A Beginner's Guide to Customer-Centric Website Design

Since the world wide web innovations in the early 21st century, the internet has become a necessity in every people's life. No longer, it's just a collection of commercial website that meets a business goal and attract customers. It now facilitates a vast range of different websites and web app that covers a lot of human expressions, interaction, and demand, including communication, consultation, and product-consumerism. It permeates our society and highly affects our day-to-day transactions, which fuels the innovation of more advanced technologies.

Many of our interactions now take place on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices, that work across multiple platforms. With the advent of these technologies, websites should not only be well-designed. They must be organized, easy to navigate, and communicate clear information about the business without any unnecessary distractions that prevent potential customers from moving to competitors' websites.

Through it, we've realized the intersection of web design and development and business strategy that catalyzes the customer centric approach, which enormously affects the purchasing decision of potential customers, and can bring forth the relevant information and message of the business or niche. If done correctly, it can provide a better chance of creating successful products that customers can repeatedly purchase and influence how the market responds to the information being presented on the website.

A customer centric design is an enabler of the customer experience, allowing customers to quickly find information that can lead them to the product they are looking for and influence informed buying decisions. No customer visits a website for no reason. They visit the website because of the benefit they can get from it, which can solve customer problems. For instance, if a customer is looking for a specific piece of furniture, the website should categorize the type of furniture, whether it's for the living room, kitchen, dining, etc., to efficiently create a smooth customer journey while browsing the website. It is through this underlying and intangible design thinking that uncovers the art of building customer centric websites that customers want and need.

Online businesses that can showcase customer centricity on their own website will see massive growth in their website analytics and visibility. This means the website can bring the company more revenue, good customer feedback, and customer retention. Many businesses rarely maintain search prominence without consistently providing optimal experiences. Search rankings do not happen by accident. High performing websites don't necessarily mean building visually appealing websites with extensive web animation. It can also involve the problem or complaint resolution process while maintaining human-product interaction that makes the experience significant and unforgettable. Understanding and anticipating what your target audience will want to explore on a website is not rocket science. Nevertheless, providing a solid engagement with customers, helpful content, innovative features, and continuous commitment to product improvements can help the business rise to the top in increasingly competitive marketplaces.

Building and marketing a fantastic product or brand is no longer enough in a world with an infinite supply of information. In this real-time and on-demand society where access to an endless variety of products and services is just a click away, business owners and marketers should provide find innovative ways to enhance the customer experience that doesn't exist on their competitor's platforms. Using customer-centered principles in web design and development, your business can gain an advantage over the market competition. Using customer centric web design means being realistic about your resources and maximizing the potential website optimization that can improve your website user metrics, engagement, and conversion rate.

A business that actively designs an excellent user experience and understands the customer's journey can anticipate a dominant effect on its website's user retention. While your customer's needs and expectations are constantly changing, you can keep up with the speed of those current and real-time needs by carefully crafting and following a customer centric website design approach.

The customer-centric website design reflects and resolves customers' needs, requirements, and problems to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. As a business owner, the company's ability to connect and attract customers' experiences to a personal degree makes the business stand out from the rest of the other companies that may offer the same type of product.

The customer will always be the number one foundation of the business that keeps its existence. Implementing a user-centric design approach with search engine visibility practices provides an authentic user experience that customers won't find anywhere.

In the digital age, people become preoccupied with too much data and metrics that they have forgotten that it's the people themselves that businesses are attracting and serving. Without understanding and anticipating the customers' desires, it would be impossible to retain them from the first website visit. Every business needs to return to the core foundation of buying and customer-serving to provide an excellent customer-friendly website.

As a business owner, the challenge is consistently creating a good user experience that meets the brand goals and customers' needs. With all of the factors contributing to overall success, integrating customer-centric website designs into your development process will surely provide a significant benefit in the long run.

Below are some of the key benefits of customer-centric website design:

Usability

A customer-centric website design approach can make the website easy to use and user-friendly. The principles behind customer-centric websites enable websites to be crafted in an organized manner by categorizing information according to their use, kind, and relevancy. It also makes the website easy to navigate with clear messages and information without too many irrelevant web elements to help the user decide quickly based on what he wants to achieve, whether to purchase products or know more about the business. This process can also involve the proper use of font families, sizes, colors, and content design to make the user experience more delightful and engaging.

Engagement and interactivity

Customer-centric websites are shareable and engaging, which captivates customers to stay, interact, and engage with your website. The concept behind this customer-centric design is that it personalized the content and targets specific audiences with the intent of helping them buy or get what they need when they need it. Customer-centric website design communicates information at a given time, from the headlines to the more minor copywriting details. This builds customers' expectations even before they visit your website, thus, can result in more visitors and revenue.

Customer Satisfaction and Retention

A bad customer experience impacts the probability of gaining loyal customers. Poor experience drives customers to switch brands that can provide them with a better experience. Customer-centric websites are designed with customer satisfaction in mind, encompassing the expressed and unexpressed needs of customers, whether a need or a complaint resolution. Customer-centric web design consists of website elements that listen and create resolutions to customers' fundamental problems or requirements, such as an FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) section or a simple feedback form. Customer-centric websites are always internally driven and focus on what is best for the customer, not the company.

Increase Revenue

Successful websites must strive for higher customer satisfaction levels to generate revenue through clear and concise delivery of content and information. Since today's consumers are highly sophisticated, educated, and informed, they have this pre-patterned expectation they are looking for. Customer-centric websites provide content about the benefits, functionalities, features, or look and feel of the product or service to help the customer understand them better even if they don't have or experience the product or service on hand.

