5 key ingredients of a customer-obsessed business website

Customer-centricity and customer-obsession are two phrases that we hear more and more in the business world.

The business models of some of the globe’s most successful companies are built around the concept.

In this blog, we’ll look at how you can design a website that’s just as customer obsessed as everything else your company does.

What is customer obsession?

Customer-obsessed companies put the customer first. It might sound simple, but this focus needs to be woven into everything a business does – from the marketing to the selection of products and services.

Every member of staff in the business needs to be on board with it, too.

Customer obsession involves the ability to empathise with customers. It entails being honest with them at all times. Plus, it calls for businesses to make life simple for customers at every turn.

What does a customer obsessed company look like?

Amazon is famous for its customer centric approach. Owner Jeff Bezos has revealed that he always leaves a chair empty in board meetings.

The reason?

It’s reserved for the most important person – the customer.

Bezos also said: "Obsessing over customer experience is the only long-term defensible competitive advantage."

What are the proven benefits of customer obsession?

Statistics suggest that companies that adopt customer-centric strategies are up to 60 per cent more profitable than competitors.

On top of this, research has revealed that customer-obsessed businesses tend to have employees that are almost a third more engaged and committed to their roles.

5 tips for designing a website that’s customer obsessed

When trying to implement a customer-centric culture at your business, you’ll probably start by reviewing your sales tactics or perhaps your marketing or product range.

You might not think about updating your website.

However, there are a few quick updates you can implement to make your website more customer centric.

1. Your copy

Review the words on your website.

Customer centric copy will empathise with the problems your customers face and reveal how your products and services can fix that problem. It will also explain how your offering can make their life easier and happier.

If your site is full of claims about how you’re the best, biggest, most experienced, or most awarded, without explaining how these elements can benefit the customer, then you can conclude that your copy is not customer obsessed.

2. Page experience

As mentioned above, in order to be customer obsessed you have to do everything you can to make life easy for your clients.

So, in website terms, this means making your site as simple and enjoyable to navigate as possible.

Google recently identified several areas that contribute to a pleasant onsite experience and it has since incorporated these areas into its new page ranking algorithm ‘Page Experience’.

If you’re a web designer or developer, you’ll already be aware of this algorithm.

If it’s new to you, these are few dos and don’ts…

Improve your Largest Contentful Paint time: This is the time it takes for a website to show a visitor its largest content on screen.

One of the simpler tasks you can do to improve LCP is to optimise your website’s images. You can find a few tips on how to do this in our blog on the topic.

Servers can also be one of the lead causes of slow load times. If your website is experiencing low LCP times, take a look at your hosting plan. Does it offer dedicated resources, for example?

The Business Hosting Plans at tsoHost give you dedicated resources without you having to splash out on a Virtual Private Server.

Find out more below.

Ensure your site is optimised for mobile.

Don’t

Have any Cumulative Layout Shifts on your site: cumulative layout shift refers to content that appears to jump about on your site after a visitor accesses it.

This effect can be caused by pop ups, ads or new content being injected into the page by late running JavaScript. You can find out more on how to minimize CLS through Google.

3. Your FAQ page

Having a comprehensive FAQ page on your website is key to making life easier for customers.

No-one wants to have to email or call a company to get answers about products and services when they could find the information they need on a well presented FAQ page.

If you get asked the same question by customers on a regular basis, be sure to add that question – and its answer – to your FAQ page.

4. Support

It goes without saying that customer obsessed companies should provide superior customer service.

Business websites should make it clear how customers can contact a member of staff. Plus, they should make the contact experience effortless.

It could be beneficial to add a chatbot to your site. However, these can be pricey.

In the absence of a chatbot, you should ensure that you have a contact form section on your site.

Research suggests that customers don’t like to fill in more than three fields on a contact form. Statistics also show that cutting the amount of form fields down from 11 to four can increase conversions by 120 per cent.

So, try to keep your contact form as simple as possible.

5. Online window-shopping opportunities

If you have an online store, this is a great way to take customer centricity to the next level.

Research indicates that more and more people are now window shopping online.

This means, they’re increasingly searching the internet for ideas and inspiration before they buy a product or service.

You can cater for this trend on your website by creating a range of ‘ideas for’ blogs. For example, ideas for picnic outfits, ideas for home gyms, ideas for wedding hair styles etc.

It could also help to add product comparison functionality to your site.

For example, if you have a WooCommerce store, look at the WooCommerce Products Compare extension.

It allows shoppers to choose products to compare side by side. The comparison tables can feature everything from price to review ratings to product specs.

This extension usually costs £35 a year. If that seems a little much, take a look at tsoHost’s WordPress ecommerce hosting plans – they come with £4,000 of premium WooCommerce extensions included for free.