How to improve the online customer experience

By Henry Brown

Are you looking for ways to improve your customer service? Customer experience is a significant consideration for small businesses, but achieving a positive customer experience for every customer isn’t always easy. Creating an excellent customer experience is all about surpassing expectations, and delivering a level of service that ensures customer satisfaction.

Providing a positive customer experience goes beyond the face-to-face service offered by your staff, and beyond the customer support provided over the phone. A positive customer experience is formed at the beginning of the customer journey and is vital in persuading customers to choose your business over your competitors. Nowadays, the first impression of a business that customers receive is likely to be online. Most consumers carry out their product research by comparing and evaluating products on a company’s website. This means that online presence and support are vital to providing a positive customer experience and keeping those customers returning to your business time and again. There are several ways to enhance your customer’s experience of your business online. Here are the areas that you need to focus on:

Website usability

A well-designed website is an essential component for any business wanting to improve their levels of customer satisfaction. Web development is at the heart of your online offering, so building a website with optimal functionality is a must. To prevent your customers from becoming frustrated when using your site, you need to ensure that it is easy to navigate and also works across both desktop platforms and mobile devices. Ensuring that your website is developed to provide a positive user experience is fundamental to the customer experience when visiting your site.

As well as ensuring that the website is developed with the customer in mind, your content also needs to make life as easy as possible for your customers. Your written content should follow a logical format, with clear and concise product descriptions to help visitors to your site evaluate their purchase decisions easily. Images used on the website should also be clear and high quality, so customers can easily see the products.

Online support

In the past, chatbots were seen as an annoying pop-up that couldn’t answer even the most basic customer queries. Luckily, artificial intelligence has developed at a fast rate in recent years, and chatbots have become a useful tool for providing customer support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Chatbots are an excellent way to answer customer queries and are a handy pop-up to use to reduce abandoned baskets and boost your online conversion rate.

Frequently asked question pages may seem a little outdated, but they are extremely useful for customers and an essential feature on any website. Enabling your customers to see answers to the most commonly asked questions that your customer service team receives cuts down on the calls and email queries that your support team needs to answer. Having a lower volume of queries will help your team to respond efficiently and ensure a positive customer experience.

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Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.

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