It’s the New Year, it’s the time when we think through our plans for the year ahead and take a look at how we can perform better this year. But have you thought about the fact your customers and potential customers will be doing the same too? Are you making sure that they know that the best supplier for the year ahead is you? Are you making doing business with you easy?
Why not take some time to take a look at your customers’ experience of you through their eyes? To quote Henry Ford “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.” This is especially true when it comes to your website. So often websites are designed to mirror your internal systems and talk in your internal language. Take this new year as the opportunity to see how your website could be changed to become the most effective tool for business growth in 2011. After all, your website is a sales person that works for you 24 hours a day 365 days of the year, make sure it’s working in the right way!
Five tips for website analysis:
- KISS – Keep it simple, is it easy and obvious for your customers to find out how you can solve their problem
- Language – avoid the use of jargon and include the care words your customer is looking for
- Watch a customer – ask someone, preferably who hasn’t been on your site before, to carry out tasks that you would hope customers will achieve on your site, and see where they struggle, a good start for making changes!
- Structure – structure the content of your site in the way your customer thinks, not just a reflection of your internal methods and structures
- Talk to Real Point, sorry couldn’t resist this but, after all, our years of experience of building websites that help our customers’ businesses grow could make a difference to yours!
So this year, make your customers’ lives better by making your hardest working team member work effectively!