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Posts Tagged ‘website’
Is Your Website A Bad Sales Rep? Wednesday, August 1st, 2012
Total Experience Design (TXD) is a focus on the holistic experience that is delivered to your customer. This includes your online experience as well as your offline experience. Many of you have a website for your business and that website is designed to in some way enhance the sales process. What happens when your website takes away from your sales process? Let me give you an example.
Take event ticket sales in today’s market. I don’t know very many people who purchase tickets to events offline. I don’t know what the numbers are for online sales but I bet they are really high. E-mail opt ins and deal sites like Groupon let you know when your favorite event has a special promotion to get you to buy a ticket to that event.
As a baseball fan I am subscribed to our local baseball team’s mailing list. They ran a promotion a couple of months ago for free tickets. Thinking that this would be a great Sunday afternoon activity with the family, I thought about getting tickets but didn’t do so right away.
When I tried to buy tickets, I had waited too long and this happened:
Now I was not concerned with the fact that I missed the promotion. What I was concerned with was the experience that they delivered in the process. All I got was a tiny set of letters that said, “This offer is no longer for sale.” That’s it. They might as well have given me the finger.
Instead of saying something like: “I’m sorry, this promotion has expired. However, we would love to see you at the game. You can check out other ticket options here or you can take a look at some of our upcoming promotions to other games.” What I got was a dead end in the experience. Not even a link to buy tickets somewhere else unless I am handicapped.
Could you imagine if someone called your office to ask about a service offer and the person on the phone told them that you don’t offer that anymore and then just hung up on the perspective client. You would go nuts.
Small business owners create these unintentional poor experiences online all the time. In the case of the minor league baseball game, I still got tickets because I love baseball. Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the game. The average person will just move on and spend their money somewhere else.
How is your online experience? Are there any dead ends that need to be opened up to reduce the sales friction for your buyers? Take some time and review your online presence and make sure that all roads lead to the logical next step for your customer.
Total Experience Design: In The Online World, The Little Things Matter Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
Creating an experience for your customers is a lot about connecting with them in ways that are unexpected. In the online world, people expect to see your business on social media and they expect you to have a website (even if you don’t have one!). While it’s certainly important to create a great experience for the people who visit your website or follow you on social media, when it comes to total experience design (TXD), the little things matter.
One of the little things that gets overlooked by businesses online is what do with users who happen upon a 404 page error on your website.
Here’s what that experience typically looks like:
A 404 error happens when a user tries to visit a page on your website that isn’t there. This could be because you moved it or it never existed. Rather than leave your clients at dead ends, what if you used this dead end as a tool for engaging your client base at a deeper level?
Renny Gleeson talks about this very thing in a recent TED Talk that he did. Great talk and a great lesson on how companies are doing the little things to build an engaging experience for their audience.
Enjoy the short video and look at how you can incorporate some of these ideas into your own experience.