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With most businesses facing pressures beyond their control, it’s easy to lose sight of what we do. can Control. We hear the phrase over and over: “You need to minimize risk, increase revenue, and protect customer loyalty.” My answer is always the same. It’s about multiplying what you can control. Make your user experience competitive and create business value through great design.
Research shows that good UX design can make a big difference. According to Forrester, companies that focus on designing great, user-centric experiences benefit from improved customer loyalty, increased revenue, better market valuations, and higher stock prices. In fact, according to their report, a $1 investment in UX yields an average return of $100, giving him a ROI of 10,000%.
When your business is under pressure, maximizing the return on all your investments is critical. Here are three key ways to invest in UX and create value:
1) Customer Retention Protection.
Acquiring a new customer is always more expensive than retaining a loyal one, but loyalty is earned or lost with every experience. Up to 61% of customers move on to another location after a great experience. On the contrary, if they feel valued, they will stay. According to Pew Research, 86% of buyers say they are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
Retention is one of the top KPIs (key performance indicators) for subscription businesses. SaaS (Software as a Service) is the most popular model digital companies use to charge for their solutions. SaaS has many benefits for both business and customers. But there are also challenges. You need to keep your customers happy and maintain high usage and adoption rates. Otherwise, the customer can cancel the subscription at any time.
As consumers tighten their spending on non-essentials, providing a user experience that consistently puts their needs first increases their perception of value. All positive experiences offer the opportunity to protect your place within your budget.
2) Improve your sales conversion rate.
As consumers, we instinctively know that a bad user experience will not compel us to make a purchase. But just knowing that some part of the user experience is bad doesn’t solve the problem. Design teams need to pinpoint where friction occurs in the conversion experience. Being able to use real-time data to simplify the checkout process or create incentives for purchases can make a big difference in conversions.
As an example, let’s look at SaaS (Software as a Service). In many cases, companies in the SaaS model have only one chance to deliver a great first experience to their users. Suppose a brand offers a freemium model or free trial and wants to convert free users into paying customers. When users have a great experience as measured by their ability to complete their required tasks in an effective and efficient manner, we guarantee a significant increase in conversion rates.
3. Maximize engineering productivity and reduce product development failures
understood. Time to market is critical. How quickly an organization can build and launch a product can be the difference between surviving or succeeding in a tough market. However, design and development decisions made solely for the sake of being agile can be detrimental to end users. User research gets pushed aside and you realize you need to fix it after launch. Worse, the product fails completely and the team doesn’t know why.
A recurring theme in some of the most famous product failures is not thinking about the end user early enough. Remember Sony Betamax, Google Wave, Microsoft Vista? All great companies. All products have potential. All failed on the wisdom of end-user feedback.
When product teams collect real-time user data and incorporate that UX research early in the agile development cycle, the entire process is de-risked and data-driven decisions are made. The result is smarter, faster movement on the front end instead of cleaning up costly mistakes and risking a failed launch. Thanks to test automation, conducting investigations has become relatively easy, fast, and scalable.
Doing more with less has become more of a mantra than a mantra, so maintaining and improving a great UX should be a top strategic priority. This is one of the most powerful business instruments you can control.
