June 4, 2019
Troubleshooting your Customer Experience
In this article:
Your website is a critical step in your customer's interaction with your brand and is often the first true engagement beyond the initial marketing stimulus.As a marketing professional, you want to make sure that your online customer experience is fluid and as effortless as possible. However, more often than not, some kind of customer experience problem tends to occur in the digital space. The unattended nature of the digital brand interaction with the website is where customers really need to figure things out for themselves.Frustration will soon follow if the desired interaction by the user is not clear, setting your brand on the wrong foot with your customer. Ideally, visitors to your website shouldn't even need to think (or be sober by some people's thinking) when using your digital touch points.- Knowing when you have a problem
- Quick tools for troubleshooting
- The untapped resource - The Customer Service Team
- Fixing customer experience
- More complicated problems
- Tip: Measuring complexity: Interaction count
- Lamb's Principles
Knowing when you have a problem
"It's not you, it's me."You website ultimately needs to work for your markets common denominator. It's not acceptable to say that it's the customer's fault they can't use the website. It is up to you to make things right!There are a number of potential sources that can inform you that there's a problem with the customer experience:- You hate it, it's clearly not right
- Customer service activity
- Analytics reports
- Poor performance to industry benchmarks
- Surveys (NPS)
The Untapped Resource - the Customer Service Team
In our experience, we find that the customer service team can often be overlooked when seeking out issues related to the website. The problem with the customer service team is that it can take a little more effort to engage the team and to separate out the loud [customer] voice in the room vs the real issues that are affecting people.But if you invest the time, you can get some very specific insights relating to:- Pain points in the purchasing or enquiry problems
- Areas where there is difficulty finding key functionality or information
- Common customer questions that the website is not addressing
Quick Tools for Troubleshooting
Beyond the customer service team, there is a suite of tools you can employ to drill down in the problem.Google AnalyticsHaving Google Analytics(or equivalent) installed on your website is an absolute mandatory.However, while everyone has it - it's not necessarily a tool that is easily used by Marketers to find problems, but it certainly is a great help when it comes to using external expertise.If you want to dive in yourself. The key metrics you are looking for related to bounce rate, and goal funnel completion rates. You want to focus your effort on pages that have a high bounce rate, or gaps in the funnel that have a higher than expected drop in completion rates.Usability TrackingUsability tracking is a really great reference if you generally have a problem, but don' know where people are getting stuck.Some usability tracking tools have the capability to capture an actual video of the user's experience. This video can be exceptionally enlightening in a way that Analytics or aggregate data cannot. Specifically, if you can see that someone looks to be getting stuck, or frustrated. Sometimes you will find that users may be going the long way to do something that can be done much simpler - if only it was a little more obvious.Post-engagement surveysPost engagement surveys are a very effective and low-cost mechanism to capture immediate impressions of the on-site customer journey. Net Promoter Scores, for example, provide a data point for the overall customer's satisfaction and is an important metric you should embrace if you can.But, as with any rating system, some users give 5/5 by default, so it may be useful to add in the ability to input soft feedback that may be an impediment, but not a major frustration.An external average web userDo you know someone that isn't very tech-ey? Then you have potentially found a very useful resource that can help you review your site for issues from an objective perspective. They may highlight a lack of context or explanation about things you may take for granted as an expert.Make sure you make it worth their while, however!Un-think and don't readTurn off your brain for a second, just have a very quick scan through your site - do not read anything. What do you notice? What don't you notice? This can be a surprising activity.Fun waysIf you are up for a bit of fun and aren't worried about the cost, you can always talk to Richard. Richard is a UX Designer that has a simple promise, he'll get drunk and use your website. The simple philosophy is that if the website is good, you can be drunk and still be able to use it effectively. If you are game, check it out - https://theuserisdrunk.com/Fixing Customer Experience
Workshop itGet a group of key stakeholders together and talk through it.A small team is capable of putting together a list of priority content or actions and can provide some direction on what elements could be better prioritised or made clear.It's important to know that all information is not made equal - you will have hero content that people primarily want from your site. Make sure this hero content is the most easily accessible and visible content in the site. If all content is important, then no content is important.A/B TestingIn the absence of any clear best practice, and when the risk of making a change diminishing the performance of your website, A/B testing can be a great tool. In order to do A/B testing, you will need a statistically sizable audience. Tools will commonly want over 1000 interactions in order to normalise extraordinary behaviour and determine a better solution.We don't recommend A/B testing if it's clear there are a major deficiency and a clear best practice solution. It's just adding cost and time that is unnecessary.A/B testing is ideal when you are dealing with tens of thousands of users a month, or millions of dollars a month. The overhead of managing the A/B testing, particularly if you are using a 3rd party can sometimes not justify the cost of the experiment.SearchSearch is a killer piece of functionality for a site with hundreds of products or content. Auto-complete search solutions, like Algolia, adds a much improved Google-like search capability to your website. Be warned, on-site search can perform poorly and it's our belief that if you are hitting a result results page that you are probably serving up poor matches to the client's query.External expertiseUltimately it's very likely going to be a development activity to fix the problems in your customer experience. It is trivial to identify dozens of problems or deviations from best practice - but at the end of the day, you may not be able to commercially justify 50 minor adjustments to your website.The cost of implementing a small fix can be higher than expected as it doesn't fit within a from scratch production workflow. Like a car, changing something after it is made, is considerably more expensing than in the conception stage. This is the hidden cost of lower quality or a rushed solution.Also, get advice from your expert, we have worked with some clients that have come to us at the end of an internal troubleshooting exercise to get very creative solutions to problems that could be dealt with much easier with a best practice pattern.More complicated customer experience problems
If you work with a largely homogeneous customer base and stakeholders, user experience can be relatively straight forward. More complicated customer experience problem happens when you have:- Multi-stakeholder engagements, or have
- More than a few hundred pages of content (or products)