Optimizing the Customer Experience: Designing for Customer Intent

Building a simple customer experience that satisfies your customers’ expectations is a starting point (or evolution) in your digital journey. You might be asking yourself, “How do I know what my customer wants?” The data is available from their behavior online, and many of your customers will tell you what they want. Putting the pieces together can appear complex, and it can be simplified if you segment the optimization of your customers’ experience into three buckets: Design, Usability and Search. This article will focus on the Designing based on your customer's intent.

Design, usability and search are related to how you can serve your customer. In order for your website to create value in the eyes of the customers, your challenge is to optimize your website so that it is accessible to the greatest number of your ideal customers. Value increases with the number of customer touch points that the customers use. For example, digital customers expect more than the ability to purchase online, they expect the ability to compare similar products, review historical purchases, view delivery schedules, and receive advice from other customers.

Of course, how can you focus on the satisfaction of the customer if you don’t know what drives their satisfaction? This starts with a clear vision, clear brand positioning and clear customer definition. A clear vision is having a clear strategy, which is critical to your design, usability and search efforts. This approach pinpoints the exact problem that you are solving for. Having clarity around your brand’s value proposition is very important to effectively positioning your brand. Finally, a clear customer definition is knowing your customer and understanding their needs. What support and enhancements surround your brand’s offering and how do those distinctive interactions foster your brand and engage your customer.

If you focusing on creating a great customer experience, your buyer’s expectations will be met, your customer touch points will increase, and likely your sales will increase at a rate that outperforms the market. Evolving your digital strategy to one that focuses on the customer experience will in turn support a new strategy.

Design

Begin with an understanding of why visitors are coming to your site. What is their intent? Identify their problem or need and the steps to a solution. Align your design with customer intent. Create an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to your solution where with enough frequency your solutions form a habit. The 6 basic intents of visitors coming to your site are to:

1. Buy now – Distributors are shifting from gated sites starting at the home page to offering an un-gated approach where products and pricing (MSRP) are shown. This allows distributors to cultivate a customer experience for unregistered users. For registered users, many distributors make it easy with saved cart, saved lists, saved past purchases, special pricing and more.

2. Search – Distributors must tune the search results to deliver on the customer expectations

3.Self-service – Buyers seek convenience for printing an invoice, requesting a quote, viewing their past purchases, or quickly re-buying. According to Forrester, "B2B buyers prefer 3 to 1 the do-it-yourself options for researching products, prior to purchase, compared with talking with a sales representative."

4. Learn – There are many examples of distributors and manufacturers providing previously gated information to increase transparency and earn customer trust. Sharing information also ensures that consumers have the support and expertise they need. Finally, if a distributor cultivates a learning and sharing community it will bring buyers together, which helps to build the brand. Examples include a blog, how-to videos, or even sharing company events on social media.

5. Find a location – Not only allow your visitors to know where your locations are, make it easy for them with a click-to-call phone number, click to map directions, and local store and holiday hours. Ideally, this would also be in your site map for SEO purposes.“At the end of the day, you’re trying to solve the problems of your end customers. You’re trying to create value for them. You are creating value in the customer experience.” Chip Schramm,President, Turner Supply Company

6. Contact your company – Encourage customers to be interactive and ask questions on the spot. Employ live chat, add your telephone number to the page header, and respond to email questions within 1 business day. Aligning your design to meet your customer’s intent with a clean, streamlined design and clear Calls-to-Action will yield a better customer experience. This will help cultivate return visitors and long-term relationships.

Summary

A consistent design and usable experience are essential for clearly communicating with customers to give them the confidence to buy – whether they are online or in your branch with a smartphone in hand. Having a customer experience strategy will inform your design, usability and search and put your company in a better position to make a smart investment and design decision that delight customers and serve the business.