8 Ways to Boost Your Customer Experience
In the 21st century, entrepreneurs must consider many factors to improve their business performance. One of the things you must neglect is the customer experience on your website!
Customer experience is defined as the buyers’ perception of your eCommerce brand during their purchasing procedure. In other words, they need to feel comfortable and engaged from when they land on your website to when they make an order. If you successfully complete that task, you will raise the chances of convincing the buyer to return to your website again.
So, how to do that? Well, people will need to have in mind multiple factors that can ruin the perception of the customer. That’s why we highlighted some of the most useful tips to make things easier for you. Let’s find them out!
Table of Contents:
- Brand Personality
- Website Optimization
- Web Store Design
- Web Store Navigation
- Content
- The Check-out Process
- Mobile Optimization
- Customer Service
Define the Personality of Your Brand
It doesn’t matter if you started a business 3 months or 3 years ago. Your brand must have an identity that will make you different from competitors in the same industry. To identify your brand’s personality, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions.
Primarily, you need to find a feature that makes you unique and different from others. That feature can be absolutely everything. For example, do you support sustainability? Talk about the eco-friendly packaging or sustainable materials your products are made of. Also, try to figure out what you want customers to think about your brand. Do you want them to think your products are luxurious? Is your goal to represent your brand as a huge supporter of sustainability practices?
You should also check the identities of your direct competitors. They have the same target audience as you. That means they have already done something you will have to do in the future. Yet, don’t copy their ideas. The identity of every brand must be unique. Use their strategy as an inspiration and upgrade it.
The Website Must Be Fast
The development of advanced technology has made people a bit impatient. Believe it or not, more than 50% of website visitors expect the web page to upload in less than 3 seconds. You won’t have the chance to show your brand identity or offer the product if your eCommerce store doesn’t upload fast.
It is not a secret that eCommerce stores have a large number of elements on their websites. There are a lot of images, videos, and textual content that do have high requests. That’s why you should use effective practices to speed up the load time.
First, you should try to reduce the number of UTTP requests. Also, we recommend you explore all the HTML, CSS, and JS files. Check out if there are any line breaks, extra spaces, or anything else that you can afford to eliminate. These “small details” are the common reason the page needs more time to upload.
Store Design Matters a Lot!
The content on your web store can be engaging, easy to read, and SEO-optimized. Unfortunately, that won’t boost website customer experience if the design isn’t top-notch. Based on some surveys, more than 50% of consumers believe web design is a crucial branding element. It is a fact you must not neglect!
The first thing you should do is explore your direct competitors' websites. Every industry usually has some sort of standard you will have to respect. These standards are established by the consumers. After that, you should think of a design that is strongly connected with your brand identity and the messages you want to send. Keep in mind that each color wakes up certain emotions and sends certain messages.
In the end, don’t overdo it with the colors. The design of your store must be eye-pleasing. It is not a point to add many colors and empty spaces and distract visitors from the content. Keep in mind that texts are those that convince people to make orders!
Navigation of the Web Store is Equally Important
After you leave a good first impression with the look of your website, people will start to explore your products. You must ensure they can easily find everything they want with a few clicks. Studies confirm that more than 30% of people would leave the website if the navigation is poor.
Our recommendation is to add as many categories as possible to your website. Also, you should allow people to filter their research by particular features. In the end, there should be a search box where people can type particular keywords to find products or pages they want. These tiny details can significantly influence your sales, so don’t neglect them!
The Textual Content Should Be Outstanding
We do understand your desire to boost your SEO rankings through textual content. Yet, don’t forget you are not writing content for the robot only. The texts need to be engaging and easy to read. Apart from that, their structure should be eye pleasing as well. Avoid using too long paragraphs and sentences. These factors will immediately make the content look monotonous.
Apart from that, ensure that all the information you share is correct. You will lose your reputation if you share wrong information on your blog or disinformation/partly-correct data about your products. Proofread everything before you publish the text on your website. Small grammar or spelling mistakes can negatively influence customer experience.
Check-Out Processes Should Be Easy
Your job isn’t done even if you convinced the visitor to purchase some of the products on your website. You don’t want to lose a buyer at the last moment, don’t you? That’s why you must make the check-out process simple and easy.
Primarily, you should avoid asking unnecessary questions. Customers do not have the entire day to answer a bunch of stuff. Plus, we already explained that their patience isn’t as you would want it. Also, people often make mistakes while filling up the form. Just highlight the particular field where the mistake was made and share a short note on how that mistake can be improved.
Last but not least - don’t ask people to sign up to your website in the middle of the check-out procedure. Imagine how annoyed they will be if they click the “order” button and get a notification that they must sign up. Be sure they will leave your webshop because of that! Instead, you should allow them to make purchases as guests. Afterward, you can offer them to subscribe to your newsletters with the email address or register on a website. That’s the way to boost a website’s customer experience!
Optimize the Website for Smartphone and Table Devices
Who says that people order products only via their laptops or computer devices? Believe it or not, 63% of all orders in the last quarter of 2022 are made via smartphones. We still wait for the results of the first quarter of this year, but we believe the numbers are almost identical or even higher. The fact only confirms that your website needs to be mobile-friendly. In other words, the website should automatically adapt its design and navigation to any type of mobile phone and any size of screen. Plus, web responsiveness is one of the key factors for SEO which is another reason why you should not neglect it!
Customer Service Has to Be Professional!
Even if you highlighted all the important information about your product, shipping, and other stuff, there will be people asking questions. If those questions remain unanswered, you will lose many customers that intended to buy your products. Apart from that, it is not a secret that mistakes in the eCommerce world happen. Some people may receive wrong or damaged products, which you will have to handle. They will complain and ask for a refund or replacement, and there has to be someone who will take care of these issues.
Because of all the things we talked about above, you can easily conclude on your own how essential the role of customer service is. Before everything, it would be good to add a FAQ page on your website. That way, visitors may get some answers without even contacting customer service.
Also, you should add a live chat option because more than 70% consider it the most satisfactory form of communication. The live chat button should be highlighted on the main page of the website in a visible place. However, to boost the website’s customer experience to the fullest, you should also add some other communication channels, such as email or phone. Some people prefer “traditional” ways of communication.
P.S. If possible, make customer support available 24/7.
Conclusion
Each of these tips is equally important! Because of that, we recommend you apply all of them and boost the website’s customer experience. People have to feel comfy and enjoy the journey on your eCommerce store. Small details can distract them in any part of the sales funnel. Work with a professional if you can’t handle all the tasks alone, and check out the industry standards to make things easier for yourself.
E-commerce entrepreneurs partner with Atomix for a customizable and cost-effective approach to building and scaling fulfillment operations.
Talk with a team member and get $1,000 of order fulfillment credit*
*$1,000 of credit is applied to customers account after Atomix fulfills their 500th order