I recently purchased an airline ticket to India to attend my sister’s wedding. She decided to go forward with her event after two Covid delays (and just before Omicron resulted in heightened restrictions), and we had to reserve our tickets quickly. Unfortunately, my trip to the airline’s website to purchase tickets was a complete fiasco.
I almost gave up trying to figure out what flights were available and when they were available. And I couldn’t help but wonder: in 2022, how is this even possible? How can the digital customer experience of a major airline be so bad?
The whole situation taught me how evident it is now when a corporation isn’t focused on their customers’ experience. The divide between a positive and negative digital experience is expanding. And the costs of being on the wrong side of the split are rising: not only irritated customers, but also lost revenue, customer loyalty, and advocacy.
The constant digital exposure has resulted in soaring expectations for those of us who are online all the time — and let’s face it, since the pandemic hit, that’s most of us — And many websites still don’t live up to the hype.
There are a few simple but important reasons why so many businesses are still on the wrong track. Here is the list of three most common blunders as below.
Fail 1: The website’s objective is not aligned.
The demise of a website usually begins at the top. Customer experience — and the fact that websites are ultimately about income — is often forgotten while inside business departments debate over their vision for the site.
The stakes are high, with e-commerce revenues predicted to increase from $4.8 trillion in 2021 to $6.4 trillion in 2024. According to studies, 40% of visitors will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load, and 88 percent will not return after a negative user experience. For e-commerce companies, poor UX is a trillion-dollar problem; they lost 35 percent of customer purchases because the user experience falls short of expectations.
Websites become a jumble of competing aims and messaging that serve no one if there is no understanding of customers or a desire to convert website visitors. Businesses that succeed online internalise and map out the website’s basic goal — to establish empathy with customers, tell the brand storey, and earn income — then map it out on their website.
They understand that their primary goal is to make the consumer journey as seamless as possible.
Fail 2: I’m stuck in the restart attitude for the rest of my life.
If your organisation hasn’t agreed on the objective of its website, the accompanying digital jumble will definitely cause internal dissatisfaction – and the complaints will mount. It may be more convenient at that point to simply wipe the slate clean and rebuild the entire site than than deal with the difficulties one by one.
However, relaunching isn’t the best option here. It’s time-consuming, expensive, and just as likely to result in another shoddy website. Especially if the stakeholders are still squabbling over their share of the pie. It’s time to say goodbye to relaunches and rethink how they should build and update websites. Forget about comprehensive overhauls. Get rid of the long list of prerequisites. The new game is all about speed and iteration.
I’ve worked with tens of thousands of businesses. What I’ve witnessed time and time again is that web teams must grasp the website’s primary purpose and user experience in order to succeed. Then, in response to market and user needs, be agile enough to make regular, incremental modifications.
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That’s how Harvard redesigned their website and launched a dynamic homepage that allows for continuous, seamless changes. Reimagining one of the world’s most prominent and high-profile university websites necessitated a thorough grasp of the needs and aspirations of its many audiences. The team discovered the desire for simplicity and involvement by researching user groups. The team was able to focus on clarifying difficult user paths and generating a sense of universal — and timely — appeal as a result of this.
Treating your website as a live, breathing marketing asset that demands ongoing attention begins with a mental shift, followed by a procedural adjustment. Finally, having technologies that empower the marketing team to adapt to changing customer requests in real time is essential.
Fail 3: IT bears the brunt of the responsibility.
For many firms, attempting to fix a broken website goes like this: marketing submits a modification request to IT. Nothing occurs while they wait. They eventually send a senior executive to IT to figure out what’s going on. It’ll be a long and arduous process, and it’ll probably be insufficient to restore the website’s former glory.
While the success of a company’s website must begin at the top, continuous adjustments are frequently delegated to the IT department, despite the fact that customer-centric experiences are firmly in marketing’s domain. However, rather than siloing this job within IT, a multi-stakeholder model that empowers frontline marketing staff with web ops tools can alleviate this challenge.
Tableau, for example, has devoted a small team to ensuring that they updated its site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Without relying on technology, they were able to make steady and continuous development. What’s the end result? Tableau’s website now generates upwards of 95 percent of its income, with 7,000 personalised landing pages attracting upwards of 50,000 leads every month.
Source: ecommerce platforms , online selling platform
