Online customer experience, also called user experience or UX, can refer simply to the ease with which customers perform expected activities on your website. Online customer experience includes intuitiveness (design for ease of use), attractiveness (creative design), and utility (functionality).
Customer experience also encompasses all aspects of your customers’ online interaction with you, your services, and your products. Beyond just a checklist of website features and intuitive layout, customer experience encompasses access to support, feedback mechanisms, training & educational resources, community contacts with other customers, and similar online resources.
The customer enters the sales cycle with specific questions and concerns. These questions and concerns should be addressed directly through your online customer experience.
Experience shows that if a customer’s interest is captured with an email, web link, phone call, and you do not provide a next step that addresses that interest, you will lose that potential customer.
To increase your effective customer experience, eliminate hurdles inadvertently placed in front of customers - particularly online where they can easily click to your competitor’s site.
In a recent campaign, the campaign microsite used friendly URLs that were not related to the primary company URLs. Due to company policy, at the point of registration, customers were taken to the core company URL where they were asked a series of questions that were not relevant to the product being purchased.
Not surprisingly, 96% of customers abandoned the registration at this point until the site was revised to remove the unnecessary and irrelevant steps in the process.
