Whether you’re big or small, start here:

1. Know your audience. How deeply do you understand your audience, their pain points, motivations, and needs? You must have this knowledge to create good CX. Acquiring that knowledge is Mission 1. 
2. Ensure that your digital properties and efforts support your brand promise. Does your website experience support or detract from what your customers and prospects expect? Your promises, explicit and implicit, drive those expectations. Falling short feels like betrayal. Too many brands fail to align what they promise and what their online experience delivers.
   
   For example: If your brand promises convenience, nothing says “not convenient” more than poor site structure or ineffective site search. No one perceives the inability to find what they seek as convenient.
   
   If you’re a nonprofit and your brand focuses on telling stories of people you’ve helped, are those stories front and center on your website and easily found? Do you integrate them into your social media strategy?
3. Conduct a user experience audit. Spend some time and budget auditing usability (often referred to as UX) to identify your site visitors’ most common pain points. Then work to ease that pain.
   
   Sometimes, this can mean a total website or app overhaul. More often, you’ll uncover simpler problems with simpler solutions. For example:
   
   - Shorten a donation form that’s too long and frequently abandoned before submission.
   - Create an FAQ that answers questions visitors keep asking over the phone.
   - Rename confusing navigation labels so they say exactly what content lives beneath them.
4. Use a consistent voice across all channels. Your brand voice – the unique way that your brand communicates – should be channel agnostic. Adjust your tone based on your message and your writing style or medium, but do it within brand guidelines. Consistency creates familiarity for your customers.
5. Make sure your website is accessible. Is your website accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities? According to the US Census Bureau, nearly 1 in 5 Americans has a disability. If your website isn’t accessible, those potential customers can’t use it, resulting in frustration for them and lost business for you. 
6. Adhere to all privacy rules and regulations. Nothing damages a brand and online experience more than visitor mistrust of what you do with personal information. Make sure you understand privacy laws and comply with them.
7. Consider the omni-channel brand experience. In today’s multi-channel world, consumers expect a consistent experience across channels and devices. They expect you to know them (“Good Morning, Jaimie,” said Starbucks with a quick link to one of my usual orders) regardless of the device at hand. This piece is a big challenge for many brands, even the big ones.
   
   If you can’t tackle that big issue, do what you can with the basics. Ensure consistent use of imagery, fonts, and logos across channels. Inconsistency across your digital footprint can throw consumers off. Anything that makes a site visitor stop and think before hitting a checkout or donate button costs you money and should be removed or improved. (Pet peeve: Third-party shopping carts or payment solutions that aren’t integrated with your site and thus look and feel wrong.)
8. Review your content. Is your content optimized for the web?
   
   - Do you use H1s, subheads, and bullet points to make scanning easy?
   - Do you write at a grade level that matches your users?
   - Is your content easily digestible? Does your content answer your users’ most common questions?
   
   Here are some excellent tips for writing web content that breaks through the noise.
9. Analyze the competition. Sometimes, finding unique ways to stand out from the pack can be as simple as knowing what the pack is doing. Review competitor sites to understand the quality of the online customer experience they deliver. What unique online features and functionality do they offer? Can you find relatively easy, cost-effective ways to top their customer experience?

User experience improvements aren’t always expensive or overwhelming. After all, creating a great online customer experience – and a great brand experience – is all about removing friction.

Feeling obliged to create a Starbucks-level digital experience can make even the most enthusiastic of us want to stay in bed in the morning. Don’t despair! Keep it simple by going back to the basics. You don’t have to be perfect. The experience you offer just has to be a little ahead of the pack. And as we saw in our opening statistics, the rest of the pack isn’t all that swift.

If you need to understand how well your site is delivering on usability, get started with a UX audit. We can help you uncover what's working, what's not, and where to focus your time and efforts on improvements. Reach to us today!