The “X” Factor – Upgrading Your Online Experience

In the last few months, most of the businesses found themselves on the fast-track to digital transformation. We’ve helped many of our clients come up with new solutions for reaching customers at their homes and offering products and services online. 

The companies that were the most successful at moving traditionally physical products and services online had one thing in common – they focused on offering an outstanding online experience for the customers as well as their own team. There are a lot of fine details that need to be taken into consideration, and most of them fall into three distinct categories – CX (Customer Experience), EX (Employee Experience), and UX (User Experience). 

Let’s look at these categories separately and explore how they can give you a competitive advantage during the recent shift to the fully remote business model.

CX (Customer Experience) is the journey that the customer goes through while learning and engaging with your brand, and eventually making a purchase. Advertising, social media marketing, influences that drive repeat purchases, email campaigns, product returns and complaints, and debt collection are all examples of touchpoints that affect the overall customer’s experience. Great CX builds customer loyalty, and this is why a large percentage of companies spend a significant portion of their budget in this area.

Here are a few examples of how companies can improve their CX:

  1. Double down on the communication with your customers online. You can share ongoing updates via emails and newsletters, social media posts, and live broadcasts. You can add a chatbot to your website to answer frequently asked questions for people that found your site for the first time. 
  2. Shift your ad spend towards social media and away from more traditional avenues like radio and billboards.
  3. Offer value. Can you educate your customers about an important topic that can solve their problem or alleviate immediate pain? The companies that offer quality content via blog posts or videos will win in the long run.

EX (Employee Experience) is the practice of focusing on an ‘internal customer’ – the employee – and their overall experience during various stages of employment. It starts with brand exposure and the hiring process and then continues during the onboarding process. It is also critical the whole time the employee is working for your company. According to HBR, investing in EX has proven to increase the company’s profit on average by 400%. 

What can you do to improve EX? 

  1. Focus on clear and open communication. It’s better to over-communicate when everyone is working remotely to avoid misunderstanding and friction between team members.
  2. Prioritize video calls over chats and emails. Video is the second-best option after in-person meetings. The tone of voice and the message can be easily misinterpreted in the written format, so make sure to have enough face time with your team to maintain the quality of the communication.
  3. Do team building online. Virtual happy hours or llamas crashing your Zoom calls are on the upswing these days and help keep your team connected.

UX (User Experience) is how a person feels when interfacing with your online product or service through different forms of interaction, such as a browser, a mobile site, or an app. You want to make sure that your products provide the most comfortable, most natural, and most rewarding experience. 

There are a few ways of how you can elevate your UX:

  1. Audit your website to ensure that it offers an easy and clear way to sign up for your online services or purchase a product.
  2. Focus on delivering delightful user experiences. Make sure that your website or app is intuitive, information is clearly laid out, and it takes only a few clicks to get to the right page. 
  3. Keep your design consistent
  4. Avoid complexity and any functionality that might not be intuitive to the user.
  5. Hire a professional design team to perform a UX/UI design audit of your website or an app and provide you with actionable feedback.

© This article has been originally published in SPIN OUT Magazine, Summer 2020 issue

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