It should be easy for consumers to engage with your brand. People want to interact. They want to have an experience tailored to them. And they want this experience to be seamless and genuine. Here are five ways to engage with customers to provide a great digital and omnichannel experience.
1: Get users invested by customizing & personalizing experiences to best meet their needs.
Want to know what your customers like? Just ask them. Customers are often willing to share their preferences as long you are upfront about what they will be used for and make preference selection optional. Make it clear that these preferences are used to customize their experience. Goodreads is a great example of how to customize and personalize for users. The company offers up multiple book genres and asks users to select which ones they are interested in. With these preferences set, Goodreads is then able to more accurately recommend books its customers are interested in reading.
2: Allow users quick access to frequent tasks and show data in an intuitive format.
Don’t make your customers search endlessly for common tasks. Do some usability testing to find out which tasks they will use most often and place these functions in easy-to-access spots. In its app, &pizza presents content in a very simple, direct way. The app gives seven key options very clearly. Six of which (Locations, Rewards, Menu, etc.) are all the same size, and then a larger call-to-action, “Order Ahead,” listed at the bottom of the screen – indicating its prominent use.
3: Make users feel special.
Dale Carnegie once said, “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
And Dale knew a thing or two about winning friends and influencing people. Brands should heed this advice and use customers’ names to make them feel special. Seeing their own name can make people feel more comfortable and reassured that the experience they are being presented with is solely for them. It can also serve as a reminder that everything is working properly. McDonald’s provides a good example of how to use a customer’s name to welcome them to a digital experience.
4: Offer quick and easy access to help and support in a variety of formats.
Every user is different. This means every user’s needs are different, and this applies to asking for help too. That’s why it is important to offer help and support in a variety of ways. Not every user will feel comfortable asking for support via chat; others may not want to talk on the phone; and still others prefer to have a FAQ library at their fingertips and avoid interaction altogether. Nest is a company that offers plenty of support options. Not only does Nest present different options to interact with a support professional – including chat, search, and phone – the company also gives customers various options about topics and formats to narrow down a user’s search.
5: Choose a tone and ethos for content that appeals to your target audience.
It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it that can make all the difference. Your brand’s tone should be consistent across all channels.
No matter where your customers go, what platforms they interact with, you should be delivering your message with the same tone and ethos. This tone and ethos should resonate with the people who use your product. Perhaps there is no better example than Starbucks, a company that has built a strong brand identity on the principles of enjoying coffee, embracing technology, and enacting social change. You can see this tone displayed proudly all over Starbucks’ digital properties, including its website, where “Social Impact” is displayed prominently.
This is just part one in our series of Omnichannel and Digital UX Best Practices. Make sure to stay tuned for more!
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