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User experience What is UX and why is it important?
In conversations with marketing experts, you inevitably come across the abbreviation “UX”. But what is it exactly and why does it seem to be so important? We’ll explain it to you in this article.
User experience (UX) is very important in both e-commerce and high street shopping. After all, what customer will buy from a retailer again if they were dissatisfied?
There can be many reasons for a bad (unsatisfactory) customer experience: no or only poor advice was provided, the quality of the product is inadequate, the item is completely different from what was expected, or the customers don’t find the payment option they expected in the shop.
Let me tell you how quickly frustration can arise when shopping. I was a bit unsure which variant of a product I should buy in an online shop. The retailer had the option of a live chat on their website. A great service, I thought.
However, my enthusiasm quickly waned when I still hadn’t received a reply after ten minutes. When I closed the chat, I was asked to leave my name and e-mail address. A confusing and frustrating experience that didn’t help me make up my mind.
In order to spare the customer such disappointments, retailers would do well to consider whether a useful feature is actually suitable for their own shop. In this case, the retailer would probably have been better advised to set up a link to WhatsApp Business. In this way, the customer can send their question, knowing that the answer will not arrive in two minutes.
How can I find out how to improve the customer experience online?
Direct feedback from customers is one of the most important tools for measuring customer satisfaction. There are many channels for feedback:
- Google My Business or Google Reviews
- customer service
- personal call
- social media
When gathering feedback, there’s always a risk that customers will write a negative review. As good as it reads, when customers are full of praise (which has a positive effect on those who are still undecided), it isn’t really helpful. Negative feedback is more important! That’s because it highlights where mistakes happen or where there are opportunities to get even better. So retailers shouldn’t take negative feedback personally, but rather see it as an opportunity to optimize processes and other things.
Conclusion: something positive can also come out of criticism.
What other consequences can negative UX have?
Google evaluates each indexed web page, checks them for various properties and assigns them points. Since usability is important for Google, this is also checked.
Design: The website should display optimally on all devices (mobile phone, PC, tablet), i.e. no cropped images or content. This is the only way the customer can read all the content on their mobile phone while on the go or at home on their PC.
- Comparison to high street shop: the customer is in the shop and wants to look at a tent, but the outer tent is missing. This means the customer can only get a rough idea of what the actual tent looks like.
Speed of the website or online shop: The customer doesn’t want to wait ages for a page to load so that they can order something.
- Comparison to high street shop: the customer has to queue until they can enter the shop. Tip: you can measure your page speed with e.g. PageSpeed Insights from Google.
Short ordering process: The customer should be able to order the desired item with as few clicks as possible. Who wants to click through ten pages to finally place an order?
- Comparison to high street shop: the customer stands at the checkout for ages waiting to pay.
Reviews: This allows users to read reviews of products or the shop and make an informed decision about whether to order the product.
- Comparison to high street shop: the customer gets opinions from friends and acquaintances.
These are just a few examples of what Google takes into account.
If Google doesn’t find your online shop or website user-friendly enough, it will be indexed as less relevant and will only appear in later positions on the search results pages.
- Blog post: Customer reviews – what are they useful for?
- Blog post: Search journey in SEO
- Blog post: Heavens, we’ve forgotten the customer – so what does he want?