Have you ever wondered why successful businesses seem to always perform exceptionally well? I know, it sounds like a tautology: great performance equals success. But why do they never seem to fail?
Every year, like clockwork, their offline and digital campaigns fall short of being nominated for a Grammy award as they continue to effortlessly post impressive profit margins.
Well, this does not happen by chance. And no, it’s not because they have advertising budgets that could possibly run a small country.
The primary reason for this consistent performance is that they measure pretty much everything. And, of course, they use the data they extract to plan for an even brighter future.
By doing so, everything their respective marketing departments do is purely data-driven.
This is why it is super important to always measure your business activities output. This includes your sales figures, digital marketing, advertising, email campaigns, social media, and, most importantly, customer experience.
Here’s the thing. Your business environment will always keep changing. It could be because of the weather, the status of the economy, or even as a result of a crisis. All these changes can have a significant impact on your sales.
So, for you to mitigate the effect, you must measure your variables periodically. Look at it this way, if you want to know your top performing sales people, you must measure or track their results after a given period of time.
If you want to know if your social media strategy is delivering optimal results, you must measure if your posts are gaining traction.
You get the picture, don’t you?
The same goes for user experience – it’s just as important as your other critical business variable.
If for whatever reason, your customers can quite remember how their experience was when they last visited your website or used your app, this is a red flag in itself. Okay fine, your products probably rock and they still went ahead and purchased something, which is still okay.
However, you can’t keep betting on the quality of your products or service and neglect the customer experience part. Your competition will eventually match your product quality, which will complicate things for your sales and marketing team, and if they happen to improve their customer experience – it’s game over for you!
Now you see why you should strive to keep enhancing your customer experience. The end goal is for it to have that ‘wow’ factor everytime your customers interact with your sales points.
Just so we are on the same page, user experience or UX is basically any interaction a user has with not just your product or service but pretty much the entire purchase journey. Different factors such as usability, credibility, usefulness, accessibility, desirability, and value play a crucial role in your customer experience.
A company like Airbnb, for instance, attributed its change in fortune in 2009 to great user experience, which helped the fairly new business at the time accelerate its value to about $10 million from almost going bust.
If you are wondering why your website’s bounce rate is remarkably high, then your overall user experience probably is not up to scratch. It’s no secret that most people today are shopping online more than ever before. Take the US, for instance, where eCommerce sales are expected to reach over $740 billion by 2023.
Image Source: BigCommerce
To get a piece of this action, your user experience simply needs to rock big time! If your eCommerce website takes ages to load, your images are low quality, the pages are poorly designed, useability and content are not all that great, and your website is not mobile-friendly, then you will most definitely have a hard time attracting and retaining customers.
If you watch a good movie or read a good book, chances are that you will recommend them to friends or family. The same concept applies to user experience. If your customers are not particularly thrilled by your website or app, well, let’s just say they won’t be sharing that information anytime soon.
In fact, they might even rant about it on their social media and there goes your rating! A superb user experience is, therefore, crucial for getting those elusive customer recommendations.
Do you want to grow your business without necessarily spending more than you need to? Then you need to make sure you make their shopping journey super easy and memorable. How your customers and prospects interact with your digital touchpoints is just as equally important.
Employee productivity is a critical component of any company’s growth. If your team is not productive, your bottom line will eventually be negatively affected. A bad user experience simply means that your team is constantly trying to fix its persistent shortcomings, which means they are not using their time working on tasks that will enhance your company’s growth.
But with a great user experience, you know, one that enhances how your customers and prospects interact with your eCommerce website or app throughout their purchase journey, your employees are motivated to perform their duties effectively.
ROX or Return on Experience means measuring, understanding, and ultimately multiplying the overall value of your business’s investment. This includes customer experience, employee experience, and leadership experience – all of which are key pillars to your ROX success.
It’s no wonder most companies today say that ROX is the new ROI due to its effectiveness and overall impact. User experience is largely driven by customer expectations, which are evolving every minute.
This is why it is now critical that you not only have a customer experience strategy that allows you to scale your user experience across your company’s key customer touchpoints but also make it more personalized and in real-time.
To get a clear picture of your return on experience, you need to consistently track and measure all key metrics that touch on the overall experience and your organization’s goal(s).
