Whether you’re building a website for the first time or experienced in the website realm, having a website that works for your user audience is critical. Typically, you take into account your audience’s location, their age, or interests when making website decisions. Google Analytics has an entire section of statistics devoted to your website audience composition. I encourage you to review this periodically to keep current with your existing audience.
The next step is usually to brainstorm what is the best way to communicate to that audience, or how to get your message across. As a web development company, we try to help our clients build that customer experience. What you want to achieve is an impression that is lasting, talked about at the water cooler, remembered as being easy to use, and simple to quickly find pertinent information.
Three basic tips to improve that experience are as follows:
1) Setup usability tests for your demographic audience. Get a few individuals together from that group, and a few tasks you want these users to accomplish. These tasks need to be specific and critical to your business. For example, add a shoe to your shopping cart and purchase it, or fill out a ‘contact us’ form to inquire with a realtor. The goal is to discover where the shortfalls are and address them.
2) Have meaningful conversations with your users. Interact with them when they call or e-mail you. Don’t always fold at the customer-is-always-right mantra; sometimes this is obviously appropriate. Other times it is best to stick to your business policies and values. Ensure that interaction and communication with your users is clear and concise, and your site’s functionality is intuitive. If you’re too wordy or tools are hard to use, then your users will abandon ship quickly.
3) Engage your customers through mobile devices and social media. Keep the lines of communication open, or design infographics to draw in your customer. Users relate to imagery, but only when tastefully done.
You can also engage your customers more effectively through an omni-channel experience. This gets your users participating the most. The omni-channel perspective is different than the multi-channel setup in the integration and ease of access with everything. The customer service representative in the store will be able to immediately reference the customer's previous purchases and preferences just as easily as the customer service representative on the phone can or the customer service webchat representative can. Or the customer can use a desktop computer to check inventory by store on the company's website, purchase the item later on with a smartphone or tablet, and pick up the product at the customer's chosen location.
Has your approach with your customers been successful?
Source:
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/omnichannel