June 4, 2021
UX vs CX: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters
Enjoying this article?
Share it with the world!
Customer Experience Design: 4 Ways to Improve Your Site
| ⚡ Quick Answer Customer experience (CX) is the sum of every interaction between your company and your customers — and most companies overestimate how well they deliver it. CX design takes a customer-centric approach, considering customer needs at every point of interaction to create a unified experience across all your assets. On your website, four things move the needle: a personalized tone, social proof, straightforward support, and an easy purchase process. |
The Delivery Gap
According to a market-based research report, 80% of companies believe they provide an “excellent” customer experience. However, when customers were asked about this, only 8% of customers agreed with this fact. You can call it a “delivery gap”. (Bain & Company, “Closing the delivery gap”, 2005)
Customer experience is the sum of all possible interactions between your company and customers. It involves interactions at all levels, from obvious print ads, Facebook posts and business cards, to details such as the style of the help desk or the way your brick-and-mortar location is decorated.
According to a report by Forrester, “Unmet customer expectations are resulting in churn; the lack of digital transformation gains is translating to loss of market share; industry lines that protected some are crumbling; and longstanding, durable business models are failing.” Therefore, organizations must take creative approaches to digital optimization to reduce “delivery gaps” and increase conversion rates. (Forrester 2018 Predictions, November 2017)
McKinsey reports that 70% of the shopping experience revolves around customers’ sentiments along with the journey from being a general audience to a brand promoter. Therefore, providing suitable CX services for new and old customers has become necessary for enterprises. Therefore, the web design trend is now moving towards the latest buzzword CX (Customer Experience). That shift is part of a wider move covered in digital transformation across industries and the leadership challenges it creates.
Why customer experience?
It’s about bringing all touchpoints together to establish a thoughtful and consistent interaction with your brand. From small businesses to commercial brands, it is becoming more and more important at all levels. CX is not really a new concept, but now it has a name (and a label); you may have considered CX for your business. Unifying those touchpoints is exactly what Salesforce Data Cloud is built for, and Sales, Service and Marketing Cloud is where most of that interaction actually happens.
Nowadays, all customers have unlimited information at their fingertips, which has changed their consumption and buying habits. Finding another service, doing business remotely or purchasing abroad is no longer an obstacle, and all just is a few taps away.
| Industry Insight Your website is an important point of service that can make or break the overall experience. |
Every interaction with your company is a decision point. Creating a memorable, relaxing and enjoyable experience for your customers from start to finish will help your business stand out; this is where your CX comes into play. Your website is an important point of service that can make or break the overall experience. That is where front-end development stops being a design question and becomes a business one.
CX design adopts a customer-centric approach. Customer needs are considered at every point of interaction, and the goal is to create a unified experience across all your assets.
| How wide is your own delivery gap? Most teams are surprised by the distance between what they intend their site to feel like and what visitors actually experience. |
How to Design the Best CX for Your Website?
Well, if you can ensure that your customers are at the centre of your design strategy, then it becomes easy to create unique experiences that make your customers want to convert. Here are some smart tips on how to design the best CX for your website.
|
Use Personalized Tone in Website Content Throughout the content on your website, you can use an informal or more personalized tone to convey your message to potential customers. For example, the navigation bar, your landing page, product pages and blog posts should be friendly and engaging in tone. Likewise, words like we, you, community, and collaboration should be included in your vocabulary. When writing business website content, it is best to avoid using too professional and robotic tone. Make your customers feel that your business is customer-centric with a personalized tone. |
|
Rely On Social Proof Anything from reviews and recommendations to customer interviews can become social proof of your product or business. This kind of social proof is very effective to attract repeat customers to buy again or to make deals with new audiences. This kind of social proof will add a lot of trust and credibility to your brand. You will find quite a few options of different platforms that can help you to shape customer comments and reviews into such content that can be showcased on your website’s landing page. If customers are satisfied with your website service, they can send a “smiley face” emoticon as a comment. If they are not completely satisfied with your service, the “unhappy” emoji is for them. You can also do this for your website. When you provide proof of service and product quality from existing customers, people will begin to trust your brand. They will begin to see you as a reliable provider of services and goods. |
|
Provide Straightforward Support Be sure to provide website visitors with an easy way to contact your support agent from anywhere on the site map. For example, suppose a customer is reading a blog post of yours, and you want to contact a support agent while reading it, you need to make sure that they only need to click once or twice to complete this task. Alternatively, you can add this support page to the footer of your website, or you can display it in the navigation bar for clarity. When you let people easily connect with you, you can enjoy a healthy user engagement rate. |
|
Make the Purchase Process Easy Whether you rely on a one-time purchase or a recurring subscription, you need to make sure that the checkout process is very simple. Customers don’t like the method of wasting valuable time by requiring multiple identity checks, confirmations, and other purchase information before allowing them to purchase your product. So, what should you do? Well |
| Check the complete checkout process periodically to figure out how many clicks it needs to finish the buying process. | |
| Measure the degree of intrusive identity checks, extra discounts, and pop-up windows. |
The simpler the visitor’s product purchase process, the better for your business. If you can provide a great customer experience throughout the visitor’s journey, as brownie points, they can recommend your services or products to their social circles.
Support is where CX is won or lost most visibly. Salesforce Agentforce and Einstein AI across Sales, Marketing and Service are how many teams now staff that layer, with Einstein Copilot assisting agents directly. On the delivery side, DevOps has a measurable effect on customer satisfaction.
| Turning CX intent into something customers actually feel Tone, social proof, support and checkout are design decisions before they are technology decisions — but they need both to work. |
Wrapping Up
Well, adopting CX enhancement practices will undoubtedly increase the return on investment (ROI) of your business and lay a solid foundation for the continued growth of your brand. To provide an interesting customer experience, always try to understand customer voice and customer-centric trends. You need to make sure that no matter where your customers find you, you are the best representative of your brand.
Understanding that customer voice at scale is a data problem as much as a design one — see seven ways business intelligence can improve your business and the role of data analytics in organizational success. For the build itself, choosing the right web development company, product engineering services and quality assurance decide whether the experience holds up in practice, while mobile apps and custom mobile development extend it beyond the browser. Intelligent operations and a Salesforce consulting partner connect it to the wider business.
| Key Takeaways
|
| Ready to close your own delivery gap? Impressico helps businesses design customer-centric websites and applications where tone, support, social proof and checkout all pull in the same direction. 🚀 Start a CX ProjectThe Importance of Front-End Development → 30-minute conversation · no commitment |
Impressico Business Solutions — UI/UX design, front-end development and customer experience consulting for businesses building for the web.
IBS
Similar articles
