We all know what websites do, right?
They are your marketing team’s best asset to generating awareness and leads.
In today’s digital age, websites are often the first curated interactions customers have with your brand. Yes, yes, we know ads and social media are also part of your brand. Long before sales engage leads, websites are your brand ambassadors—working diligently to communicate your value to the world.
Often, organizations make the mistake of thinking that the extent of a website’s usefulness ends after visitors convert into leads.
But did you know that your website can also be your greatest customer experience asset?
With its scalability, flexibility, digital tracking, and visual medium—your website is the perfect environment for informing and empowering your customers throughout their journey.
If you’re only using your website to generate awareness, you miss out on an incredible opportunity to lower your costs and increase customer lifetime value and satisfaction.
Creating a Digital Customer Experience
Extending your website’s value to the entire customer journey—and reaping the benefits of doing so—are built on some simple, straightforward principles.
Teach your customers that your website is THE SOURCE OF TRUTH for your business.
You need to keep your website bursting at the seams with new information about your organization, solutions, people, community, releases, and market trends. If it has to do with your company, find an organized and elegant way to share it on your site.
Each section of your website needs a purpose that speaks to a persona.
Funneling more interactions into your website requires that information is organized and easy to navigate. Targeting specific needs and personas with each page enables your visitors to quickly find what they need.
Expand your website to focus on the entire customer journey.
Your website needs to serve more people than just strangers and prospects. Think about the needs of leads, new customers, and existing customers. Provide content and resources that increase awareness, inform decisions, and increase sales.
Train your customers to visit your website often.
Merely placing the information on your website isn’t enough. Show your customers that this information exists and create touchpoints that funnel them to your website to gather resources. Provide information and drive customers to your website during the sales process, onboarding, education, and continued support. By creating multiple convenient interactions through your website, customers will consult it as their default when they need something.
Anticipate your customer needs and empower them
Proactively provide resources that solve your customer’s problems. Know when they will face challenges during purchase, onboarding, adoption, and utilization of your solutions and create resources to address their needs. Solving customer needs proactively makes doing business with you easy and enjoyable.
Motivate and encourage digital interactions but don’t force them.
Leverage your site wherever and whenever possible. Stuff it to the gills with value. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that your website can be your only source of contact. When your customers want you, be available on-demand with chat, phone, or email. Providing options for engagement will let your customers know you are accountable to them and not trying to brush them off. Your customers are more likely to consult your website for information when they know they have options. “At every stage of the customer lifecycle, a majority rated an immediate response from businesses as “important” or “very important” — 82% when they had marketing or sales-related inquiries, and 90% when a customer support issue came up.” (source)
What A Digital Customer Experience Website Does
When you embrace the above principles, you realize your website’s potential to inform, educate, support, and upsell your existing customers in addition to attracting new ones.
When done well, your website becomes a hub of digital interactions that meet your customers’ changing needs. Expand your website and bring your digital customer experience to life with chatbots and chat support, webinars, knowledge bases, community forums, courses and learning management systems, portals, and guided walkthroughs.
Turning your website into a digital customer experience has a host of benefits that would take a team of hundreds to match.
There is a direct correlation between the amount of time a prospect spends on a company website engaging with relevant content and the likelihood that those interactions will lead to a sale. Gleanster research
The Advantages of Turning your Website Into a Hub
The benefits of leveraging your website to care for your customers are concrete and numerous.
Measure Your Customer Experience
Unlike the ambiguous nature of surveys (if and when customers fill them out) and in-person interactions, a website’s digital architecture leaves no uncertainty. You can see what topics your customers are interested in, what resources they are accessing, where, when, how they navigate your site, and how many interactions they are having. These insights turn your website into a living and ever-improving experience that delights customers.
Understand Trends
With the ability to track customer interactions, determining trends and anticipating needs becomes second nature. Seeing what your customers are searching for, the articles they consume, and the questions they ask enables you to create content to fill those needs. You can also see what content is aging well or deserves more attention and what events spur traffic increases. Driving your interactions to your website provides real-time insights that are unmatched.
Lower Costs
By servicing your customers digitally and anticipating their needs, you are actively deflecting higher cost interactions and support mediums. In other words, your website enables you to service your customers one-to-many instead of one-to-one.
“89% of millennials use a search engine to find answers before making a call to get customer service.” (source)
Increase Loyalty
A visually stunning and easy to navigate resource center is a powerful customer delight tool. It lowers effort (one of the best indicators of customer satisfaction), it’s entertaining, and the interactions can be as personable as in-person engagements. It’s a win-win for customers and organizations.
Compounding Traffic
Attention is an invaluable resource for organizations. Creating a website that has buzz, evolves continuously, and services various customers is a traffic-generating machine. Visitors and attention provide opportunities for your marketing team to share insights, solution updates and imprint your brand in ways that are not possible with in-person interactions. When done well, your customers engage prospects, generate content, and promote your organization for you!
Leveraging Your Website For Your Customer Experience
“65% OF CUSTOMERS BELIEVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN PRICE WHEN DECIDING TO MAKE A PURCHASE WITH A BRAND.”
– GARTNER
Modern consumers are interacting with the business digitally more and more. Organizations that capitalize on these changing consumer behaviors can increase awareness, drive sales, and foster brand loyalty at scale.
Don’t let the valuable real estate of your website go to waste. Carefully curated experiences that encompass the entire customer journey are potent assets that fuel growth.
So stop thinking of your website as a digital business card and start leveraging it to support your customers, foster engagement, and build loyalty.
For additional insights on how anticipating your customer needs can increase revenue see our blog: Increase lifetime value and lower acquisition costs with inbound.
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At SequoiaCX, we’re passionate about crafting authentic, engaging, and persona-driven websites that generate traffic AND high-quality leads. We’ve designed this 20+ page resource to make the entire planning process easier for you and your team—whether you’re developing it in-house or working with an agency like us.
