Improve ROI with a better UX
It’s just a couple of years back when most of us had a “secretary” to handle all your mundane tasks- booking flights, arrange meetings, remembering important dates, managing your schedule and even shopping gifts. But with resource optimization being the next big thing it’s a thing of past. Today, We’ve got used to doing things on our own We have got a calendar, project management tools, online shopping, web booking and check-ins, all at a click of a mouse. Customer experience and User Experience are the two key differentiators determining success for organizations. And it’s for this precise reason that’s giants like Apple.Inc, Google, Airbnb have integrated UX as a part of their core business process.
Where UX And CX Meet
User experience is a subset of customer experience. Whereas, customer experience encompasses every interaction a customer has with the company or brand including customer support, advertising, selling, etc. User experience is always to be seen in a larger context of customer experience else it makes no sense even after have it right. To say, you’ve designed a great website attracting a lot of traffic. But if your customer support is not able to handle the queries, the overall customer experience turns sour and the same applies vice versa.
When a company invests in UX of its products or websites, it gets a chance to improve its ROI in the following areas
- Increase in conversion/revenue- greater ease of use leads to enhanced brand loyalty and customer retention
- Increases customer satisfaction- customers love well-designed products that exactly meet their needs.
- Lower support calls- pre-empting likely user problems via UX techniques lower’s the need for calling support for help thus leading to cost-effectiveness.
- Reduced development waste- User research helps you know exactly what your customer needs and values thus bringing in more development efficiency. When organizations invest in UX during a project’s concept phase, they reduce product development cycles by 33 to 50 percent.
Essential UX techniques that can improve CX
Good UX design ensures customer experience goes up many notches by boosting customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and eventually leading to customer retention. When MacAfee started integrating usability testing to understand more about its customer needs, the company saved 90% in support expense cost. The essential techniques that you can integrate into your UX to improve CX are-
Creating persona will help you get into the mind of your customers and let you know what are their needs, behavior, interests, likes, motivation, and concerns, Knowing exactly your target audiences help you tailor your UX design to best suit your customers needs and eliminate any pain points they have and deliver an awesome experience.
Customer Journey Mapping
You need to identify the key touchpoints your customer is going to have with your product and try to ensure every interaction is as seamless as possible. Most often, we do the mistake of mapping the customer journey from a company perspective. We do what we assume our customers would be behaving. Instead, step into each of the customer personas and map the journey.
Wireframing
Having a basic skeleton of a page helps you prioritize all the elements taking customer behavior into account. It shows you how things will flow across all devices and help you gather early feedback. On the other hand, wireframing help makes content development more effective. It is easy to establish an information hierarchy and arrange content accordingly.
Usability Testing
By performing user testing you can easily find out the bottlenecks in your UX design and fix them even before the design goes live. At Designour, as a principle, we do usability testing for 95% of use cases to ensure the experience can be as seamless as possible.
UX from the customer perspective
When you look at UX from a customer perspective, you can have 3 possible outcomes- Meet expectation, Exceed Expectations and Shape Expectations
Meet Expectation- When you meet your customer’s expectations by being what they expected, customers feel you care about them. They feel good at interacting with your product. Every company should strive for this to sustain themselves in this competitive market
Exceed Expectation- When you exceed your customer’s expectations is when customers start trusting you and you earn their loyalty. They start spreading positive things about your products in their close circle. The phenomenal success of Airbnb can be attributed to this. The positive reviews, ratings, and word of mouth publicity have all translated to them being in the top of their game
Shape- This is where your customers feel they want to buy more. They are even open to new functionality and extension. We’ve seen with both Google and Amazon. Google started with a search engine and met its user expectations for 10 years before bringing in new products. Google built its customer trust and loyalty year after year by exceeding the expectation. The same is with Amazon. The journey which started with brick and motor book store has moved into everything store with a market cap of $260 billion.
Takeaway
Customers don’t expect a “No” in any of their interactions with the company. They want to know why and how. And just like a conversation, the flow of information needs to be seamless. Better UX will lead to increase customer satisfaction which in turn will lead to great ROI. According to a Jacob Neilson Research, the rule of 1:10:100 incapsulates the value of UX. Spend 1 dollar in User Research or Spend 10 dollars in changing the design or 100 dollars in changing the product. A 10% spend on UX can get you an 83% increase in conversion lift. The earlier you start investing in UX, the better your CX is going to be and translating to more ROI.
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