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How to make your website more customer-friendly

“The customer experience is the next competitive battleground” – Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell
The user experience that you offer your customers online can make or break the success of your website. If your customers find what they’re looking for and complete their tasks quickly and easily, this helps to boost customer satisfaction levels. The result? You benefit from repeat visits, heightened customer loyalty and increased sales.

 

On the other hand, a slow, confusing or frustrating user experience will increase your churn rate. This could lead to a loss of business and possibly also a dent in your reputation.

 

Customer experience matters in every type of organisation across every sector, even if you’re offering a public service and you’re not selling B2C or B2B. When your targeted users visit your site, you want to seamlessly guide them through the necessary steps to meet their goals as well as your website objectives.

 

Here are six steps that you can take to create a winning customer experience on your website:

 

1. Know your customer

Before you begin designing your user experience (UX), you need to understand your customers – the human beings who will be using your website day in and day out. Why will they visit your site? What will they hope to achieve? How much time will they have to spare? Once you know your audience well enough, you’ll understand how to make your website easier and more satisfying to use – and therefore more customer-friendly.

 

2. Be welcoming

When users enter your site, there’s no receptionist or sales assistant to welcome them and show them where to go. The UX design and content structure on your home page need to do this job for you. Your users don’t want to scroll or click their way through reams of images and content before  they understand what your organisation has to offer them or find the product they’re looking for.

 

3. Be clear

When you’re writing your content, make sure you’re leading your user through a logical thought process. Where should they begin and end? How can they skip to the bits that are important to them? And how will you help them to navigate through all the relevant information as fast and painlessly as possible?

 

4. Include strong calls to action

Guide your users through the customer journey by telling them what to do next. Encourage them to click a button, fill out a short form or discover a new special offer using clear, direct instructions in a way that is easily visible and comprehensible.

 

5. Keep it simple

While you definitely want your design to be visually appealing and your content to be compelling, you also need to be careful not to overwhelm the customer with too many moving parts, images, design features and words. Pare down your user experience so it is as simple and clean as possible.

 

6. Don’t waste your customers’ time

Your website load speed is critical. No matter how well designed and written your web pages are, if they’re slow to load, they’ll send your customers packing. There are many factors that influence lag time, from your server performance and location to the size and format of your image files. Make sure that you have the technical expertise to get all these elements right – or that you partner with a web development and design agency that has the requisite experience in this area.

 

Need our help? Kri8it has decades of digital experience. Chat to us about how we can make your website more customer-friendly.

Contact us

Cape Town, South Africa

Tel: +27 21 797 8444
Email: clint@kri8it.com

George, South Africa

Email: francesca@kri8it.com

Dublin, Ireland

Tel: +353 83 317 4599
Email: charl@kri8it.ie

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