The customer experience is the perception a customer made of your brand as a whole on the bases of their interactions at different stages of customer journey, including pre-purchase, purchasing process and post-purchase interactions. The customer experience is also referred to as CX and usually businesses have a dedicated CX manager who is responsible for maintaining and enhancing the customer experience across all customer facing channels. When it comes to the business website the customer experience become even more important, as in case of a website-based interaction there is no sales staff or any other employee to advocate about your brand, products, services or such stuff. In fact your website is the only tool that you can use to address all problems and fulfill all needs of the customers in order to encourage them to take whatever action you want them to take and convert. A website conversion is a specific and most beneficial action that you want your customers to take when they land on your website, it is usually making an online purchase or filling in a contact form which is also known as a lead form. Businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE focus a lot on their corporate websites and their online brand image. As the majority of the customers tend to look up in the internet about the product/service or business before making a decision, this makes your corporate website even more important.
A great and satisfactory customer experience help you converting more visitors into customers or leads. Whereas a poor or below average customer experience will not only reduce your sales but it will also negatively impact your brand image and brand reputation. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE the competition is very high, a customer can find hundreds of businesses by a few taps on their smartphone, it is extremely important to stand out of the crowd and build a strong online presence. Where businesses invest heavily in customer experience and customer satisfaction solutions, they often doesn’t pay much attention to their corporate websites unless you are selling online via e-Commerce. In reality these day’s most of the customers search in Google to find out about a brand or product/service before contacting the sales rep. So, for most of your potential customers your website would be the first touch point. That is why it will help you set up your business’s first impression. As the saying goes ‘first impression is the last impression’ it is pretty much true, the first impression has huge influence on customer’s perception, and it is extremely difficult to revert its impact. That is why you must have to have a positive first impression. The websites who succeed in making delivering satisfactory experience are tend to have more sales and conversions. In this blog we will discuss how customer experience can help boosting your website conversions and setting up a positive first impression.
Good Customer Experience: Engaging Content
A good customer experience ensures the customers and visitors can have easy access to the information on the website. However, will be landing on your website must be seeking some information. No one will search for something, click on a link in the search and directly make a purchase or fill in the form. The customers need to consume some information and then they will make up their mind. That is why easy access to information is crucial for customer experience and if your website is providing quick and easy access to the information your conversion rate will rise. Businesses often made a very common mistake, which is to publish a lot of content, images, videos and graphics, however, in reality if a page is too dense most people will get confused or get bored. So, your website should be able to communicate the brand message, the value proposition and the important key points that are necessary to take a decision. Avoid describing everything in details and writing long essays, in fact the bullet points are more effective than a three or four paragraph essay. That is why it is crucial to provide to the point, easy-to-understand and short content on your website along with graphics, visuals, picture and videos to maximize the customer engagements. Offering engaging content is the best way to boost your website conversions.
Good Customer Experience: Accessibility and Intuitive UI
A good customer experience starts with easy accessibility and intuitive UI (user interface). In fact the UI and UX (user experience)/CX (customer experience) are closely related to each other. Most of the websites lack sufficient accessibility features. The prime goal of accessibility is to make your website and content accessible for all types of users, this is not only limited to the most common accessibility options, such as screen readers, font size adjusting, magnifiers, color scheme selector and responsiveness. But it also expands to the content and media you are publishing on your website and how easy and accessible that content is. Furthermore the accessibility also includes the information structure the navigation and accessing to the features that your website is offering. This all has to be designed by keeping the customer in mind. When we talk about customers there are different types of customers, different types of products/services a business is offering and different demographics and much more. Businesses utilize this data to define different customer personas. Any customer persona consists of the customers or groups of customers who tend to behave in a same manners and have almost similar needs. Different customers have different level of understanding, some can easily consume technical content and some might be unable to grasp it.
Similarly your website navigation, UI, features and all other details would be perceived differently, that is why when designing all these things, you must consider the minimum difficulty level, you must consider the customer persona with minimum understanding, and prepare content and web design for them. The easy accessibility and intuitive UI significantly improve the customer experience all allow them to absorb your content/information and navigate easily at your website which can significantly increase the chances of conversion. It is important to understand that whoever will be landing on your website will be seeking information initially, later on they might want to purchase your product or fill in the lead form to share their contact details. All these steps should be easy-to-access and the web design and other elements of the web page should guide your user to the next step of the customer journey. Because too long or too complex customer journey will increase customer churn rate. The customer churn is the customers who have a desire to purchase or convert but leave half-way through because of any inconvenient. This inconvenient could be due to complex UI, difficult content, complex navigation or too much distractions on the web page. Hence the customer journey should be short and easy which will help you boosting your website conversions.
Good Customer Experience: Trust Markers
For any website, the trust markers are very important. A business website is a doorway for most of your audience. For most of the customers your website would be the first interaction with your brand. That is why it is extremely crucial to gain their trust. According to several studies, 40% to 50% of the customers judge a business’s credibility on the bases of its website. If they found your website good they will immediately form a positive brand image and vice versa. There are several factors that contributes to make a business website trust worthy, however, the trust markers are considered to be the most important. Because these trust markers will be viewed and considered the most by the majority of your website visitors. There are a tons of trust markers and signals that our human brain consider either consciously or subconsciously, such as:
- The page load speed, domain name, SLS Certificate, etc.
- The professional web design and aesthetics
- Page navigation, content and media
- Information about the brand and the product/service
- Contact details, address and location, etc.
- Client Testimonials, Ratings, Social Proofs
- Case Studies, Press Releases, Blogs, etc.
- Client, Partners and Supplier’s Logos
- Portfolio and Sample of Work
- Product Rating, Purchase Stats, Views, etc.
