Sara James
A high-quality website should have a multi-functional design that attracts potential customers. However, nothing is more frustrating than to land on a site that’s difficult to navigate. An effective website should be intuitive, uncomplicated, cater to your ideal client, and showcase five-star customer service.
Businesses will often focus so heavily on making high-end websites that integrate with fancy features that they lose sight of the importance of maintaining a user-friendly platform that their customers feel good about using on a continual basis. In fact, companies that can grow their customer retention rates by as little as 5% can see profit increases up to 95%. A great way to retain happy customers is to cater your website to their needs and make their journey through your site as intuitive and seamless as possible.
Tech companies, in particular, have a lot to gain from building a website that caters to their users and continually adds value to them. When dealing with technical products or services, it’s essential to cater to user’s needs across skill levels and industries. This means creating a customer service experience on your site that appeals to them, doesn’t scare them away or confuse them.
There are some simple, actionable steps that companies can take to enhance their website’s UX (user experience) to make their target audience stay longer on the site, leading to a rise in ROI and overall customer satisfaction.
#1 Make it Fast
To speed up your customer service experience, you have to offer faster responses to customer queries. Live chats and a support staff are a good customer support method but set the expectations up front of how long your customers should be waiting for a response. If you’re receiving a high number of support requests, it’s unrealistic to set the expectation of extremely quick or instant response times if you’re working with a small team.
Another option for enhancing the UX on your website is to utilize chatbots or AI technology. A chatbot can solve the problems of more customers than actual humans in the same span of time. Just this year, 35% customers expect to be interacting with a chatbot when talking with a company online.
People are also busier than ever, and no one wants to wait for a delayed response or a page to load, so regularly test and update your website speeds. Set aside time to make sure the servers are fast and can handle high amounts of traffic, and still easily load graphics, videos and other high definition content. Also, make sure you have a quality assurance plan for your website so that you can consistently keep track of performance.
#2 Keep It Simple
If consumers aren’t able to find what they are looking for, you’ll eventually see a rise in your bounce rate. A lot of sites overthink and over-complicate their designs, which leads to customer confusion and avoidable frustration on their end. For example, no matter which pages a customer lands on within your site, they should always be able to navigate back home, despite if the navigation bar aesthetically pleasing to your site or not. Adding too much to your website also slows down the development phase and makes it more complicated for developers to make changes instantly. By maintaining a clean interface, you are encouraging the customer to surf your website and use all the essential tools that you provide. You should also include a search feature on the top of your web pages. This feature will speed up the buying process as customers will find what they came to buy within minutes. Your call-to-action buttons also play a significant role in guiding customers. An attractive and colorful CTA button always has more chances of being clicked on.
#3 Add Value to Your Visitors
Whether you aim to educate, inform or assist, make sure that your site is adding value in a few different areas. Having a robust blog that accompanies your standard customer service practice is a great way to provide something to your visitors that they may not have known that they needed. The most successful companies have robust support pages that tackle all of their user’s most frequent issues and their blog provides valuable content to inform not only their users but people in their industry as a whole. The more value you add to current users and other people in your audience, the most trust you gain.
#4 Inform Your Customers That Their Data is Safe
Many users hesitate in providing personal information like name, number, email, etc. The primary reasons are that they are afraid that either you’ll use this data for the wrong purpose, or your site may get hacked, compromising your user's data. An SSL certificate can increase consumer trust in your business. This protocol displays a secured sign beside your URL, signaling to the world that this website is 100% secure.
#5 Optimize for Mobile
Years back, we could only use the internet on a computer. But nowadays, over 70% of internet usage is through mobile phones. To enhance UX, you need to make sure your website is compatible with all screen sizes. Whether the screen is of a small smartwatch or a 55 inch smart TV, your site should have versions that can cater to all of them.
#6 Make Your Website More Personal
According to eMarketer, 48% marketers have stated that adding personalization to websites increases the revenue by 10%. Personalization not only boosts UX, but it also increases loyalty and referrals to your business. A few companies that have excelled in creating personal environments for users are Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Wondering how they did it? You can start off by greeting every user with their name after they log in. You can create a custom page for this procedure. Suggestions or recommendations for the type of categories will always make a user happy as they’ll have access to things related to their interests. In 2017, the average rate of users abandoning their carts was 78.65%. You can target this lot by offering exclusive discounts for checking out. Who doesn’t love an extra discount? A great way to retain your customers is by launching a loyalty program. With this program, you can give away points to a customer for making purchases and referring your business. Customers can use these points to avail discounts and hence you’ll experience a rise in sales. Personalization does take a lot of work, but the rewards are far more significant than what you’ll invest in the process.
