UI & UX Essentials: 7 ways to enhance your customer journey
Customer experience is the key and the secret to the success of any business online; designing a strong customer journey facilitates easy decision making for your potential customers. It is what turns leads into buying customers. Product designers spend time, money and effort to ensure they master their customer experience and create customer journey maps.
According to a study conducted lately by the Baymard institute in 2021, almost 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts. Wondering why? Studies have shown that it is probably taking customers many steps to get from point A to B when it should only be done in one step, leading to frustration and abandoning of the cart; this is probably a result of a poor customer journey map.
First, let’s identify What is a Customer Journey?
Customer journey is the experience your client has with your company when engaging with your business. It includes every point of contact a client has with your business; it even includes the client’s identification of his needs and researching the different solutions available, and deciding on a solution. It also covers product-level interaction and how the product was promoted to the client, customer support experiences, purchasing experience, and even if the client decided to discontinue using the product. The user experience is all the elements that form the interface, like layout, visual design, content, branding, and touchpoints.
A great positive user experience is one that meets your client’s needs without any issues.
Now, what is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a visual design or a graph of a customer’s experience with your website or application. It provides an insight into the needs and problems of potential clients, which directly impact their actions. By understanding this, you will be able to boost your customer experience leading to higher conversion rates.
During their journey, customers see ads, talk to customer service representatives, read reviews of other clients and add items to their cart and check out.
Improving UX/UI designs for your website or application will increase user satisfaction and accessibility and create a positive customer journey experience, leading to increased conversion.
Here is how to improve the customer journey for your business:
Set Objectives for the map
First and most important, you and your team need to identify what you are looking to achieve from the customer journey map. Identify the information you are looking to collect, the insights you need, and how it will help you. Establishing these objectives from the start can help guarantee your efforts in creating a customer journey actually pays off.
Create your personas
To get valuable customer insights and understand your clients is through identifying their personas and understanding their needs. Your business will probably have different customers, so you will need to create different personas for each segment.
Next, it is important to get feedback from these personas on your services, their experience purchasing from your website through questionnaires, some of the questions you may need to ask are:
- How did you hear about our brand?
- Why did you choose our business?
- What are your pains, problems, and goals from visiting the website/application?
- How much time did you spend on our website/application?
- Was the website easy to navigate?
- Did you research our competitors, and if yes, who?
- Did you try to contact customer service, and if yes, what was your experience?
Once you get this information, you will be able to identify each persona’s journey during their customer journey map.
Identify customer stages and actions
After creating and understanding the personas you created, you need to start identifying customer actions on your website to understand and fix issues. You should now be able to understand why clients leave your website. A part of the mapping process is predicting what they will do on your website—accurate forecasts help in troubleshooting and providing better customer experiences, which leads to more conversions.
List all touchpoints
After identifying the stages, you are now ready to identify a list of the touchpoints that the customer will have in each stage.
Touchpoints are when your customer engages with an element of your brand; it could be an interaction on your company websites like a download or a click, an ad they saw, reading a review, or purchasing and trying your products; it also includes their experience with your customer support.
You need to predict all the different scenarios your client can interact with your business and write down the expected actions they may take for each interaction. This is a critical point, so you and your team will need to brainstorm and get creative.
Explore your resources and determine what you need
Creating customer journey maps gives you a holistic, comprehensive view of your whole business. It underlines every resource you need to build the customer experience. This will help you identify where you need more resources to provide a positive experience for your customer.
Test your customer journey
This is the most critical element of the process, for each of your personas, try out the journey yourself, follow their steps through their social media activity, emails, and searching online. Check if there is any missing step or any area for improvement. Make sure you thoroughly analyze your touchpoints and ensure they don’t drive clients away before making a purchase.
Revise and update
After creating the customer journey map, you can now apply suitable changes to your website to achieve a positive customer experience. Maybe changing your call-to-action or writing more engaging product descriptions.
However, this is not the end of the process; as you gather data from your website and clients, you need to keep revising and updating your customer journey and touchpoints when needed.
Customer journeys are constantly changing; they are meant to help your business stay close to your customers and address their needs and pain points. F360 team of UI & UX designers can help you create the perfect user experience and customer journey that guarantees more conversions for your business. Subscribe to our web development services and get started immediately.