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The web is a beautiful thing. It's full of information, entertainment and commerce that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Web design is what makes the experience on your site more appealing to visitors by improving usability, readability and functionality. In this blog post we'll explore the importance of customer experience and why it will influence sales, repeat business, and brand equity.
It's important to know how web design affects the customer experience with your company as well as making it easier for people to find what they're looking for online. Remember, your website optimization is a perpetual task, but continually monitoring and improving will always help increase your conversions.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is the sum of all the emotional moments customers have during their dealings with your business. It’s a pretty easy concept—you can probably remember a time you felt frustrated by browsing a site with poor UX vs a site like Nike or Apple. How did each site make you feel? Which site would you prefer to use again?
Or have you ever tried purchasing a product on a mobile website, but the add to cart or checkout buttons were had to tap or couldn’t be accessed, or links always opened in new tabs?
Or maybe, you’ve been frustrated because you spent all day on hold trying to reach customer service, or even find out how to contact customer service in the first place. While customer experience and customer journey are two very different things, they're closely related. To understand CX, you must understand customer journey.
What is Customer Journey?
Customer journey is comprised of all steps and interactions a customer experiences when they first engage with your business, all the way to post-purchasing.
How are you greeting new customers to your business? Are you guiding your customer through a sales funnel, or is all the information just listed up front so they are forced to digest everything at once and make their own decisions?
By using UX strategy and design to improve this entire journey, you give your customers a positive browsing experience, which in turn will increase the chance of repeat purchases, and even word of mouth referrals.
Customer journey mapping is a crucial step in increasing sales conversions and establishing meaningful connections with customers.
What's the Difference Between UX & CX?
UX and CX are often confused, but have very different meanings. Customer experience is also not to be confused with customer service! A customer's user experience is created through a series of interactions that happen before, during, and after purchase. We use it to enhance website interactions, thereby improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Think about site ease of use on different devices, organized, navigable content on pages, and providing relevant text and graphic information. Ask yourself, "how easy is it, really, to complete an objective on my site?"
On the other hand, to reiterate, customer experience focuses on how customer's feel about a company and their interaction with them. For some tips for improving website UX, read this article.
Why You Should Care About All This
UX impacts your website and its customer journey, which will be used to define the customer experience. You want to create a meaningful, long-lasting relationship with your customer because that is the start of building your brand.
Make them feel secure during their browsing experience and comfortable with how things were handled throughout this transaction. Make them feel like the product or service they received was worth their money and time.
In the digital age of 2021, with all the tools at our disposal, there are amazing businesses, small and large, that are providing excellent customer experiences. And those are the ones that are building brand equity and turning customers into loyal fans.
UX and CX will positively impact your sales conversions, and it’s something that should be done regularly. Unfortunately, you can’t just optimize your site once and be done with it. User demands and expectations, as well as your industry, are changing constantly, and in order to evolve your website to meet those changes, the best way to go about doing that is to pair UX with analytics. To dive deeper into that subject, check out our article on growing sales with website analytics.
Ways to Improve CX
Improving CX can't be done by changing a single variable—it's a collection of decisions that work together to deliver a smooth browsing experience, one in which the user doesn't run into friction while completing their objective.
To get started, here are common strategies you can think about to improve customer engagement for your visitors:
- Increase the visibility of products with better imagery, and using appropriate product placement techniques—highlighting them at the top or placing them in logical groupings to make browsing easier.
- Optimize images (cropping and file size) so they look great on any screen size and load quickly.
- Provide one page navigation so it's easier for users who don't want or have time to search through pages of content.
- Use clear language—keep your copy legible, simple, and conversational.
- Give visitors access to all of the necessary contact information without having to go through unnecessary pages.
To Sum Up
Web design is a form of creative art that focuses on elemental parts of the internet and how it can be used to provide a positive experience to the customer. Whether it's through social media, search engine optimization or just website navigation, web design plays an integral part in how people interact with your business.
Web designers must make sure that these experiences are cohesive, appropriate and customer-centered.
They should discover what would make these customers happy and move seamlessly through all touch points, no matter how small, and throughout all the communication channels.
How is your current customer journey and what customer experience are you trying to achieve now? Do your customers have the tools they need to become raving fans?
Do they have everything they could possibly need at their fingertips? If not, it might be time for a website redesign. When you're ready to create a more engagement website, send us a message and we'll be happy to offer some smart solutions.
Let's improve your customer experience
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