Trendstream’s recent research evidenced what we’d long suspected – that one of the best ways of improving brand image is to interact with customers online. And not by a small degree either – a 29% increase in reputation on average.
Flip this round and it’s easy to understand the effect failing to interact well with customers online. Example, I’m in the market for a new boiler. Valliant and Worcester Bosch are the two makes I’m looking at. The Valliant website looks slicker but runs you into the equivalent of a road block. It’s smooth sailing on a nice looking site all the way up to boiler recommendations and then you can’t click on them to get more information, or phone them. The Worcester Bosch site by contrast, while lacking in design, functions well and gives you the information you need including a good phone service.
So when it comes down to making a decision between them, I’m going to go for the Bosch, even though it costs around 20% more, because the brand experience online makes me trust it more over the long term.
Incidentally, it’s not just boiler makers that need to be aware of online brand perception. We asked a plumber to recommend a boiler and when we looked up the brand he mentioned, it had a poor reputation but was known for giving the largest commission to plumbers. Needless to say this had a negative effect on our perception of that plumber’s brand value.
There’s really no excuse for badly designed websites online these days as there’s a raft of inexpensive tools available to test where the roadblocks are in the customer journey. Two tried and tested ones are Kampyle which makes it easy to ask visitors what they think about the site and Crazyegg which shows you where they are clicking with a ‘confetti’ map, so you can move important text up to that area.
It’s easy to end up snowed under with website analytics data so keeping it simple enables online businesses to make big improvements to customer journeys quickly and easily.