Create a Smart Website That Works for You
Beyond a simple business card or an online product catalog, we should aspire for the corporate website to be a versatile communication tool between your business and your clients, both current and potential. Your company most likely already has a website; however, it’s very probable that improvements can be implemented so that it becomes a true business ally that works tirelessly for you. In this post, we’ll tell you how to achieve this in five steps.
Steps to create a smart website
If you’re thinking of eCommerce as the only example of a site that works tirelessly for your business, you’re mistaken: the possibilities of a digital ally go far beyond a product catalog and a payment gateway.
The real secret lies in creating customer experiences (CX) that can be completed directly from your portal (we’ll call it “Portal,” because the term webpage no longer does it justice).
These experiences are based on five main pillars:
1. Content experience,
2. Audience identification and personalization,
3. Automated transactions such as those in eCommerce,
4. Consumer autonomy, and just as important as all the above,
5. System reliability—that is, ensuring everything operates without system failures.
1. Content Experience
This stage may seem obvious or taken for granted; however, creating a truly good content experience isn’t that easy. Having your digital ally constantly telling your story, talking about your products, services, values, and processes will ensure that anyone searching for what your business offers can find you—and more importantly, can identify the product or service that solves their needs.
2. Audience Identification and Personalization
In addition to traditional market studies that help us understand our potential audiences, website analytics tools allow us to discover new inputs about who is interested in our offering. These inputs can help uncover market niches and unmet needs—in other words, explore new blue oceans. By progressively creating a more complete customer profile through the capture, storage, and analysis of characteristics and learnings from each interaction in their journey, we can generate personalized experiences that build close and lasting relationships.
3. Transacciones automatizadas
Whether you run an eCommerce business or offer an online service, there are tasks that can be automated. That’s why the first step in creating an experience that works for both you and your clients is to define the key processes of the business.define the key processes of the business.
Many business processes can be automated. Let’s consider a law firm specializing in intellectual property. Among the many tasks they perform when a client hires them to register a trademark are the phonetic search of the brand, submitting the application to the IMPI for registration, and, if all goes well, delivering the registration to the client. Other aspects related to this service could include preparing quotes, generating invoices, collections, and more.
Within this larger process, we find smaller processes that translate into specific tasks. For example, requesting the client’s logo in order to upload it to the IMPI platform.
Identifying a process, the people involved, and all of its variations and conditions can be a major undertaking. In the case of the law firm, for instance, the quotation might depend on the number of categories in which the brand needs to be registered, making it impractical to establish a flat fee for each service. And here we’re only addressing one stage of the macroprocess.
However, once the work processes are defined and those that can be carried out automatically are delegated to a computer system, the results of this hard work will only bring benefits and resource savings to the company.
4. Consumer Autonomy
In addition to saving companies resources, giving consumers autonomy improves the Customer Experience by providing faster and more accurate responses to the results they are looking for. By customer autonomy, we mean the ease with which people can independently contract a service or purchase a product. Autonomous customers are proactive individuals who research before making a purchase and then complete the transaction themselves.
It is increasingly useful for our clients to have a section where they can resolve technical support issues; change their phone plan by upgrading or downgrading; plan their dream vacation; order food delivery; contact a doctor; among many other tasks that were previously carried out by human staff or specialized computer programs.
5. System Reliability
The website is the fundamental tool through which companies now acquire clients (Lead Generation). Today, more than ever in the history of marketing, we have concrete data to segment audiences and understand their tastes and preferences.
Implementing analytics tools on your website makes it easier to make decisions based on all kinds of data. These may be demographic, such as age ranges, geographic location, gender, or even preferred times and devices for connecting to the Internet and interacting with your brand. This information allows us to accompany potential clients throughout their Customer Journey and enhance their purchasing experience.
In conclusion…
We must not waste the potential of websites; by creating smart applications that carry out parts of business processes, we will gain countless benefits.