How UX Plays a Role in Your Overall AX

When people think about Experience, oftentimes their minds go straight to customer service. But experience, especially in B2B, really embodies the entirety of the customer's interaction with the brand. And that interaction, more often than not, starts with the company website.

This week on The Account Experience Podcast we spoke with Kelly Rader, VP of Digital Experience at ObjectEdge.

Kelly talked to us about the importance of delivering quality experiences in all the places we don't usually think about to ensure that your brand has accessibility to the largest possible audience.

"Sometimes accessibility is something that if forgotten, or it's deprioritized because it's a shared responsibility between marketers and developers and the team in charge of content." She goes on to say, "Accessibility is a business challenge, not just a marketing challenge."

And if that doesn't entice you to rethink your website experience, listen to this. Google is backing this sentiment 100%. They have always been in the business of presenting the customer with the best possible experience, but now they're taking it to the next level by actually presenting badges to pages that offer the best experience. And you can probably imagine that if your website is served with a page that has the badge, the customer is likely to go there first. Curious how you can get it?

Well, according to Kelly, there are 3 things you need to be keenly aware of (because Google is):

1. Page load speed: It needs to be under 2.5 seconds at all costs.
2. Interactivity - Dynamic portions of your website need to load immediately.
3. Visual Stability - Make sure your visuals are stable across all platforms and devices.

But here's the thing. If you're not tying these website efforts to your VoC program, how are you going to know where to invest?

And that was our big takeaway from this interview. Your website is an important touchpoint in the customer journey. That's why it is so important to make sure your UX is spot on. But the magic happens when you're able to connect your analytics to your customer's voice.

How are they interacting with the site?

What pain points are they experiencing as they do?

And here's the big one, what steps do you have in place to optimize for the best possible experience?

Because you can analyze data until you're blue in the face, but unless you have programs in place to continuously optimize, it's not worth a whole lot.