Creating a positive customer experience is something that companies have strived for since the concept was first laid out. Of course, this isn’t a pointless struggle, as good customer experience is so important. If you didn’t know, customer experience is the sum of your customer’s interactions with you, from the moment they learn of you, all the way to having to possibly use customer service and support.
So, creating a positive customer experience is basically conducting good business. Managing this in traditional scenarios is pretty well-mapped and well-tread area, so there’s nothing remotely original or new to say about that. But, in the online era, we find a whole new ballgame before us, don’t we?
Providing a good experience through a completely online medium brings in a lot of disciplines and variables you otherwise wouldn’t have to contend with, such as usability, design skill, communications optimization and the like. So, that may leave you wondering how you provide good experience through something like a website.
Well, there are no established, unanimous best practices for this, and there probably never will be, because the internet at large went down the soft standardization route some time ago, and likely won’t do a rebound in that context now.
So, it all comes down to thinking about the phases of a customer experience, and seeing how that affects the dynamics of your website. Need creation is a different thing, and your website is generally not going to handle that, but you can help a little from there by using solid SEO techniques on your site to make it easy to find online.
That, however, does not really do any needs creation itself. But, it does help with the next phase, which is going to be your biggest expenditure of effort with your website anyhow.
During the second phase, customers do research, comparisons and study of you and competitors, and one of the things they’re going to look at is your website. So, the biggest thing to do, beyond solid usability and UX, is to make sure you have content and informative material easy to find and very encompassing.
This means that, while you are going to blog elsewhere, and tie in third party publications, you want that to all point back to your site, and you want duplicate material on the site as well, so you can minimize wandering in the customer as much as possible.
Along with that, consider using onboard software to guide the user through research, and to provide tours of your site, your company and your offered services.
Further nuances for creating a positive user customer experience in your website are all about usability and design, and we’ve covered those in detail before, so there’s no reason to diverge into that again. In this case, it’s all about making sure you have content and good SEO, along with all of those design and logic aspects that apply to any web based systems. One day, there may be better, unanimously accepted practices for this sort of thing, as the shift to all digital for more things continues. But, for now, this is the best we can do, and if we follow this closely, it’s possible to make this happen.
