4 simple steps to consistently improve customer experiences on websites
Optimize your digital experiences with actionable analytics data, intelligent investigative tools, and calculated tactics across multiple departments.
Optimize your digital experiences with actionable analytics data, intelligent investigative tools, and calculated tactics across multiple departments.
Most enterprises have a rich well of data, but far fewer have found a way to extract the actionable insights needed to deliver better online experiences, enhance engagements or conversions, and gain a real competitive advantage.
Enterprises face unique challenges when it comes to measuring and improving online experiences – from scattered and siloed digital intelligence to substandard, fractured optimization programs. To perfect experiences across websites and apps, organizations must first make sense of data and master digital optimization.
With the amount of data being generated and collected, however, optimizing experiences can feel like a daunting task at most organizations.
Knowing this, enterprises can start with a fine-tuned methodology that leverages actionable analytics data, intelligent investigative tools, and calculated tactics across multiple departments. They should follow this four-phase process to generate consistent engagement, produce more conversions, and promote better customer loyalty.
The first step of experience optimization is identifying and aligning on a universal key performance indicator (KPI). Otherwise, any digital team’s optimization efforts will be aimless.
That said, digital metrics can’t be selected at random – marketers need a KPI that definitively quantifies digital experiences on their website or app. These can include customer satisfaction scores, repeat visits, conversion and retention rates, time spent on a site, and Net Promoter Scores.
While these metrics enable a digital team to measure optimization progress, each fails to definitively quantify and link the specific experiences affecting each metric. Enterprises should consider using a more holistic, universal metric that measures online experiences automatically.
Even better, if the metric is AI-powered, like Decibel’s Digital Experience Score (DXS®) it can crunch billions of data points around user navigation, frustration, engagement, as well as form and technical experiences. This capability takes the guesswork out of managing, measuring, and improving digital experiences.
Regardless of the experience metric an organization decides to use, it takes more than just a KPI to sync different teams – marketers need to delineate clear responsibilities. Organizations should set guidelines that provide objectives for each practitioner to enable multi-team efforts that move the needle on the collective digital experience KPI selected.
Once organizations have selected the primary KPI, it’s time to measure its performance across every single journey on the website or app.
This view is foundational for effective optimization, with 80% of CX professionals believing a journey-based strategy drives overall business success, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and customer lifetime value. With the days of linear conversions gone, enterprises can no longer afford to view these journeys through a transactional and conversion-centric lens.
With that in mind, shaping the perfect user journey means optimizing experiences across every possible touchpoint. To do this effectively, organizations need to evaluate their current end-to-end website or app performance. They should use one of the two following methodologies:
Customers are unpredictable, but web analytics and experience analytics tools can help teams focus on micro-level issues and optimize experiences across every possible touchpoint. Both methods provide the must-have insights on the quality of an enterprise’s user experiences and indicate the performance behind each user journey, laying the foundation for the next phase.
With a clear understanding of how experiences are performing, marketers can investigate any bottlenecks reflected by their KPI results. To succeed in this phase, marketers need access to sufficient digital intelligence.
Brands effectively using available data and analytics insights are more likely to acquire and retain customers and be profitable as a result. In fact, there are three fundamental resources every team needs to diagnose and resolve the issues plaguing user experiences and digital journeys:
With these analytics and investigative tools in place, marketers will be poised to identify user experience issues with ease and turn them into opportunities.
By now, organizations have established the issues undermining user experiences and sabotaging user journeys – and worked across departments to develop fixes for them. Now, optimization efforts must be thorough and united to be truly effective.
If executed properly, revamped digital experiences can create significant increase in conversion rates, but it takes following three steps to get there:
As more users pay closer attention to digital experiences – given many in-person ones have been put on hold – enterprises should use every tool at their disposal to ensure satisfaction and ease.
With a systematic approach to optimization, digital teams can methodically implement user experience improvements with ease. It’s just a matter of time before engagement and conversions rise as organizations quickly chip away at the issues plaguing user journeys.