How to Improve Customer Experience Through Web Design

With businesses putting a premium on customer experience, customers are getting more empowered by the day, and rightly so. After all, the money getting spent on products and services is theirs, which entitles them to the best possible customer service businesses can muster.

One indicator of the power customers these days have over businesses is their ability to hold businesses accountable for bad service. With the proliferation of social media sites and business directory services that feature customer reviews, customers have the power to make or break, say, a restaurant with rude food servers.

That power extends to the online world. Websites are expected to provide optimum customer service to their visitors, from their online shopping experience to post-purchase customer service. By delivering top-notch customer experience, consumers will have a positive perception of your brand, and will likely rave about it online, which can only lead to good things for your business.

The quality of a customer’s experience when visiting a website relies heavily on its web design. If you want to give your customers a positive experience as they explore your site, then you have to make sure your website design does the following:

Makes Navigation Intuitive and Convenient

If there’s one thing that almost always guarantees that customers are going to have a bad experience while exploring your site, it would be getting lost trying to find the content they want to check out. No one likes wasting their time getting sent on a wild goose chase, all because of lousy website navigation. Customers will drop your site right away and help send your bounce rates soaring.

For great customer experience, navigating your site needs to be effortless and intuitive. You would want your customers to get where they want to go within your website with just a click or two. So, organize all your navigational elements, add a working search feature as well as anchored navigation bars, create drop-down menus, and do some internal linking to improve website navigation.

Leads to Faster-Loading Pages

Customers will always want the pages they visit to load fast, and the definition of “fast” in relation to the Internet seems to change by the day.

There was a time when “fast” page loading used to be four seconds or so. Today, a page that takes about three seconds to load is already considered slow. A page load time of two seconds now seems to be the norm, with each second beyond that leading to higher bounce rates.

If the pages of your website fit most customers’ definition of “slow,” then you might want to take a long, hard look at your web hosting provider and consider switching to a different one that can provide faster server speeds.

You can also make some adjustments to your web design to increase your page load speed. Start with going for a simpler web design that uses a lot of white space. Minimize the use of heavy graphic design elements because they do slow the site down. The same goes for sliders and carousels. If your website features large images, try to compress and optimize them to speed things up. Custom fonts make the site look good, but they can also affect page loading speed, so minimize their use, or better yet, don’t use them at all.

Delivers Prompt Customer Assistance With a Chatbot

It’s only been a couple of years or so when chatbots were touted to be the next big thing in customer service, but they have already fulfilled that promise, and they’re only bound to become more widespread in the coming years.

If your website doesn’t have a chatbot yet, we recommend you put up one. With a chatbot, customers with questions or concerns about your products or services can instantly get the assistance they need, even when no one’s manning your phone lines. Considering how some customers don’t feel comfortable talking to a real person, a chatbot can go a long way in getting them to loosen up when availing of your assistance.

While it’s true that the chatbot system still has plenty of room for improvement, the AI used in chatbots is becoming increasingly advanced.  It’s only a matter of time before customers won’t be able to tell the difference between talking to a flesh-and-blood customer representative and an innovative chatbot.

Streamlines the Purchasing Process

There is no question about the way e-commerce websites have made shopping a very convenient experience. However, like the chatbot, it’s not perfect, not when most e-commerce websites still make their customers go through a whole parade of identity checks that make the entire buying process longer and, in many instances, frustrating.

Thankfully, many e-commerce sites are already tweaking their web design to make the entire checkout process more streamlined. Some have kept their identity checks to a minimum, while others have reduced the number of questions that customers have to answer just so they can spend their money patronizing your business. There are also e-commerce websites that have cut down or eliminated the use of pop-ups that carry more offers because they can be irritating to shoppers as well.

Makes the Site Look Good on Mobile Devices

Mobile users have long outnumbered desktop users. That means that any experience people might have with your website will likely be with a mobile device. If you want that customer experience to be a positive one, it’s imperative for your website to have a mobile-friendly web design. If it doesn’t, then you cannot expect billions of mobile users to have anything good to say about your website and your business.

Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly don’t display well on smartphones and tablets. If mobile users access it, it won’t take them long to drop it. They’re not going to waste their time on a website with clickable elements that aren’t optimized for touch, unfriendly navigation, and all the other things that come with a non-responsive design.

A focus on customer experience will improve your business in all respects, and you can do it, starting with your web design.

responsive web design – DepositPhotos

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