A company lives and dies on whether or not prospects are willing to buy its products or use its services. Understanding the value of your product from a customer’s perspective is the key to keeping up consumer interest and expanding your audience. As such, any business looking to maintain itself in the long-term must develop a firm grasp on user experience services. They have to adapt their business model to best fit their customer’s needs and wants—customer experience has to be taken into account in order to improve the reputation of the business.
It’s here that terms have to be defined: User experience indicates a person’s experiences with a certain product. Customer experience is defined as a person’s experiences with a brand or company. Both are different and unique, but are constantly working in tandem to enhance a company’s reputation.
Do You Hear the People Sing?
Improvements have to be made based on the context of how your product is used by your customers—whether or not the experience can be streamlined, simplified, or generally optimized to make it more “smooth” for the prospect.
Poorly-made digital apps and websites can show, perhaps moreso than many other products, how user experience can affect a brand’s image. A badly designed, cluttered, and confusing interface can easily drive away people who would otherwise be interested in what you have to sell. People won’t use an app if they find it clumsy or inconvenient to use, after all. For better or for worse, a person will never forget the kind of experiences he had with a commodity.
There’s always room for improvement, however, and these can be the best opportunities to build reputation. Rather than lashing out in anger over criticism, a company that takes into account the grievances of its base can use the feedback to better their product. After all, would you rather recommend from a company that improves based on the concerns of its base, or a company that repeatedly ignores ways to better develop its goods?
Taking the user experience of your customers into account can never do you wrong. Improving your product based on customer feedback is a standard procedure. The best businesses go one step further and integrate improvements just with the goal in mind to improve convenience for the existing and potential customers.
Trust is established here. With trust comes loyalty, eventually giving birth to support, and this results to increasing conversion of potential customers.
User Experience, Customer Experience, and Trust
It’s your job to craft an image of your company that can appeal to a broad audience, an image compelling enough to draw in even those who would otherwise have nothing to do with your brand. Of course, advertising plays a significant role as far as sales are concerned, but word-of-mouth from your audience can be just as effective in making or breaking your business.
All entrepreneurs have a core target audience to cater towards, but in reality they’re not just targeting that audience. Your average audience member has friends, family members, or acquaintances—some of whom haven’t even heard of you in any way, are unconcerned with what you’re selling, or simply don’t have the time or money to invest in your products.
Your core base of supporters may already be invested in you, and they may like your business well enough to recommend you to others. But all that said, it really isn’t their job to sell you to their loved ones; it’s a choice they make, not an obligation to your brand.
A healthy rapport with your base is always a net positive. When your customers report overall positive experiences because of how well you’ve crafted your products, those outside your audience will see that maybe you’re worth trusting.
A House of Cards
Make no mistake: maintaining a reputation is a balancing act. The internet has made it so that a dozen angry voices can drown out a hundred positive comments. One single rash comment or even just plain flawed wording can topple everything you tried to build.
The harshest criticisms flow more freely now than ever before. A glitch in the app you made, a broken link on your website, or even just a poorly-worded statement on your blog—all of that can be taken and spread to every corner of the internet faster than you can imagine, every little comment tarnishing your reputation more and more.
Big names build themselves on their reputation. You can pour all the money in the world into your company, but if your products have a reputation for being terribly made, then no one’s going to buy. Likewise, even if your products are well regarded, you’ll likely drive away potential customers if they hear your company exercises scummy business practices (such as abusing employees, false advertising, directly insulting supporters, and the like).
Criticism is inherently valuable, as it enables you to discover the weaknesses in your business model and fix them accordingly. Constant praise causes stagnation, and if your goods stagnate, you’ll lose more people than you could gain.
If your products are well-made and your willingness to take in feedback is sincere, you’ll almost certainly gain support on that front. All the better if you make honest attempts to polish your services and prioritize the experience of your consumers, rather than forcing your vision upon them and admonishing them for not seeing it. This is true whether or not you’re a multimedia American corporation or a mobile app development company in Singapore.
In the end, the hallmark of a strong business is a constant ebb and flow of maintaining good product and keeping up good relations with customers. There’s always room for improvement, always ways to keep your brand afloat, and always people to appeal to; sometimes apps and other pieces of technology might require a whole digital transformation just to reform into something better.
It might be worth it to do so, however, because it’s always a good rule of thumb to put your customers’ satisfactions above all else. Any business that starts off on that foundation at the very least has a chance to go farther than expected.
Other References:
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User Experience (UX) vs. Customer Experience (CX): What’s the Dif?: https://digital.gov/2014/07/07/user-experience-ux-vs-customer-experience-cx-whats-the-dif/
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Increasing Customer Satisfaction With Better UX: https://www.clarity-ventures.com/blog/increasing-customer-satisfaction-with-better-ux
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Ethics and User Experience – Reputation Management, the Right Way: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/ethics-and-the-user-experience-reputation-management-the-right-way