- Industry Association, Awards, Certificates, etc.
- Dedicated Policy, Terms & Conditions, FAQs Pages, etc.
- Trust Seals, Security Badges and Privacy Protection Icons, etc.
- Google Business and Google Maps Listing
- Social Media Accounts’ Links/Icons
- Customer Help Center, Call Center, Live Chat, etc.
There are still penalty of others. These trust markers are very important in building trust which improves customer experience. Most of the time customers look up for these indicators. The trust markers, trust signals or trust badges/seals can greatly inspire confidence and help businesses gain trust. The trust markers also give your website a professional look and feel and help increasing conversion rate. People tent to incline towards website with trust markers even if they unable to understand some information they will prefer a website with trust marker over a website without trust markers at which they have understood everything. That is why the trust markers are very important for customer experience which help businesses boost website conversions and generate more leads.
Good Customer Experience: Customer Service
The customer service is one of the most important aspect of customer experience. A good customer service and support will always result in more conversions. When a customer lands on your website, they consume information, then they move on to the next step or making a purchase of filling in a contact form. However, most of the customers have queries and concerns which they want to address before moving on to the next step. For that they usually look up for the contact details or customer service center details. Most of the time people tend to avoid calling customer service as they usually have to wait for a long time to get to a sales rep. According to several studies more than 55% of the customers will convert if the business could answer to their queries within one minute. That is why integrating a live chat within your website can be extremely helpful in enhancing customer experience and boosting your website conversions. When you are available to respond to your customers when they needed you the most can help you gain their trust. The live chat is not as that difficult, even startups, small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) can also utilize it. It will help you assist your customers and website visitors in real-time. Obviously in Dubai and everywhere in UAE the most of such enquiries are made during the working hours, especially for B2B businesses all such enquiries are made during the working hours, it is easier for small and medium size businesses to spare a staff for the live chat.
The live chat not only improve customer experience but it can also significantly improve the customer happiness and customer satisfaction. According to several studies, businesses who have implement a live chat at their corporate website witness up to 30% growth in their customer happiness and almost half of the cost reduction in their customer care expenses. Quickly answering to customers’ concerns and questions not only increase conversion rate but also help improving brand image and reputation. The customer engagement and good experience help increasing customer loyalty and help increasing their lifetime value (CLTV). The higher customer lifetime value (CLTV) is a great indicator for long-term growth and success. Furthermore the websites with live chat also witness higher customer return rate. Apart from live chat you can also integrate chat bots. The chat bots are excellent for the customer support and help businesses reach out to a wider audience. It is when your customer service or sale staff is engaged already, or it is off hours, or peak hours, and a customer needs a support. The chat bots are very capable tools, they can answer most of the simple queries and usually there are certain queries which are more common than the others, these simple queries can be pre-configured in your chat bots, however, for more complex queries you can divert them to your customer service center. Hence a combination of live chat with chat bots could be great to enhance your customer experience and to boost your website conversions.
Good Customer Experience: Responsive Website
The mobile phones have become an integral part of our daily lives, no matter what you do or where you live in the country, everyone has a mobile phone, according to data almost 99% of UAE population owns mobile phone and almost similar percentage of population is also connected with the internet. Globally the mobile phones are responsible for 56% of the all internet traffic and in UAE it is slightly more at 60%. This made mobile phone extremely important for your marketing strategy. Obviously most of the businesses these days prefer to have a responsive website. However, a majority of businesses are not aware that the having a responsive web design or a mobile-friendly website is not just enough. There are a lot many things that you should consider while making your website response. First and foremost it is the compatibility with different smartphones, operating systems, web browsers and screen sizes. There are so many different types and sizes of smartphone, thankfully we have only two major platform to deal with which are Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, almost 98% of smartphones are built on these two platforms. Secondly it is the customer experience and consistency in both desktop and mobile versions. The mobile version should also give the look and feel of the desktop version, all the content, buttons and any other details should be the same. Furthermore the user navigation and reachability during one-hand operation is important. That is why just making your website able to rearrange itself according to the screen size is not enough, you will have to offer a satisfactory and consistent customer experience which will help you boosting your conversions.
Conclusion
Your corporate website is not just an online company profile or brochure but it is the foundation of your online and digital marketing efforts to expand and grow your business. Your corporate website will enhance your online presence and will help you establish a brand identity in the online world. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE the internet penetration is at 99%, which is significant. The easy access to internet, technological advancement of smartphone and rise of social media have changed several market trends. One of the most important market trend for businesses is the changed user behavior, now a days an average customer will first search about the products/services or business they need, and then they will decide to get in touch with the brand. In most of the cases your corporate website would be the very first interaction of your customers with your brand. Hence it is crucial to set up a great first impression and give them what they want to build the relationship with them. The website conversions can generate a significant amount of revenue for the business. According to several global studies an average customer is willing to pay extra if they will get a better experience. Obviously different industries have different stats but in general almost 86% of the customers showed willingness to pay extra if they will be getting a good customer experience. That is what make customer experience most important.
There are many things that you can do to improve customer experience, the most important thing is to think from your customer’s perspective. Do some research, divide your customers in different personas and then identify the most important personas for your business, these should be the one who are generating most of the business. Then align your content, pictures, videos, multimedia and even the design according to your targeted audience. There are a few basic things that you must consider, such as simplicity is always the best policy, not always in the design, but in the content it is always the best way to maximize customer engagement. Moreover you can improve your website’s navigation, UI, and visuals. Adding trust markers, customer endorsements, and customer service details will be great idea. Furthermore making your website responsive is essential to maximize the customer satisfaction. Happy and satisfied customers are more likely to convert. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to revamp your website to make it more customer-friendly and high-converting, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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