Today’s customer-experience landscape is fiercely competitive and quite complex, requiring businesses to address the challenges by investing in a digital-experience strategy. Providing a positive digital experience requires a visually pleasing interface, driving engagement and cohesion across all channels. The explosion of smartphones, tablets, connected devices and social media apps mean businesses must plan and deliver consistent experience across all these platforms.
The all too commonplace, out-of-the-box digital experience fails to leave a lasting impression on customers, due to the fact that it lacks a coherent personality. Many businesses look to their competition to see what is working for them or what their website consists of and mimics it. However, businesses must establish their own brand, personality and visual design. Engaging and dynamic customer experiences are a key competitive advantage that should not be missed or taken lightly.
Site design considerations
In designing the aesthetics and functionality of a website, businesses tend to focus on visual simplicity and ease of navigation. Many businesses have redesigned their sites, with the focus on making the site more intuitively organized, generally based on activities or needs, and easier to navigate and use. Having the sole focus on only the look and feel of the site instead of the content is a common pitfall in site design and redesign. Customers need both simplicity and depth. Thus, common best-practice features of site design and improvement should include:
• Emphasis on the most used features, such as service pages, learning-based content and support pages.
• Recognition of a wide variety of individual customer segments on the home page, including the size of the business and industry.
• Offer targeted and engaging content with size-of-business appropriate resources and tools, which provide tactile user experiences, while ensuring a unified platform for content, community and commerce across all channels.
• Aim to manage, deliver, measure and optimize experiences consistently across every digital touch point.
• Review the site and related platforms for any possible user experience problems that could potentially create negative feelings about the brand by frustrating and annoying customers.
More and more provider websites and platforms are moving away from largely rehashing information regardless of the business segment, thus creating custom portals and links to unique information. Providing these distinct experiences for each business segment and industry serviced helps businesses avoid potential pitfalls, such as unintentionally alienating key segments.
Integrated digital experiences
To deliver effective customer experiences across a portfolio of channels, providers need to be aware of their customers’ behaviors and make the most appropriate touch points for learning, engagement, purchasing and support available at each step of the user’s journey. Offering dedicated business resources is becoming increasingly common; however, the development of these resources varies greatly. For those providers seeking to integrate resources into their digital experience, there are several elements to consider in the development, including:
• Targeted: Resources must be specific to the audience to offer real value. Not only should vendors create a separate portal and experience for small and midsized businesses, but other resources, such as the industry portal or community site, should have targeted material according to the size of the business.
• Multimedia: Leveraging several types of rich media will keep users engaged. While written content still appeals to many users, podcasts, webinars, graphics and videos tend to be more engaging and will likely encourage repeat visits.
• Interaction: Making the user part of a community increases visits. Businesses that are integrating interaction and tactile features, such as expert advice, live support chats, community chats and even more importantly, leveraging social media platforms, are excelling in customer gains and retention.
Digital discovery and resonance
While some businesses are providing a large number of tools and content across their websites, they are often poorly executed, not integrated well, hard to access and use and, in many cases, are not updated with the frequency required to encourage repeat visits and deeper navigation.
A positive customer experience should meet customer expectations, which is why incorporating a clear understanding of target customers, their goals and how they accomplish their goals is essential to creating successful digital interactions. It is critical to identify target customers, their behaviors and what they need to accomplish their goals. The experience customers have in digital touch-points forge their impressions of a brand, so it is important for providers to have a clear understanding of how well their brand resonates by reviewing how well the site communicates brand attributes through the use of content, functionality, language, typography, imagery, layout, relevance and production values.
Businesses must focus on their ability to provide relevant online experiences to business decision-makers. Aspects such as online learning, site design. and messaging and e-commerce capabilities are critical and must be tailored to the customer.
The Web channel is a powerful environment that enables two-way discovery: Customers discover capabilities while the business discovers their needs and preferences. It is recommended that providers create experiences to get to know their customers online and use this knowledge to respond to them more intelligently everywhere – online and off. The use of compelling and inviting visuals helps providers demonstrate that they want customers to engage with them.
Online purchasing
With such fierce competition in the current marketplace, providers should be driven to offer their best products, services and prices up front, as readily available information drives sales, promotes customer loyalty and is a key factor in providing an effective online purchasing experience. Businesses today require a gamut of information to continue their upward growth trajectory. Therefore, offering price transparency options up front are both useful and expected by business decision-makers regardless of the type of product or service, telecom or non-tech.
Most business processes are heavily reliant upon technology, so it makes sense to shop online for business-related items. However, providers will not only need to present a visually appealing store front, but insightful and useful information and tools to enhance the online experience overall. Tools that ensure a quick and intuitive online purchasing process are key to securing today’s busy business customer. The more intuitive and “the quicker the better” experience ensures business productivity. Businesses have transformed from passive and repetitive to active and innovative, and the timing of information and communication has never been such a critical element in terms of the success of modern businesses to allow them to cope with the ever-changing market dynamics.
Heather Taylor brings to Compass Intelligence her entrepreneurial spirit and extensive knowledge on Web-based experiences. Her analysis on online behaviors, trends, challenges and best practices helps businesses create website strategies and tactics that deliver value to their prospects and customers. Her research covers various sizes of business and industries, with a specific emphasis on the use of Web portal platforms and online communities to shape customer exploration, engagement and buying behaviors. In her research, Taylor also covers such topics as influencers, e-commerce, online buying behaviors and trends, website operations and optimization, and social computing. Taylor’s background spans both business marketing and telecommunications-related roles. Prior to joining Compass Intelligence, Taylor worked as a senior account executive with TexLink Communications, a privately held, full-service provider of voice and data communications services. Prior to joining TexLink, Taylor served as marketing director for AT2 Communications, a worldwide distributor of complex wide area and local area networking equipment solutions.
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