Optimizing Website Real Estate & Customer Experience
Lena Siara Huang
Lena started out by intimating that 2012 is really going to be focused on the customer experience. Considering the numbers of consumer touch points, mining the data rich environments available has become critical to understanding and learning from customer insights.
On site optimization has become more important as well, with content management, on site behavioral targeting and tag management growing in importance.
1 in 5 US consumers indicate a bad experience will cause them to switch brands.
Customer Engagement – Fully engaged consumers can show a 23% premium in wallet share and relationship.
Full engagement is driven by experience based differentiation: From functionality, to accessibility, to emotional connection with your brand.
Customers perceive value based on: Benefit, Effort, Risk, Price, Treatment.
However, customer engagement cannot be measured in terms of customer satisfaction. Emotionally satisfied customers have more value to a brand than rationally satisfied customers. Emotional satisfaction leads to true full brand engagement.
Rational satisfaction is likely based on benefit and value. Emotional satisfaction touches on pride and passion. 30% of consumer actions are based on Rational, whereas as 2/3rds are based on Emotional triggers.
One key tool in CX is Customer Journey Mapping. This includes fully understanding each step in the customer buying process/decision making process during their interactions with you.
Lena offered several websites to look at that she believes do an exceptional job in engaging customers, such as Fanta andDisneyland. She showed category landing pages from Home Depot, and emphasized how each of these pages included trust building elements (free in store pick up, etc).
Lena also went through the REI website (one of her favorite sites, and mine as well) and pointed out their sharp use of navigation and space to engage customers. She pointed out the 100% satisfaction guarantee and its prominence. She showed the Most Popular items, which are featured on each category lander, and reviews and ratings. REI also dynamically builds breadcrumb trails based on customer input for product variations.