8 Effective Ways To Improve Customer Experience On Your Website

One thing that businesses always strive for is the customer experience (also referred to as CX). After all, customers are the mainstay of a business. They are the ones who define the success of a brand. Without offering a good customer experience. it would be quite difficult for a brand to survive in the long run. That’s why they are always looking for ways to improve or enhance the experience of their customers. Here, not only just the products and services matter but your website design and layout, and whether customers are getting a positive experience out of it are equally important.

What is Customer Experience?

In layman’s terms, customer experience or CX is nothing but a customer’s perception and feelings towards your brand. Let’s say you went out to an electronics store to purchase an air conditioner. The salesperson there assists you in finding the best AC as per your budget and requirements and answers all the queries running through your mind. Later, you purchase the AC you like and leave the store happy and satisfied. All this accounts for a positive offline customer experience.

Now, the same is the case with a digital medium. Only the platform (physical store turns into a website) and the way of interaction changes, customers’ expectations are the same. They want to be assisted in the right way in the easiest manner and get their queries addressed to achieve the desired outcome.

Long story short, customer experience encompasses all interaction points between the brand’s website and customers, and how effectively the former communicates with the latter in their buying journey. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the matter of purchase but their experience altogether.

There is fierce competition today in almost every business niche. People have plenty of options to choose from (to purchase). Therefore, it’s important to be always one step ahead of your competitors. And in order to be ahead and be the first choice for your customers, always keep your focus on improving the customer experience. Today, in this blog, we will be looking at the different ways to improve customer experience or CX on your website.

How to Improve Your Website CX?

There are plenty of ways to improve your website’s CX. You may come across many during your search, however, the below-mentioned eight points are the most effective ones to improve online customer experience.

1. Improve the Website Load Speed

A slow-loading website is a sign of a poor customer experience. A few seconds delay can cause customers to abandon your website and switch to your competitor’s. Not only it makes you lose potential customers but also affects your revenue. Customers’ time is precious. They do not want to sit idle looking at the website to get loaded. Even a one-second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%.

Put yourself in their shoes. Would you wait if a website is taking longer than expected to load? Most probably, you won’t. You would start looking at the other options.

Website page load speed is an important aspect when it comes to improving online customer experience. Lookup at your website and figure out what’s making it slow, and then work on them to accelerate the page load speed.

2. Smooth Navigation Process

Usability is the key to improving CX on your website. By this, we mean that the customers should be able to easily navigate throughout the website with no interruptions or distractions whatsoever. Customers are often presented with irritating popups, so keep that to a minimum as they create annoyance. Reduce unnecessary clicks and use features like auto-scroll on your product page so they do not have to move from page to page manually. In a nutshell, the customer journey should be smooth and intuitive, and without any inconvenience. Make it effortless for them to reach their desired outcome.

3. Easy Checkout

Nothing turns off customers more than a long and complicated checkout, which eventually leads to cart abandonment. Why would you create any barrier when a customer is just one step away from making a purchase? This can severely affect your conversion rate.

Follow a simplified checkout process. Don’t make customers wait for too long on the checkout page. Avoid long forms. Ask for necessary information only that is relevant for customers to place an order. Moreover, if they make any mistake while filling out their details such as email or residential address, try to notify them through inline form validation. Many times, customers are notified about the errors after they submit their details which only delays the checkout process.

Last but not least, try to integrate multiple payment options on your website so that customers can choose their preferred payment mode for the purchase.

4. Minimalistic Design

To improve customer experience on your website, make sure it possesses minimum distractions- right from the moment customers land on your website till they checkout. Remember, customers are there for a reason, they have a purpose, and you shouldn’t do anything that diverts their focus. For example, too many animations, call-to-actions, images, cluttered content can cause distraction to users and leave them with an unpleasant experience.

Try to keep the design as minimalistic as possible. Use proper fonts and appropriate font size, have enough white space, make use of limited but captivating images, pay attention to the iconography and colors that you have used on your website. All these things play a crucial role in improving the digital customer experience.

Also Read: Mobile App Design: Key Elements that contribute to the success

5. Introduce Voice Search

Alexa and Siri have now become an inevitable part of our lives. People have started using voice commands whether it is to get their query answered or purchase something. So it’s a no-brainer that you should also add the voice search functionality on your website. Rather than having to type their query or the name of the product they are looking for, allow users to perform a voice search and get the relevant results. A microphone icon along with the magnifying glass on the search bar is the best way to display that your website is voice optimized.

6. Display Ratings and Reviews

Users always look for reviews before buying a product or service. They want to know from other people’s experience whether the product or service is worth spending money on or not. Some users might not even buy if the website doesn’t display product reviews. How they are supposed to know that the money they are going to spend on your product won’t go in vain? Despite this, many website owners often hesitate to display reviews because of the fear of negative ones. Yes, you might receive a few negative reviews but that shouldn’t discourage you. In fact, take it as feedback to see which areas you need to work upon. Displaying ratings and reviews not only helps customers make a better purchase decision but also improves your website’s authoritativeness.

7. Mobile-friendliness

A majority of the traffic comes through mobile devices these days. So you need to ensure that your website looks as structured on a hand-held device as it does on a desktop. Businesses tend to overlook the mobile part and keep their primary focus on making the website desktop-friendly. Both are equally important from the customer experience perspective.

Make sure that your website is responsive and mobile-friendly. If the website is not well-optimized for mobile devices, you may lose a huge chunk of your total conversions and your future customers as well.

8. Customer Support

Another way to improve the the customer experience on your website is by making it easy for customers to contact you. Customers can have several queries when they land on your website. It could be regarding a product or an ongoing offer.

Allow customers to reach out to you in the easiest way possible. Place a live chat option on your website so that customers can drop a text and seek help regarding their queries. Make sure that the customer support option is easily accessible. Do not forget to add your social media channels as most customers connect with a brand or business through their social accounts.

Final Word

A good and positive customer experience encourages word-of-mouth. People talk about your business more and recommend it to others. In today’s competitive landscape, this is all that a business wishes for.

So keep your customers happy and offer them a better experience than your competitors. The more positive experience they receive, the more likely they will turn into loyal customers.