One negative feature on your website could be costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars, no matter how great your product or service may be. PwC conducted a study which showed that one in three customers would leave a brand they love after just one bad experience and 92% would refuse to return to a company after two or three bad experiences. It is key that your business is proactive in addressing customer frustrations, and this is easily done by completing frequent User Experience (UX) audits.
In a recent survey conducted by Mercantile Systems, Inc. (MSI), 2/3 of the respondents indicated that they recently had a noteworthy experience when using a service or product. Of those, less than 17% of the responses were recalling a positive experience, the overwhelming majority indicated that they had a noteworthy negative experience.
Despite frequent good experiences with a company, one respondent to our survey made the impactful statement, “It’s a miracle I still even use this service.” He was referring to a delivery service website in which he had always received great customer service and felt that the personal service went above and beyond, yet he had serious doubts about continuing based simply on the multiple tech issues he had to go through when using the app. A great example of how a second-rate experience can deter from a five-star product.
Another respondent told us about trying to order a specialty item online. After spending an inordinate amount of time re-doing the order repeatedly due to products being out of stock, the customer just gave up and went to a competitor.
There are countless pitfalls throughout an online ordering process that can cause customer frustration without a company even knowing they are occurring. Difficulty in navigating the system or inability to quickly locate the information they are looking for. Pages that take too long to load. Too many questions to answer. Not being able to view sites well on different devices (cell phones, tablets, etc). Even something as seemingly ridiculous as color scheme or too many photos can deter customers from your website. According to SWEOR, 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout are unattractive.
No matter what industry you are in, over the last decade your customers experience has changed. There has been a shift to digital, and COVID-19 has only amplified this. Forbes found that internet usage has increased by 70% since the pandemic began back in Spring. Your customers experience has changed, and you need to measure it.
Contact an MSI consultant today about how we can help.
