existing customers, people will start relying on your brand. They will start considering you as a trustworthy provider of services and goods.
Provide Straightforward Support
Make sure that you are providing a straightforward way to website visitors to get in touch with your support agents from any point in the sitemap. For instance, suppose a customer is reading one of your blog posts and while reading he/she wants to contact a support agent, you have to ensure they can do so within two or fewer clicks.
Alternatively, you can add this support page to your website’s footer or you can show it in the navigation bar for added clarity. You can enjoy a healthy user engagement rate when you make it easy for people to reach out to you.
Make The Purchase Process Easy
Whether you rely on one-time purchases or recurring subscriptions, you need to make sure the checkout process is very simple. Customers don’t like the approach when you waste their valuable time by requiring multiple identity checks, confirmations, and additional purchase information before allowing them to purchase your products.
So, what should you do? Well,
- Test the entire checkout process periodically to figure out how many clicks it requires to finish the purchase process.
- Gauge how meddlesome the identity checks, additional offers, and popups are.
The easier you make the process of purchasing products for your visitors, the better it would be for your business. If you can offer a stellar customer experience throughout a visitor’s journey, as brownie points, they can recommend your services or products among their social circles as well.
Make Sure To Follow-up On The Purchases
First, congratulations for successfully converting your visitors into potential customers! But you’ll be doing a huge mistake if you think customers’ journey with you ends here.
Now that the customer has trusted your services with their money and time, the customer servicing should ramp up. You can follow up on your customers’ purchases through omnichannel customer experience or email surveys depending on the niche you operate in.
It is advisable not to let the customer support end as soon as a visitor converts into a customer. Instead, extend the proverbial olive branch and do follow up on the purchases. It will boost your credibility as a customer-centric brand.
Periodically, Iterate On Your Website Design
To implement this phase successfully, make sure the customer support department is constantly collecting and analyzing customer feedback. According to the feedback you are getting, you should make the necessary changes on your website design.
Also, you can extrapolate useful comments and feedback in regards to your website and/or business for later use. It will help you to offer something game-changing, innovative, and exciting to your audience in terms of refining your CX.
Wrapping Up
Well, adopting practices that enhance the CX will undoubtedly boost the return on investment (ROI) for your business, and provide a steady foundation upon which your brand can continue to grow. To offer an intriguing CX, always try to be up to date on Voice of Customer and customer-centricity trends. You need to make sure that wherever your customers find you, it’s the best representation of your brand.
Want to learn more?
Want to get an industry-recognized Course Certificate in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic? Online UX courses from the Interaction Design Foundation can provide you with industry-relevant skills to advance your UX career. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research – Methods and Best Practices are some of the most popular courses. Good luck on your learning journey!
