8 Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience

Mike Jones

October 26, 2016

8 Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience

The Importance of Customer Experience

Often overlooked, Customer Experience is one of the main factors that contributes to the success of your brand. It is as important as your digital marketing strategies, website usability and, of course, product quality. In other words, you need to identify the means to offer your clients a satisfying and entertaining experience. If they find navigating your website to be simple and enjoyable, they are more likely to come back and eventually buy from you. Today we will take a look at 8 ways to improve this experience and use it to convert better.

1. Increase Website Speed

If your website moves too slowly, your customers will get bored and frustrated and go somewhere else. One of the biggest deal breakers is not represented by your range of products, prices or competition, but the easiness with which people can start using your site and browse through its pages. And if this doesn’t convince you, remember that site speed is one of Google’s criteria for SEO. It wins you points and puts you in a relevant position in Google searches.

2. Go Mobile

Experts in digital marketing and SEO cannot emphasize enough the importance of your website being scalable and usable on mobile devices. According to recent studies, two-thirds of Americans use their smartphones to access the internet not only for entertainment purposes but for shopping and service contracting. The rest of the world follows this trend as well. And Google also added the site’s availability on mobile devices among its SEO criteria.

If you want to stay ahead and keep your customers happy, you need to make their mobile experience fast, efficient and complete, allowing them to browse your website, read your content, purchase products and interact with your brand.

3. Stop Discouraging Your Customers

Take your time and browse the Internet, taking special interest in your own competitors. Note down all the things that you experience and feel when you begin browsing similar websites. Is there a login process that people need to go through? Is it necessary and if it is, is it easy? Do you use complicated, long and obnoxious signup forms that make people get bored fast? Do you use contact forms that ask for more personal information than is necessary?

A/B testing is one of the best ways to check out your signup forms, login process, contact forms and landing page experience. Once you understand what your customers want from your website, incorporate their feedback into your upgrading efforts. You will be rewarded with better conversions for your efforts.

4. Ask Your Customers For Feedback

Starting with the way you display your products in the catalog and ending with the way you thank you them for shopping from you, customer experience can cover a very wide area. You can tweak your website and use split testing for everything. But nothing compares to actually asking your clients what they really want. Over 90% of customers will never make a purchase from you again if they feel unhappy with the experience.

Use polls and satisfaction surveys to get first-hand information and feedback from your users. Make sure you further incorporate their reasonable advice into your website/marketing strategy. Also, make sure you always publish the polls and surveys’ results. This improves the company’s transparency, increases website views and compels customers to share the results with their social media networks.

5. Trigger Users’ Memories

Have your tech team upgrade your website so users remember what they liked and what they purchased the last time they visited. Once a visitor comes by a second or a third time, he will feel appreciated and valued if he is welcomed by a short history related to content, products, and info that appealed to him the last time. If a customer is already sold on a product, they will have a more positive experience (and convert better) if they doesn’t have to browse page after page that attempt to up-sell the new visitors.

6. Use In-App Messaging

While email marketing still works, people usually have their inboxes flooded with unrequested offers, newsletters and goodwill messages, all meant to push them into making a purchase. Push notifications are also frowned upon heavily, as they can and will annoy customers and make them go away. In-app messaging, on the other hand, is a friendlier, less aggressive and more engaging way to keep your customers close and feeling valued without the “harassment” dose.

In-app dynamic messaging is timely, efficient and more relevant. By all means, useush notifications and mass emails as a part of your marketing mix – with an emphasis on mix. However, if they are all you use, you will be effectively pushing your customers to send you into the Spam folder.

7. Include Customers’ Reviews

If you know that customers’ reviews are 12 times more trusted than the company’s marketing and advertising campaign, then you know what you have to do. Moreover, 86% of customers consider other peoples’ reviews as an essential step in their purchase decision-making process, while 56% of online shoppers especially search for websites that include products/company reviews.

This is a tricky and double-edged sword. Some reviews might say things you don’t want to hear about your products, let alone be seen by other customers. The trick here is to answer all negative feedback in a personal and friendly manner. You will improve Customer Experience while listening to what verified purchasers had to say.

8. Offer Live Chat

Did you ever use such live chat boxes and receive no answer for hours? That’s not the way to do it. If your business is large enough, however, having a live chat on your website with professionals on the other end, increases users’ positive experience and converts amazingly. People can ask you questions about your products without browsing endless FAQ pages. And they will he happy not having to wait for you to answer the phone or an email. Moreover, they can be convinced to buy a certain product if the interaction with your customer support specialist was satisfactory.

We’d Love To Hear Your Comments!

These were just a few tips on how to increase your customers’ levels of satisfaction and improve their experience. Do you use other methods? What strategies did you implement?

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