Steve Jobs said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way round.” That credo helped him create one of the world’s most loved and valuable brands.
Nowadays, a great portion of the customer journey takes place online, which means that you should double down on providing superb digital customer experience and do it consistently.
A survey of 15,000 consumers found that one in three customers would leave a brand they love after a single bad experience.
Here’s how to improve your digital customer experience and prevent your customers from churning.
Improve your website
All elements of your website play an important role in offering a positive user experience and directly translate into an outstanding digital customer experience. Improving your website’s navigation should be a priority. When your prospects land on your website, they want to find what they’re looking for without having to click back and forth endlessly.
Using internal links will make your content more relevant, as well as boost your rankings. It’s a good idea to place relevant links to your blog posts within your content and provide your prospects with an opportunity to learn more about the topic they’re interested in.
Protect their data
After numerous data breaches and leaks, it’s understandable that your customers want to know that their sensitive information is protected from malicious hackers. In the wake of GDPR, it’s more important than ever to convince your prospects that it’s safe for them to share their email addresses and credit card numbers with you.
If you sell your products or services online, it’s a good idea to implement trust badges throughout your website, especially on the checkout page, as that will vouch for the safety of transactions.
Streamline communication
Your customers expect you to keep the lines of communication open throughout their customer journey. In other words, you need to make it easy for them to reach you whenever they want information or help. This means that your customer support has to be top-notch given that 82% of people expect an immediate response on their marketing or sales questions.
Understandably, not every business can afford to have 24/7 support. Chatbots can provide some of the most common answers to your customers’ questions and help them troubleshoot their issues.
Also, you should think about building a custom app that will allow your customers to contact you, browse your offers, receive different notifications and announcements, and generally speaking, connect with your business on a more personal level and customize their interactions with it.
Nurture customers after they buy
If you want to build loyalty with your prospects you need to nurture them even after they make a purchase. Send a thank-you email after they purchase that includes positive comments and reviews from other customers in the email. This is a buffer against buyer’s remorse.
Each of these steps is a low-cost means of improving your digital customer experience.
Michael Deane is an editor at Qeedle, a small-business magazine.
Author
Get our newsletter and digital focus reports
Stay current on learning and development trends, best practices, research, new products and technologies, case studies and much more.
