Strategy & Best Practices

Early Investment in Customer Experience: Your Key to Success

By Ideas @ AppDirect / January 25, 2021

An AppDirect Add-On Store partner, Spiria provides customer-centric strategies, data-driven design, and value-led software development to build digital products and experiences that transform businesses. In this guest post, Guillaume Morin-Simard, Lead UX Designer at Spiria, explains why a great customer experience is critical for retaining customers and building loyalty in digital commerce.

All products and services have one thing in common: The customer experience (CX) they provide is always the best way to achieve engagement, transformation, and loyalty, regardless of their intrinsic features. In the digital world, customer experience is essentially a matter of user interfaces. This is why a quality customer experience rests on a quality UX/UI (user experience/user interface) design.

Users of web sites and applications always appreciate ease of use and pleasant interactions. Since they use multiple interfaces on a daily basis, they are de facto experts in UX/UI. They will make judgements about UX/UI quickly, and will simply stop using the products and services that offer boring or frustrating ones. This is why efficient interfaces, supported by clear user journeys, mean lower bounce rates and lower client acquisition costs.

So many projects fail due to a company’s inability to attract or retain users. Poor interfaces and bad client experiences are therefore costly. Worse still, users believe that the quality of their user experience reflects on the quality of your products. On the flip side, users whose needs are satisfied and who enjoy their interaction with a seamless interface are much more likely to make a purchase, recommend your product to friends, trust your brand, and be loyal to it. In other words, investing in UX/UI design is investing in success.

Try to invest in user experience in the early stages of development, for two reasons. One, you don’t always get a second chance to make a good first impression. Customers that are turned off by an uninviting interface will probably never come back to it, which may mean losing clients and sales. Two, early investment is usually a cheaper investment. It’s called the cost of change: A product is much cheaper and faster to fix before implementation than after development. For example, test ideas and client clickpaths through prototypes, which are much faster and cheaper to develop than the actual product.

Of course, you can—and must—fine-tune your product after development, but the closer you are to getting it right from the start, the less time and money you’ll spend on perfecting your product later.

Near-perfect interfaces rest on the following groundwork: understanding client needs; developing a client acquisition and retention strategy; mapping out the client journey; prototyping; and usability testing. To achieve this, you’ll need CX and UX/UI experts focused on providing a flawless experience, from the first impression all the way to a successfully concluded purchase. While abandoned shopping carts are the bane of online commerce, they can be minimized with an easy and seamless checkout experience. Experts can suggest proven methods and tailor them to meet the specific needs and objectives of your target market. These experts will build a custom experience based on your offering and clientele.

In short, the more you invest in CX/UX/UI, the more sales you’ll make, the more loyal and engaged your clients will be, and the more successful your company will be. And an early customer experience process is a cheaper one and a better return on your investment.

To know more about the importance of customer experience, and how Spiria’s experts can help, check out Spiria.com.