Applying A Customer-Centric Approach To Your Online Business
You might say that is pretty obvious right? All businesses are set up with the focus centred on the customer’s needs. However, that does not necessarily make a business customer-centric. There are many factors to consider when looking to create a delightful customer experience for your business therefore it helps to have a good customer experience strategy in place. Most businesses have good customer service policies in place, however for an online business, good customer service is just one part of developing the great holistic customer experience.
Customer experience goes beyond customer service. It includes everything between when the customer first finds out about your business e.g from a blog post on Google, or a recommendation review on a social media site and goes all the way to buying your product or service, pre- and post-sales interactions, feedbacks, surveys and repeat customs. A good strategy is to ensure that the customer has a great experience at every point or interaction they have with your business. This will ensure customer loyalty and retention.
A. Listen, Listen, Listen – To Your Customers
This is the most important thing you can do to help your business. Yes, you may already have a good idea of what the customer needs or wants, but taking the time to ask them, the who, what, why, how and when regarding your business or product gives you a better idea of how best to serve your customers. You can do this by using technology as a platform to deploy online surveys, customer feedback questionnaires, right from the conception of a product idea to the product delivery and fulfilment stage. Allowing the received feedback to inform your product design or service processes ensures you are able to offer the best version of what your customer wants. Research has shown that companies that allow the use of technology derived customer experience, ideas, feedback and input to drive their product or service designs have much better customer retention, customer loyalty, and increased revenues. After collecting the feedback it is necessary to set up a plan to leverage the new knowledge into providing a better service, better sales, and a better product.
B. Questions To Ask
Before deciding what questions to ask, you want to define the reason for wanting the feedback and how you intend to use it. For example, you may want to have an idea of how attractive (competitively) your services or product offers are. You may want to use the feedback to review your pricing strategies, digital marketing plans or build new customer relationships.
Some examples of possible questions are:
What brought the customers to your website, how did they find out about your website (Digital marketing)
What stopped them from taking up your offer or incentives (Conversion, pricing strategies)
How you can improve your service or your product (Understand customer needs or your competition)
Customer satisfaction with the product/service
What they like most or hate most about your product (Buyer personas)
Would they be interested in a repeat custom with or without an incentive ( Retargeting plans, customer loyalty)
C. Customer-Centric Website Design and Website Redesign
You may already have a website, but you can also carry out some redesign of your website based on a customer-centric process. Your website is the gateway to your business. Customer-centric website design is an important part of providing a great customer experience.
You may be experiencing poor website traffic, declining website sales, high levels of abandoned carts, these issues may be due to a poorly designed website or poor useability from the customer’s perspective. It is equally important to carry out a customer-centric survey as part of your web design or redesign process.
Here are a few types of website feedback methods you can use:
- On-page feedback. These are very short surveys (maximum 4 questions) which you can set up to appear after a predetermined length of time (so as not to disturb the user experience). The questions should be short but designed to get feedback on the visitors’ satisfaction (or not ) during their website visit. You may want to start with score slider asking for the level of satisfaction from the customer journey so far, why the score was given and what can be done to improve on the score.
- Polls. These can be used to get feedback on the website design or when new changes have been recently applied eg a website redesign. It is important to know whether the new design work or flows better for the customer ( a returning customer) Since not every visitor will be in this category, this is best done as a poll sent out to a few of the existing customers before making the new website live to the public.
- Landing page or Home Page feedback. These are good for getting feedback on first impressions from your site visitors. You may want to know how effective your website copy is, whether the visitor understands what your service or products are about. You may have noticed from your Google analytics that visitors are dropping off from your homepage and may want to use the feedback to discover the difficulties the visitors are having navigating the page or the problems encountered while performing certain end actions.
4. Post-purchase page Surveys. After a successful transaction, you can place a short survey form on the thank you, success, receipt or redirect pages to find out, for example, why they chose your product or any issues they may have encountered during the purchase process. Emails can also be sent a few days post-purchase to see how the customer is getting on.
5. Cancellation or abandoned cart surveys. These are very important. You want to know why they cancelled and if there is anything that can be done to avoid this in future. The information gathered here can be used to drive improvements in your website design and website processes.
6. Visual Maps. These are tools that visual representations showing how your website users and customers move around on your site. They are usually colour coded (red for hotspots and blue for sections that receive little traffic) thus helping you to see which parts/pages/sections of your sites are mostly visited or clicked on. These give you granular insights into what parts of your design work or otherwise for your visitor. Examples of visual maps include heatmaps, scroll maps, click maps and move maps. A scroll map, for example, will let you know how far down most of your site visitors scroll to and you can see whether they are missing any important section of your site content. The information collated from these maps can help you to make informed decisions regarding a website redesign, updates, user device type problems, and A/B testing.
D. Analysing Your Customer Experience Strategy
So how do you know if your strategy is working or it needs some improvement?
First, you need to identify who your customers are, those who visit (including repeats)and take the desired actions on your website. Then have another list of those who keep visiting but don’t complete the transactional process. They are also an important subgroup, their surveys will be different.
Then identify the different entry points they come through eg landing pages, subscriber sign-ups, social media platforms etc. Also identify the various interaction points eg, post-sales, abandoned carts, cancellations, repeat purchases, first-time customers, reviews. These are the areas you will need to pay particular attention to so you can get a feel of your customer’s experience.
Identify one or two of these areas and set up your customer experience survey to get the necessary feedback on those areas. Some metrics to measure include:
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), using yes /no questions or scale (on a scale of 1-10 how satisfied are you with….etc?
Net Promoter Score®, or NPS®, this is a metric that measures how likely a customer is to recommend your website (product) to someone else. It measures customer experience and also gives an indication of customer loyalty.
Customer Effort Score (CES) This measures how much effort the customer had to put in to get to a predetermined endpoint on your website or take an action eg to order a product. If your site has poor navigation, or you have a convoluted ordering process you will pick up these issues form your CES.
It is always best to do a before and after comparison of these scores over time to get an overall picture of the effective or efficient web design features that work for your business. This is where we come in. We design these surveys to get you the best analysis and information with the aim of helping your business increase its customer retention, revenues and reduce customer churn. Even the smallest of customer-centric tweaks applied to your website can go a long way to improve your bottom line. Contact us today.
Need help with getting a customer-centric website (re)design? We are here to help!