Improve Customer Satisfaction With These Key Website Changes
It’s now hard to imagine that there was a time when a customers only point of contact with a business was calling them up on the phone or physically visiting them at their business premises. Times have changed a lot, and now companies can operate anytime and anywhere without ever directly interacting with their customers over the phone or in person. All of this is only possible with help from a business website.
As technology has evolved, and now that having a company website is the accepted norm, it has opened up a whole world of opportunities for businesses to grow. Having a website enables businesses to sell their goods and services right across the world with no need for a physical presence at all. However, as competition grows, the need for a website and a strong online presence is no longer something that’s nice to have. Instead, having an online presence, which includes both social media pages and a website, is now a necessity.
In today’s competitive business climate, it’s not even enough to have a professional website for your company. Your website also needs to be optimized so your potential customers can easily find your business due to it ranking high up on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Focusing on SEO may help your potential customers find your business in the first place, but convincing them to make a purchase or engage with your content is a completely different task. To convert website visitors into loyal customers, you need a site that has a strong focus on customer satisfaction. You also need to have a willingness to adapt and update your website to keep up with the changing needs of your customers. When it comes to improving the customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction levels, your website has a major role to play. However, it can be challenging to know where to begin and which website changes should be made.
Keep reading to discover the key website changes that can improve customer satisfaction for your website users, and ensure they return again and again to buy from your website.
Assess Your Website
Before you start making any major website changes, it’s helpful to consider your website from a customer’s viewpoint. Imagine you’re navigating onto your site for the very first time. Then, think about what you want to do while on the website, what type of content would you look for? Is the content easy to find? Does the website look impressive? Does the design of the website align with your perception of the brand? Asking each of these questions and making note on your observations from spending time navigating the front page of your website is the perfect starting point for understanding how it may be perceived by your customers, and what more needs to be done to improve it.
Improve Navigation
You need to make your website as appealing and easy as possible for potential customers to use if you want them to actually spend time finding out about your products and services and to make a purchase. Carrying out an assessment of your website as mentioned above, is an excellent way to see it from an entirely fresh perspective, Doing this can provide some helpful insights for you to work with before you start making any changes to your site. However, it’s also really helpful to identify potential pain points customers may face while using your website.
Thinking about the customer journey is an excellent way to gain a greater understanding of what your site visitors are looking for when using your website. Carrying out some customer journey mapping before you make changes to your website will help you to ensure the changes you introduce are both worthwhile and most importantly, will deliver value and benefit your target audience. Understanding the customer journey means you can ensure that your website reflects this and aligns perfectly with the way users will interact with it.
Along with customer journey mapping, it’s also helpful to assess your website’s current performance. This will give you a clearer idea of how customers currently interact with it and will provide clues as to any issues they face when using your website. By assessing user data from your website, you will be able to establish which pages your users spend the longest looking at, the most common search terms used by visitors within your website, and how they navigate through your website. This data is invaluable when you’re trying to make your website easier to navigate and more user-friendly for every potential customer who visits it.
Increase Speed and Performance
A website that is slow to load and constantly buffering is immediately off-putting for your website visitors. In fact, landing on a site that takes a long time for each page to load is likely to have potential customers hitting the back button, returning to the search results, and clicking through to the website of one of your competitors.
Consumers want fast results. People have very little patience for websites that buffer and take an age to load. So, if your website is unresponsive and slow, visitors to your site are likely to get frustrated and leave.
In the digital age, it can be helpful to think of a slow website in the same way as a customer waiting in a long queue in a store. Both of these situations are frustrating for customers and likely to cause them to abandon their purchases. Taking action to make your website more responsive and faster to load significantly enhances the customer experience. Tackling issues causing your website to be slow can help you to reduce abandoned shopping carts, encourage website visitors to spend more time exploring your site, and generally creates a much better impression of your business.
You know that speeding up your website and making it more responsive is important. However, knowing how to actually do this can be a little more confusing.
The first thing to do is to analyze your website’s current speeds. You can do this using a tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights. The tool will then return results, including suggestions on how you can make your web pages load faster.
Further ways to increase the speed of your website include:
Switching from a shared server to a dedicated server.
Reviewing your site’s code and cleaning it up where needed.
Compressing images to decrease their file size.
These small changes can make a vast difference to your website’s loading times and make for a more responsive experience for your website’s users. It’s essential to keep in mind that working on improving the speed of your website isn’t a one-time only task. This is something that requires ongoing attention. So, it’s advisable to check page loading speeds regularly and making any fixes where required to keep offering the best browsing experience for visitors to your website.
Provide Assistance Day and Night
The beauty of having a business website is that customers can make purchases at any time of the day or night. It doesn’t matter where in the world your website visitors are located, each of them is a potential customer and so it’s vital to keep this in mind when working on your website. Having customers buying your products from your website while you’re asleep is certainly a great feeling. But this also means that these same customers could be experiencing issues with your website, or may have questions about your products that they want to ask before they complete their purchase. Receiving a fast response to their questions is essential in this situation. If you can’t provide a response right away, the chances are your customer will abandon their purchase and head over to the website of one of your competitors to buy from them.
Obviously, your team can’t be on hand 24 hours a day. This is where chatbots can help. Using a chatbot to answer many of the most common questions your business receives from customers can significantly improve customer satisfaction, and help prevent lost sales. However, it’s essential you use the best ai conversational platform to offer the most positive experience for your customers. Choosing the right AI platform to generate your responses can make a big difference to the service your customers receive. Your customers need to receive meaningful, relevant answers to their questions, and the best AI platforms can ensure this happens.
Final Thoughts
As so much of a business’s footprint is now online, it makes sense to dedicate time and resources to website improvements. As you can see, there are many potential improvements that can be made, and each of these can significantly improve the experience of customers using your website.
Implementing website changes that will enhance customer satisfaction offers many benefits. The easier it is to navigate your website and to find exactly what they’re looking for, the more likely it is that website visitors will become customers who return to your website to make purchases again and again.
