Here’s a question: Are your customers really happy?
As a business, you spend time, money, and headaches trying to develop best-in-class products and services. You put on armor to go to battle with your competitors, and you sweat blood and tears to grow your brand. But how do you know that your most valuable asset (i.e., your website) is really meeting customer expectations?
The customer experience has overtaken price and product as the #1 brand differentiator. Unfortunately, customers aren’t jumping through hoops to tell you about their experiences. It’s estimated that 1 out of every 26 unhappy customers actually complains. The rest, they just leave… forever.
If you want to roll out a best-in-class website that convinces and converts, you need to understand what your customers want. So how do you do it? How do you get customers to tell you their pros and their woes? Let’s talk about hunting Ishmael’s white whale. Here’s how you discover what your customers really think about your website.
Why Should You Source Feedback From Your Users?
Why should you worry about soliciting feedback? After all, can’t you just wait for customers to tell you? Or, can’t you just use analytics and testing software to determine issues? Here’s the problem: software can’t tell you what customers are actually thinking. Sure! There are obvious problems like speed, broken links, and laggy interfaces. But beyond the tangible lies the very real intangibles, and they’re the driving force behind customer satisfaction.
62% of companies are specifically investing in feedback generation solutions to help them meet the ever-changing needs of the modern customer. Over two-thirds of companies compete on customer experience alone. And the number of businesses investing in game-changing omnichannel experiences has jumped from 20% to 80% over the last five years.
For customers, the experience is everything. 86% of customers will pay more for a great experience. 49% have made an impulse purchase due to their great experiences. And a massive 57% of customers will refuse to do business with your company if you have a poorly designed website or mobile compatibility. And that’s the interesting thing. Design is in the eyes of the beholder.
If you want to know what your customers want… what they really want deep down… you have to elicit feedback. It’s the only way. You have to jump into the trenches and figure it out.
So how do you do it?
How Do You Gather User Feedback (And What Do You Do With It)?
At Mobomo, we always say that we build “customer-centric websites.” But we aren’t just throwing around marketing buzzwords. We dive deep and leverage tools like ForSee to gather and analyze customer feedback quarterly. After all, a website is a living, breathing organism that requires change, action, and movement to remain viable in today’s constantly evolving market.
For us, eliciting feedback is done with tools. And we highly recommend that you do the same. Sure! You can try emails, postcards, surveys, and all of the other wonderful pop-up(ish) methods. But they only give you some details. You need to be able to analyze feedback at scale, combine it with CX benchmarks, and leverage best-in-class road maps to intelligently attack CX across the user journey.
In other words, we recommend that you either:
- Use CX software
- Partner with an agency that uses CX software
- Develop in-house legacy CX solutions
Trying to tackle CX with ad-hoc processes is a surefire way to get beat out by your competitors. And, remember, CX isn’t just one metric; it’s the metric that spells success in 2020 and beyond.
What Are the Benchmarks of an Effective Design?
Every company will use different design benchmarks. Remember, design is personal. And so is the purpose of your design. For example, the purpose of our project with NASA differs from the purpose of our projects with B2C point-of-sale brands. If you’re a B2B or public agency, you may want to drive users to engage and learn. White papers, downloads, and mid-funnel resources may be the most significant part of your play. So, using design that lures and drives users to these assets is front-of-mind for your business.
On the flip side, a B2C brand may be looking for sales volume. In this case, driving users to products, descriptions, and shopping cart purchases may be your largest driver. These are two very different circumstances. And they both require different benchmarks for success.
You should always start by figuring out your value-based business objectives. From there, you can start breaking down the UX factors that will help you achieve those goals by A/B testing UX/UI changes and benchmarking UX specifics that exist in that value landscape.
We won’t spend too much time discussing benchmarking because it simply varies too much. But, you do have to benchmark. It’s not optional. If you want best-in-class UX, you need the right benchmarks to track and measure success.
How to Perform a User-Centric Rollout
When you first start sourcing feedback and developing benchmarks, you’ll start making changes. Watch out. Changes are good. Poor implementation of changes is bad. The biggest UX mistake is trying to roll out massive changes across all users. If you have a high-traffic website making big UX changes, you have to carefully and methodically roll out changes in a way that doesn’t impact the user.
DNA changes can create superheroes or cause illness. You want the former. The proper rollout is how you avoid the latter. Practice safe hygiene during rollouts and always roll broad changes out slowly while testing at every step. Benchmarks are great. Feedback is great. But if your excellent new UX feature has the opposite impact that you intended, you need to be able to pull-the-plug before it impacts too many users. The stakes of the customer experience are too high.
Are You Ready to Build a Customer-Centric Brand?
Gathering feedback is the easy part. Figuring out how to leverage that feedback to make meaningful changes is challenging. We can help. At Mobomo, we design user-centric websites baked in proven UX. We elicit feedback, use powerful analytics to drive decisions, and carefully A/B test changes across populations before rolling out new solutions. We don’t just build websites. We build experiences.
Contact us to learn more.
