Businesses have different methods and operate in different ways. Still, every business in the world will have one goal they share with the rest – to attract more customers. The recipe for success in this is customer satisfaction.
Still, this is easier said than done. Companies struggle every day to find new ways to improve customer satisfaction. In the first year, approximately 20% of businesses will fail because they couldn’t attract or keep their consumers happy.
So, how can YOU improve customer satisfaction?
Today, approximately 70% of all purchasing experiences are based on how the customer is being treated and how they feel about a brand. To put it simply, people won’t buy from your business if they aren’t happy with what you have to offer.
Interestingly, a lot of customer satisfaction depends on their experience with your design. User experience (UX) and customer experience (UX) are different terms, but how you handle the first can greatly affect the latter.
In this article, you’ll learn the top ways in which your UX design can boost the satisfaction of customers.
Improve your UX skills to boost customer satisfaction
Before we go into the reasons why you should use UX design to improve the satisfaction of users, we should discuss how you can do this.
There’s no written recipe for success when it comes to designing for user satisfaction. It requires tons of knowledge, experience, and creativity that will allow you to achieve your goals. As a designer, it’s smart to constantly upgrade your knowledge in this ever-changing field. Start by obtaining an online UX certification from UXCel and learn about the best practices for a successful design.
If you’re still wondering how this can help you impress customers, let’s move on to the next part.
How UX design is used to improve customer satisfaction
When you design a website, an app, or another digital product, your goal is to make sales. To do this, you need more than SEO content or big ad investments. Consumers these days prefer the brands they can trust, so you must design with the goal of boosting users’ trust in your business.
User experience design is a process that improves how customers use a product or service. As a result, it can greatly influence their experience and satisfaction levels.
When you design for user experience, you are working on the accessibility, usability, and pleasure provided by the service or product in question. By improving the design, you improve the experience, and a better experience equals customer satisfaction.
It’s as simple as that. It is also very complex.
If you lack the experience in this field, you should know that designing for UX comes with a steep learning curve – and it’s a never-ending process. You might want to start by hiring a professional UX designer or UI UX design agency who knows the process.
Of course, you can’t hire just anyone. Ideally, you should invest your money in a person with expertise and experience, as well as someone who is constantly upgrading their knowledge to achieve customer satisfaction by designing. Solutelabs has a great guide on how to hire a UX designer that you should read before you begin your search.
If you are ready to do this on your own, keep reading.
There are different techniques that designers use to achieve this. From user research to prototyping to usability testing, plenty of things can make your design a bigger success.
Here is what we’ll discuss in detail in this article:
- User research
- Prototyping and usability testing
- Load times
- Responsive design
- User-friendly design
- Customer engagement
- User research
User research involves the process of studying how users interact with your product or service. By testing the way they use your design and respond to it, you can make changes to improve their experience on the website. The easier it is for them to find what they need, the happier they’ll be with your design.
Let’s say that you found a way to attract people to your pages. They are right there on your website, so what’s the next step? The purpose of UX design is to create a welcome page that converts leads into actual customers i.e. takes them through a seamless journey where the outcome is positive for the business.
If your customers can’t find a way to purchase or use a product, they’ll be frustrated and most likely give up. You’ll lose your hard-earned leads and the bounce rates on your site will keep growing. If you use user research data to improve the user interface, they’ll be more likely to convert instead of bounce.
Very often, the reason why leads don’t convert is that they cannot find what they are looking for. User research can tell you what your design is missing, and you can use this to provide the relevant information to the user.
- Prototyping and usability testing
Another way in which UX design can improve the customer experience is through prototyping. This process involves creating product or service mockups and testing them with customers. You can prototype your digital product, too, such as your app or website, and implement research to get feedback from your targeted audience.
By doing usability testing, businesses save a fortune on tweaking features before they are made permanent. It costs a lot more to change something after it’s finalized, not to mention how many leads you’ll lose until you realize what the problem is.
These two allow you to identify the problems that make your customers less satisfied. When you fix these glitches in your design, it can increase customer satisfaction.
- Load times
Loading time is one of the main characteristics of a good design. If your website or app doesn’t load within 3 seconds, 40% of your customers on average will leave. They will definitely not be satisfied and won’t even get the chance to see how you design the pages.
The ones that stick around after waiting for your page to load will already be unhappy because of it, so your chances of converting them will also get lower. That being said, optimizing the load times for your design is vital if you want to retain leads and convert them into consumers.
- Responsive design
Responsive design goes a long way to improve the experience of users. One of the biggest issues for customers today is pages that aren’t mobile optimized or load too slowly because they don’t have a responsive design.
Now that users are searching on their phones more than ever, not using a responsive design is the biggest mistake you can make. This will eliminate a grand portion of your leads who use devices with smaller displays.
That being said, when designing for the user experience, keep in mind that people use different screen sizes to access your product. Use a responsive design and frequently test it on different devices – this is how you’ll make sure that your site looks flawless to every visitor.
- User-friendly design
User-friendly design is much more than responsive design or a page that looks good when you first visit it. Your customers won’t be satisfied with your brand unless they have a good time on the website. Make your site easy to navigate thanks to a variety of user-friendly features. Some ideas for this include:
- Search bar access from every page
- Filtering options based on different attributes for products or services
- Highlighted relevant menu when the customer is on a specific page
- Simple terms in the navigation menus
- Clear CTAs placed in the right places
These features will help the visitor navigate your design. However, your job does not end there. Visitors have certain expectations from different pages, too. If you make it easy for them to navigate to a page but fail to offer the information they expect on it, this won’t work in your favor.
That being said, design your pages and fill them with the information your consumer expects, and make the CTAs clear so that they know which information belongs where.
- Customer engagement
An engaged customer is a happy customer. If you want to attract the attention of visitors and convert them before your competition does, you need to find ways to engage them. People are bored from seeing the same designs and reading the same content over and over again. If your design is different, this can engage them and make them more satisfied.
Engaging customers requires a lot of work. It starts with how you design your website: which colors you’ll use, how you’ll arrange the information, what type of multimedia you’ll insert and where etc. It also depends on the content you add to it, and we aren’t just talking about the blog posts or homepage text.
Content includes everything from blog articles to web page information to the name of your CTAs. How you tackle this and what you write on each part of your design can greatly affect customer satisfaction.
Bringing it all together for a better customer experience
User experience design is more than meets the eye. It’s not just about the palette you use in your design, or what font you use for your content. When you design your digital product, you are designing it for the customer and their experience. This should be led by their input, needs, and expectations. If you do it right, you can improve customer satisfaction and get more sales.
Author bio
Nadica Metuleva is a freelance writer who’s passionate about creating quality original content. She holds a Master’s degree in English teaching and a Bachelor’s degree in translation. With 8 years of experience in the freelance writing industry, Nadica has become proficient in creating content that captivates the audience, drives growth, and educates. You can find her on LinkedIn.
