A great and effective UX (user experience) for your website or customer portal is essential to be remembered or to remain distinctive. Improving your conversion is an open door and will keep your customers with you - even when it comes to retention. But what is sometimes underestimated is the long-term effect.
Positive UX also affects your efficiency, your costs and even the satisfaction of your own employees. It is not for nothing that large tech companies such as Dropbox, IBM and Uber have adjusted their UX versus Development ratio from 1 to 25 to 1 to 7 in recent years.
Make your visitor a fan
Imagine two supermarkets. In terms of distance, just as far from home and exactly the same price range. Despite the similarities, you are more likely to come back to the supermarket with clear quality, experience and that friendly and helpful but slightly chaotic cashier than to the competitor with un-rivaled shopping aisles and rude staff. This is how it works online: with a logical and user-friendly interface that matches what you are looking for, you stay on the website much more often and click further.
To achieve that usefulness, you need to know who your target audience is and what their pains and gains are:
At what moments does your website make the difference?
Do you offer relevant solutions?
How do you distinguish yourself from your competition?
By scoring above expectations, you surprise your visitor and you have a fan. With a quick click or, for example, the addition of an animation that puts a smile on your face.
Fact: Visitors decide within 10 seconds whether they want to stay on your website. On mobile, this is even shorter; 6 seconds. If you consider that 1 second means 27% of the conversion, an investment in your interface quickly pays for itself.
Close the back door
Creating content for the sake of content is wasteful. While a business needs to create content for newsletters, emails, social media, blogs and website needs, that content needs to be part of a content strategy. This strategy should be linked to the sales funnel to push potential customers along their journey.
Go beyond just creating a content calendar and focus on keywords. Assign content to the sales funnel, find the areas that are not being maintained and create a strategy that takes customers to the next stage.
Start at the beginning and ensure a good online foundation. Think carefully about how it suits the customer. Obvious obstacles such as a maze of content pages or the use of elaborate forms. Because in today's market almost all visitors go to another provider after a bad online experience - after all, there are plenty of them. Research by the Temkin Group shows that it is not necessary for current customers to switch to a competitor, leaving those customers out of your reach.
88% of visitors say they go directly to a competitor after a bad online experience.
When it comes down to it, such as when a customer is insecure or needs to perform a slightly more difficult task on your website, a poor user experience creates resistance. If you offer thoughtful user flows with smart and attractive interactive solutions at these times, your visitor will tend to click further and stay on your website longer.
More efficient business processes
Anything you can solve with technology saves your employees time. Consider using an extensive FAQ (frequently asked questions) or reporting changes to personal data via a customer portal: it all saves human actions within your organisation. It also gives your customer the feeling that they can contact your business 24/7. Using a customer portal has more advantages. It also has an impact on your internal processes; For example, for one of our clients, we reduced an entire department's overhead by 31% through the development of a new client portal. This paid for itself within the year.
Growth towards long-term customers
Satisfied customers are the best advertisement: free and highly credible. After a positive experience with your company, they are more likely to recommend you to others. Investing in optimising UX for your current customer base rather than incurring new customer acquisition costs will ultimately pay off. When you translate that into numbers, it means:
An increase of 5% more customer loyalty leads to an average growth of 25%, and in some cases even up to 95% of your profitability. Retention is mainly about a huge increase in the customer's life: with a retention of 80%, a customer who spends € 1,200 per year is worth € 6,000. With a retention increase of 5%, the value of the same customer is suddenly 8000 euros!
In addition, if you spend every dollar solving customer demand in the design stage when developing a website or portal, you will save a lot of money compared to solving customer demand in the development stage. Tenfold and a hundredfold after the first release: retrofitting in the application or in your service is very very time-consuming and expensive.
Every dollar we invest in usability and UX yields 10 to 100x.
Many companies measure their customer loyalty with the NPS (Net Promoter Score). An excellent management tool to gain insight into how your customer experiences your brand. The challenge is then to convert the obtained data into actual improvements in your website or customer portal. This can be solved by using effective UX.
Happy employees = financial growth
And last but not least: the development of a state-of-the-art new website or customer portal for your company also has an effect on employees. The ease of use improves the work processes and the investment in the people ensures more involvement and connection. A strong, beautiful brand ensures that employees are eager to identify and internalise with it. In addition, it creates a positive image of your organisation that is happy to be shared with the outside world.
Only when employees are strongly committed to the brand do they start to think and act in a certain way, guaranteeing the specific results that the company is looking for. When employees internalise the purpose and values of the organisation, they make decisions that clearly support the stated priorities. Ultimately, they design and deliver customer experiences that fit the brand and strengthen the brand's competitive position.
Once you've taken care of ensuring a great user-experience, a next logical step is to work on making your website more visible to search engines and actual users that are in the process of searching for products and services like yours. Get started and learn more about the top SEO trends for 2023 or get started right away and request a free SEO audit from one of our SEO consultants.