Customer experience is an important aspect of your business especially if you have an e-commerce website where your customers can shop. Several brands besides yours are selling the same products as yours and they can attract your customer if they have a good customer experience and make the shopping experience on a website stress-free for your clients.
A study conducted by SmartKarrot revealed that more than 89% of customers are ready to switch to a different brand that provides a better customer experience if they had a bad one with their current one. To avoid losing customers and enhance your client base, it is crucial to improve their experience both online and offline. Before exploring the methods to enhance CX, let’s first understand what customer experience means.
What is Customer Experience (CX)?
Customer experience refers to the impression, perception, and interaction a customer has with a brand or product. It includes the touchpoints and their interaction with a brand during their process of researching, buying, and using a product or services of a business including the support and help they received during the process.
1. Know what your customer wants
To retain your customers and ensure you get more customers you need to know exactly what your customer wants. There are so many websites available and most of them are offering the same products and services you are offering your clients. Therefore, when your customers try to access your website and they have difficulties, some pages or links are not opening on your website, you do not address their needs or pain points, and you will lose them.
Understanding your customers’ needs can be challenging, but one effective method is to examine their reviews, feedback, and complaints over time. Incorporating their feedback can enhance their experience and prevent losing them by addressing their concerns.
2. Understand buying mode
Another way you can improve CX on your website is by understanding the buying modes of your customers. Buying modes usually consist of either researching or purchasing stage and knowing these modes will help you improve customer experience the right way.
3. Make sure your site loads quickly
On occasion, losing customers to competitors is not due to a poor product or service, but rather because your website takes too much time to load. Based on research that was conducted, many people agreed that they would exit a site that takes more than a few seconds to load. The reason is that most people are busy and in a generation where everyone wants things to be done instantly they do not have time to waste waiting for a site to take its time before loading.
Another thing that you should consider is that your site should load quickly on a desktop rather than on a mobile devices. If you want your website to load quickly, use a Content Deliver Network (CDN), your images and videos should be well optimized, use a cache plugin on your site; also minimize HTTP requests where you can. Doing all these will improve customer experience.
4. Implement an SSL certificate
The Website Owner should buy SSL certificate and install it on the site that can bring HTTPS to the Website domain. The importance of an SSL certificate cannot be overemphasized. Besides it making your customers trust your business, it also helps you protect data or information that is shared on your website.
When you put an SSL certificate in place on your website, hackers will not be able to access your customers’ data, which means you do not have to worry about paying fines for compromising your customers’ data or looking at your brand’s reputation.
5. Use a personal chat box to engage visitors
Another important way to improve customer experience is by using a personal chat box to engage visitors. When your brand has this personal chat box in place, it is easier for customers to ask questions, receive answers offer feedback, and get helpful information from you.
Customers love to feel important, especially from the brand whose services or products they are purchasing and when they feel that you are personally interacting with them to know their needs and how to serve them better, it improves CX and earns you their loyalty.
6. Focus on navigation – and don’t forget about site search
You have to focus on navigation and site search if you want to improve customer experience. Navigation should be easy for your customers on your website; they should not find it difficult to click on a particular button or icon to be taken to where they want. Which means you should pay attention to your website design.
According to research, over 70% of customers use site search to search for products that they want, and this proves particularly helpful when a website has many products and services. It helps to filter their seats ha and make the purchasing process easier for them. So, ensure that navigation is smooth and do not neglect site search if you want to improve CX.
7. Include customer reviews
In a bid to improve CX, do not forget to include customer reviews. Most people base their purchase decisions not just on their needs and what they want to buy but looking on other people’s experiences while using a particular product or service. So, give customers the social proof they need to help them make their purchase decisions better.
8. Call-to-action matters!
Including calls to action on your websites makes it easier for your customers to act on your website. Based on your call to action, you can achieve the goals you want. Urging your customers to sign up for your newsletters make that purchase, leave their comments or testimonials, or share your content are all useful CTAs. Encourage customers to act by including CTAs on your website.
Conclusion
To stand out from the crowd of businesses offering the same products and services to customers you must ensure that you pay attention to improving your customer experiences because it will help ensure if you will get and retain your customers or lose them. Customers’ experiences change and vary, so watch out for them and look for ways to improve CX.
