Create a top-quality customer experience

Using your CMS to create a top-quality customer experience

Customers’ expectations of organisations are higher than ever; any goodwill they may have had during the Covid-19 pandemic as businesses adjusted to the new ways of working has since disappeared.

A study carried out after the pandemic found more than half of consumers (58%) have higher customer service expectations than in 2020. That same survey reinforced the fickleness of customers, finding that 68% of customers would be less loyal to a brand after just one negative experience.

Clearly, part of being a successful business relies on providing an outstanding customer experience – with no lag.

Your website plays a key role in this – which is where a CMS comes in. Your CMS can help supply the foundation for an outstanding customer experience in many ways.

Consistency 

In our digital-first society, customers want a consistent experience regardless of screen type or location.

Customers expect to be able to switch seamlessly between devices – seeing the same content, but an experience optimised for individual screens with responsive web design. Your CMS should handle this for you, automatically rearranging and stacking content based on the user’s screen without losing any functionality.

Localisation

 Equally, customers want a consistent experience wherever they are in the world – but website content often needs to be localised depending on where the user is based.

This could mean different content for users in different countries, translations, or both. A good CMS will allow for these variants, simplifying the process of customising pages.

Forrit’s CMS allows you to either bring your own translation engine or use a translation API, reducing load times for content across different markets. In fact, we’ve helped our customers reduce translation times from weeks to days.

Rapid updates

 Your CMS must be able to push your changes live with no lag, to ensure the information you want out there is available right away. If an organisation provides out-of-date information, it risks losing consumers’ trust.

This is especially true in certain sectors such as financial services, where sharing obsolete conversion or interest rates (or, indeed, any other financial information) can have a detrimental impact.

Gone are the days when Marketers had to rely on the IT department to push out content updates. An effective CMS will provide seamless content edit and approval flows, enabling website content to be updated in minutes.

Accessibility

Accessibility is also key to ensuring customers stay with your brand; at least 1 billion people worldwide have some level of disability or impairment that can affect their ability to use a website. Businesses can’t afford to ignore this community and, in some regions, it may even be illegal to do so. However, 96.3% of home pages have detectable accessibility errors, based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). If someone struggles with your website, it’s unlikely they’ll return.

It's worth noting accessibility isn’t just about ensuring people with different needs and disabilities can access your website. It’s also about ensuring the website loads properly. This is particularly important given our short attention spans – which some researchers say is only about 47 seconds; we’re quick to feel frustrated by slow-loading web pages and move on to other websites.

Ensuring your website has clear messaging and is easy to navigate – and loads quickly – will help keep people’s attention and bring them back to your page.

Downtime

Consumers will also be quick to switch to your competitor if your website is down for an extended length of time, viewing you as unreliable.

The correlation between reliability and website uptime increases at times of high traffic. Consider the negative impact on a bank’s reputation if its website were to go down just as it launched a highly sought-after mortgage rate.

With Forrit’s enterprise grade security and access to Azure datacentres around the world, instances of website downtime are practically non-existent.

Above all, it’s not enough to merely have a business website. It’s your website’s performance and the user experience that helps decide whether your customers will stay with you. A CMS is a vital part of that.

Get in touch today for more information about how our CMS can help you provide a top-quality customer experience.