What would you vote for?
A different business idea or a common business idea with a different experience?
I prefer the second one. Every business can be a special one if they focus on the right customer experience. Coming on to your Sitecore website, what makes it special is the experience served to your visitors.
There are several strategies that companies can use to enhance the customer experience on their websites. These strategies include:
- Improving the overall design and usability of the website to make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for. Navigation should be simple and easy to use. One such example is introducing a search functionality on your Sitecore website.
If you are an e-commerce website, Sitecore XC provides you with clear and detailed product information presentation and helps you introduce high-quality photos and videos, that help customers make informed purchasing decisions. You can integrate a wide range of payment options that makes the checkout process as smooth and streamlined as possible. Read more about the benefits of using Sitecore XC. - Be one click away: Your customers want to reach out to you, and they should be able to do it in just one click. This means there should be clear contact mechanisms on your homepage itself. If you have phone numbers/helpline numbers listed on the homepage, make them clickable. A live chat window for someone to help you – will be writing more about it in my next point, and clear contact options.
- Introduce a Live Chat feature: I am always a fan of this feature especially if you are in a business where customer support is of utmost requirement. Implementing a live chat allows customers to get immediate answers to their questions and concerns. In my career, I have seen business accelerating by introducing a simple live chat option on their website. However, I would also like to stress on the right use of the live chat window. Have noticed websites in the past where the live chat window pop-ups as soon as the customer is on your website. Think of the experience, you are there to read some information, you don’t want the live chat to pop up immediately which doesn’t allow them to do what they are here for. Wait for a few seconds before popping up the window and once they close it, wait for a few minutes before you show it again.
- Sitecore’s Personalization: Make your customer feel special by personalizing the content you present to them. Using the Sitecore personalization feature, you can provide personalized recommendations based on customers’ past purchases and browsing history.
- Mobile Responsiveness: Most of your customers today use your website via their mobiles/tabs. Creating a user-friendly mobile version of your website provides a great experience for customers who are using their smartphones to shop.
- Clear Contact Information: It is always a good idea to provide different ways of contacting your customers. These can be introducing a special contact us page with clear modes in which your customers can contact you. Offer multiple ways including email, phone, and social media, to ensure that they can get help when they need it.
- Faster loading times: Ensure that your website loads faster and meets Google Web Vital Standards. Web Vitals or Core Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. Your customer has an experience with high-speed internet and a slow-loading website can impact that experience for them. Moreover, when they leave a website because of its slow loading speed, search engines like Google make a note of that too. This also impacts your SEO rankings.
- A secure website is what they need: Meet any security concerns or ensure you address things that raise a lack of trust on your website. This can be from having a proper SSL certificate active on your website to addressing all privacy laws of the region.
- Clear Navigation: Though I have touched on this point above, I would like to focus once again on this. Creating a clear navigation structure helps your customer to navigate easily. Don’t go for a multi-level complicated navigation structure but vote for a simple easy-to-access/understand structure. If you are a big content website and you come up with a new blog every day, rather than introducing many different categories of blogs, you can rather have one that says blog and then include your entire blog content under it. You can then differentiate them based on your topic tags.
If you are an e-commerce website, having a clear product category can do wonders.
Overall, the key to enhancing the customer experience on your Sitecore website is to focus on making the site easy to use and providing customers with the information and support they need to make confident purchasing decisions.