When it comes to any business, customer experience is one of the key factors that drive most companies since a happy customer is more likely to return and tell others about the great products and services that you offer. But developing a good customer experience isn’t something that is done overnight, rather key steps must be taken in order to identify and resolve issues regarding your business.
One of the sore concepts of online business is the customer experience or UX, and a negative UX with a website will almost certainly see a particular customer never return to your site again, and while UX is an ongoing development there are some relatively easy steps you can take to optimize it right now, including:
- Customer Communication
- Device Optimization
- Quality Web Design
Communication is key and a customer will always look for the easiest method before calling at their own expense while device optimization is essential in today’s multi-device world and the design of your site should be a priority and reflect trending attitudes.
Customer Communication
Every business whether a traditional establishment or entirely online needs clear communication channels with its customers or audience. For half a century the telephone dominated the customer service industry but advances in technology made it possible to develop quicker and more efficient methods of communication.
Some of those methods involved email, ticketing systems, and more recently, Live Chat. Email communication works well but is slow and while ticketing is excellent for handling large volumes of queries can be even slower, but Live Chat offers a huge advantage in that it is instant. Companies such as click4assistance offer excellent Live Chat features that save time and money while offering very quick customer resolution.
Device Optimization
No longer is web access limited to the home desktop computer since the invention of the tablet and smartphone has boosted internet access on mobile devices to massive proportions, as recent data suggests that 45% of internet access now comes from mobile devices. As such, your website should be optimized to display correctly on these devices as a full-sized desktop version can look strange on a mobile device with tiny text being just one issue.
Fortunately, it’s easy to optimize a site for mobile devices. You can first check what needs to be done using Google’s Mobile Friendly Tool and following that make any necessary changes. The most common change that you might need to make is switching to a mobile responsive theme or if you don’t use themes then your web designer can code responsiveness into your site. Responsiveness automatically changes how your site looks when it detects a mobile device and displays your content accordingly. The use of mobile-friendly versions of your site can now affect your site’s ranking in SERPs so should be a priority.
Quality Web Design
A responsive site can go a long way to providing a better UX but the overall design of your site needs to be taken into account. Like everything else, web design trends change but the public nature of websites means that it is almost always the users that dictate the changes in trend when it comes to the web. As such you should take the time to check on current trends often such as whether videos are being used on landing pages, how sidebars are structured, and which colors are relevant.
Currently, a Brutalist approach to web design is being adopted as a retrospective attitude shift towards how websites are presented appears to have taken hold. This current design trend is essentially a bare-bones approach that offers quick and relevant information in an easily accessible form with only necessary colors and media being used. To adopt this trend, it might be a good idea to remove any extraneous media from your site that doesn’t directly relate to what your users actually come to your site for. The specifics will vary between sites so it isn’t viable to go into it here.
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