Improving customer experience is the driving force behind digital transformation, and today’s customers have higher expectations than ever. The ability to interact with brands across multiple digital channels has become the norm, leaving companies with no choice but to build an effective online presence in order to stay relevant.
In every industry, business leaders are starting to realise just how important it is to have a strong digital identity. Brands want to be instantly recognisable to both customers and employees, and to do so they need to be present in people’s lives. This is why you’ll struggle to find a company that isn’t using social media to build relationships with users and communicate with them on their own terms. However, social media profiles shouldn’t exist in isolation. They need inspiration, guidance, and ultimately a purpose. Therefore, a company’s most valuable digital asset today is its website.
The role of the corporate website has changed – its job is no longer to provide a virtual product catalogue or brochure. Now it needs to work for the company, to support business growth by providing solid foundations for digital transformation. Your website reveals the essence of your digital brand and therefore guides how your company interacts with users. Going beyond this, however, it also acts as a tool for you to better understand your customers by enabling you to collect huge amounts of data. Every visit provides valuable insights into customer behaviour and preferences that can help you to craft a more personalised experience.
One brand, one voice
The biggest advantage of having a corporate website is that it gives companies a platform to connect with all of their stakeholders in one place. This is essential to develop a strong and unified digital identity. Your website acts as the main touch point for people that are interested in finding out more about your company or looking to make a purchase. Failure to integrate your message could lead to inconsistent identities, causing a fragmented customer experience and confusion. Consistency is therefore fundamental.
It doesn’t matter whether visitors arrive via search engine optimisation or social media, what matters is providing a consistent and simple user experience once they’re there. This is how you can encourage users to spend time on your website and interact. For this reason, great care needs to be taken to make your website visually appealing and easy to navigate. When executed well, it can ensure that users enjoy a relevant, effective, and agile experience across all digital channels. Giving your company a single and well-defined digital identity will ease the digital transformation process and help you gain your customer’s trust and respect.
Engage your internal stakeholders
Beyond your customers and end users, organisations cannot forget that your employees and internal stakeholders will also be frequent users of the website. A strong digital identity here can help to strengthen your employees’ sense of belonging and unity, as every department and area is represented on one corporate platform.
Being able to engage them helps drive a motivated workforce, consistently pushing for more. It also helps to share crucial messages, such as a company philosophy or values. By being able to spread such messages, these ideas can go from being written off and ignored to becoming a significant pillar of everyday life in your organisation.
Understand your audience
By acting as a central hub for all of your stakeholders, a website also provides the perfect way to get to know them better. Every visitor leaves behind a data trail that can be captured and analysed. This enables you to see how users arrive at your website, where you can track their digital journey to identify what information they are most interested in. Data-driven insights will help you understand your customers, so that you can further optimise your website by offering the most relevant content.
Users will return to brands that understand them, and this will improve engagement ratios and loyalty. Converting website visits into commercial opportunities is a lot easier if you understand your customers’ behaviour and buying habits. In the digital age, customers have extremely high expectations and don’t want to be bombarded with generic content or irrelevant offers. Creating a more personalised user experience is the best way to improve your customer’s digital journey and achieve measurable growth through successful digital transformation.
What are you waiting for?
Digital transformation is being driven by the business world’s need to keep up with the expectations of increasingly demanding customers. Companies that are slow to improve their customer experience will lose out to more flexible rivals. Websites therefore play a key role in creating a unified brand identity and sharing this with users in a consistent manner across all digital channels. It provides you with the opportunity not only to show off your products and services, but also provide the unique content that they’re looking for. These techniques will help you build trust and improve engagement ratios, which will make it easier to interact with potential customers and convert them into sales.