Successful Brand Reputation

Brand reputation is difficult to build but can quickly lose if not appropriately managed. At the start of an online business, people will not automatically purchase your products upon launch, especially if you are new to the market. A customer-centric design approach enables your website to build trust by providing the necessary information about the product and the company. Creating pages or sections for customer reviews and an about page can have an enormous impact on the effectiveness and loyalty of your brand. 91% of customers are likelier to buy from a website with positive reviews. A clear business outline can bring a better brand reputation, awareness, and buying consideration to your products or services.

The concept of customer-centric web design is nothing to be scared of. It is not about fancy and complicated web content but proper information presentations delivered intelligently through excellent customer experience. Poor design is often a lack of user-centricity. This can be caused by inconsistent or irrelevant content, cluttered layout, lack of customer support, and complex navigation system, which often confuses or distract customers from the website's ultimate goal.

When working with a customer-centric website, four significant elements need to be considered to deliver a great user experience that is intuitive for your customers.

1. Customer Profile or Persona

One of the essential elements of customer-centric websites is the customer profile or persona. A customer profile (also known as a consumer profile) is a clear and comprehensive description of your customers. It would be best if you leveraged these extensive profiles of different types of customers to deliver a more relevant and personalized user experience. This can include demographics and social status information about your potential or current target audience. Often, this information can be obtained through customer feedback via a web form, web chat, phone, social media, and other forms of technology.

2. Customer Resolution

The best way to stand out and become profitable in a sophisticated and competitive market is to move from product-focused to customer-focused. When your customers become your gauge for quality control, that is when you can genuinely conclude that you are on the customer-centric path. To improve your customer experience, you need to know your customer's pain points and requirements to continuously provide excellent user experience and solutions that should be included in the website. Chances are your customers will face problems and issues along the way. Listening to your customers is vital in constantly improving your website and overall business operations. If you want to increase your website's customer retention, you need to come up with intuitive solutions for whatever problems, complaints, and related concerns your customers may face along the way.

3. Product/Service Improvement

Many companies get tripped on hard-core product marketing without the customer's input or product review. Listening to customers and getting feedback to make consistent product improvements is vital to the success of every online business. It is essential to gather feedback and reviews from the customers about how the product or services benefits them and if it solves their specific problems. With the advent of messaging and chatbots rolled out across many websites, it's easy to gather this information and use it to improve the current product or services to gain more loyal customers and increase the company's revenue. Product or service improvement involves making sensible changes based on the customers' feedback or reviews of the current product or service, whether adding a new feature or removing unnecessary elements to satisfy the customers' requirements.

4. Brand-Customer Relationship

The brand-customer relationship is an excellent way of measuring an online business's success. Customers can develop relationships with the brand through the benefit they could get from its products or services. As a business owner, you need to relish any opportunity to engage with the customers more personalized to obtain meaning and value. Instead of treating your customers as support tickets like most marketers do, you need to see them as humans looking for ways to solve their problems and help them resolve their issues. At its simplest, consistently good customer experiences can build relationships with customers and can improve your overall online presence and revenue.

Your website is your ticket to the success of your online business. In order to be successful, you need to offer a great customer experience and build your brand reputation. To ensure your success, you must design your website using the customer-centric design approach to influence your customers' buying decisions.

Below are some steps that you can take to build an effective customer-centric website:

1. Identify your target audience and analyze your existing customer data.

Starting a website and providing a great customer experience is challenging without knowing or analyzing your target audience or customers' information. Every decision you make on your website, whether the layout, images, copy text, colors, or the product or service itself, should be based on the target audience or existing customer data. This information can be obtained through proper research, website analytics, customer feedback results, online reviews, web chats, social media engagements, and other forms of communication media.

2. Do keyword research in advance

Keyword research is the crucial foundation of search engine optimization. Whatever type of website you plan to build, you need to have the proper keywords to use on your website to optimize your content and links for better search ranking. Doing keyword research in advance can enable you to build an SEO-optimized customer-centric website which can help people find your website online faster via modern search engines.

3. Use relevant frameworks, platforms, and solutions

Not all platforms are suitable for specific online business requirements and goals. To develop an effective customer-centric website, you must choose the proper modern framework, platform, or solution for a particular niche. The internet is filled with different programming languages, frameworks, platforms, and custom solutions relevant to specific business requirements, and choosing one can be daunting. When selecting the right technology for your business, always consider the following factors to ensure the success and ease of maintenance of your website project:

• Maturity
• Scalability
• Security
• Sustainability
• Popularity
• Documentation
• Resources
• Community

If you are unsure which technology is right for your business, consult a website design agency.

4. Build customer-driven features/functionalities

A customer-centric website should make the information and support about your brand, company, and product/services easily accessible and understandable to your customers. Some nice-to-have features, pages, or sections include:

• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• Contact Form
• Review Form
• Customer Feedback Form
• Web Support Chat
• About Page/Section
• Product Detail Page/Section
• Social Media Engagements

5. Keep your website and products/services updated

After you've built your website and placed your products on board, the next step is to maintain and constantly update them. Building a website for products/services is a never ending-task. Your website should regularly get backed up, fix bugs, and continuously add new features whenever necessary. The same goes for your products/services. Using the data provided by your customers, such as reviews, feedback, complaints, and other concerns, you can tweak your products/services to satisfy your customers and keep them on the cutting edge. Doing so can give your website a boost in search ranking as well as customer

A customer-centric website provides plenty of opportunities to build brand trust, engagement, and good customer experience by prioritizing the customers' requirements and needs.

Customer-centricity is not constantly forcing customers to buy products or services from your website. It's about building an excellent brand-customer relationship.

If you want to be successful online, you need to consider building your website within customer-centric core principles.