How do you measure ROX, this seemingly new kid on the block, but in fact a concept that has been around for a long time, only lacking a proper name? Well, you keep your eye on some key metrics:
1. Customer satisfaction: Traditionally, organizations have always used a holistic approach to measure customer satisfaction, which has worked for the most part. Well, today, your consumer is more demanding. They now expect a seamless experience at every touchpoint and at every step of their purchase journey.
Should you stop measuring customer satisfaction as a whole? Not really, this is still a relevant metric. But it can only tell you so much about the bits and pieces that work and that don’t. Which is why you need to go granular and see at which point of the journey the customer quits.
2. Click-through rate: Your eCommerce website and app have strategically placed calls-to-action (CTAs), which is great. But do you know what percentage of your visitors actually heed to these CTAs? You need to find out. After measuring the effectiveness of your CTAs, consider exploring alternative methods to increase engagement. One strategy to consider is by manipulating click-through rate, which involves directing real, organic-like automated traffic to your site or product listings for better SERP results.
3. Time to market: The first brand to hit the marketplace has better leverage over everyone else. The question is, how fast are you? How long does it take you and your team to develop and launch a brand new product or service or even feature? How fast your organization is to the market depends on how agile your development process is.
Measuring this metric and evaluating it will significantly enhance your processes including how long it takes you to introduce a new product or service to your target audience.
4. Customer acquisition: At a time when acquisition costs are steadily going up, opportunities to lower them are always welcome. Organizations from all industries are spending a fortune on awareness creation through advertising.
Amazon, for instance, spent a staggering $7 billion on advertising alone in 2019. This is equivalent to $21,000 per minute on ads and promos. In 2020, digital ad spend grew by 12 percent despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Having a great user experience can significantly reduce this jaw-dropping cost because word of mouth will play a big part in selling your brand to prospects.
Image Source: WebStrategies
5. Sales conversion rate: Losing an opportunity to sell is arguably one of the most common barriers to growth. A missed conversion robs your organization of the much-needed revenue. This is due to the complexity or slowness of your touchpoints – website or apps.
To remedy this situation, organizations are now investing in third-party solution providers like Salesforce, for instance, and others to help them enhance their conversion rates by reducing the notorious abandoned carts.
To do this effectively, you need specific data. This is where integration comes in. Integration, which basically allows you to consolidate all your data from your email campaigns or customer relationship management solution, making it shareable across key departments, will help you to accurately measure the impact of each activity.
This data will, in turn, help you to make the necessary adjustments and changes so that you can deploy better digital campaigns in the future, and in the process, your user experience will also significantly improve.
6. Enhanced upselling and cross-selling: Upselling and cross-selling are great ways to sell more since your existing customer base already trusts you and is more willing to listen to your sales pitch. However, without a seamless digital selling experience, your customers might not stick around long enough to listen to what you have to say.
A great user experience will encourage your customers to search and learn more about your other products and services even without the need to speak to a salesperson. Again, integration can help you to discover prospects for your other products or services that you didn’t know exist.
With all your data freely flowing between platforms, you can easily identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities and send the right campaigns at the right moment. Just think about how easy it would be if you could see your financial data from NetSuite compared to that in Salesforce, for instance. You could then easily spot existing customers who have increased their spending or the usage of your services and are ready to upgrade to a new plan. Or customers whose business has grown and are ready to invest in your premium services.
A Salesforce and NetSuite integration does exactly that. It combines data from your two platforms to obtain combined in-depth reports that you can use to make data-driven decisions and…grow. The same integration can help you easily spot bottlenecks in your user experience or sales process by pointing out the areas where your customers drop off the funnel.
Return on experience has emerged as a key growth driver for organizations. To secure the success of your business, user experience needs to be part of every decision you make. Customer experience expectations are constantly changing and without the right tools and solutions in place, your user experience strategy will most likely not yield the expected results.
To ensure that your user experience is working for you, not against you, you need to make sure that you consistently measure the highlighted metrics and most importantly, get yourself a trusted integration partner to help you make sense of the data and use it to enhance your user experience.
With SyncApps, it’s 100% FREE to enhance your ROX with integration. Sign up for a free account!
