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Maximizing User Experience Through Social Media Listening

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A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study found that 32% of consumers will “walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.”

There’s no doubt that the user experience (UX) makes a huge difference in whether customers recommend your company to others or whether they take their money elsewhere and tell everyone about their terrible experience.

However, many companies don’t know how customers experience their websites, products, and services. Fortunately, it’s not hard to listen to the market — you just need to take advantage of the massive public forum we all know as social media.

Why Does User Experience Matter?

If you have a website that looks nice and products and services that work, isn’t that enough? Unfortunately, it’s not.

To stand out in today’s crowded market, it’s essential to have a website that looks nice and is easy to navigate, accessible, and makes it easy for the customer to find what they need. It’s important to have products and services that work and are easy to use and understand.

A great user experience increases customer satisfaction and loyalty, while a poor UX causes customer confusion and frustration. This frustration can lead to poor reviews, lost sales, and damage to your company’s reputation.

It’s hard to get good reviews — you have to respond to reviews promptly and promote your business listing so customers know where to leave feedback. You don’t want to undercut that hard work by providing a poor user experience.

How to Find Out What Customers Think of Your UX

The only way to improve your UX is to know what customers think about the current process. And the best way to find this out is to listen on social media, where people share their opinions about everything from puppies to the latest software.

You can appoint a social media manager to lead the brand monitoring efforts. A social media manager keeps an eye on social media trends and ensures that your online presence resonates with your audience, so they’re a great point person for a social media listening project.

You’ll want to start by focusing on the platform that most of your customers use. In the beginning, listening on only one or two platforms is best, because it conserves resources until you’ve developed a process that’s effective and efficient.

From there, set up alerts for mentions of your brand, your products and services, your competitors, and your industry. There are specific social listening software options that make this very easy and allow you to collect all relevant information in one place.

Finally, determine as a team how you’ll respond to negative user comments. It’s important to be professional and address concerns quickly.

Take Steps to Improve User Experience Based on Feedback

There are many ways to improve user experience, and the specific approach you take will depend on the feedback you find online. However, there are some important best practices to keep in mind as your team works to improve the UX.

Prioritize the List of UX Improvements

There may be dozens of things your team wants to improve about the UX, but you can only effectively do one thing at a time. How quickly you can make improvements will depend on your IT team’s size, efficiency, and other priorities.

Think carefully about the potential UX improvements and choose your battles. Creating a prioritized list will help everyone stay on the same page and create clarity for the IT team, which can help get your projects finished more quickly.

Consider Making Social Media a Customer Service Channel

Not having quick access to customer service is a top complaint for many customers when it comes to UX. Consumers want fast answers to simple questions, a clear understanding of products and services, and more.

One way to meet that need and improve the customer experience is to use social media as a customer service channel. Providing social media customer service helps you reach billions of people around the world and gives customers an easy way to reach you. Be proactive and available, and watch your brand reputation — and sales — soar.

Keep Things Simple and Consistent

No matter what you improve, keep simplicity and consistency at the forefront of your design. Consumers won’t recognize your brand if they don’t have the same visuals and experience during each encounter.

Similar elements should look the same throughout your website and other branded platforms. Brand colors should be consistent, and everything should be easy to navigate and understand. Leave plenty of white space to avoid overwhelming a customer and losing out on the sale.

Consistency allows customers to quickly and easily accomplish the tasks they want to complete, improving their experience and increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Maximize UX Through Online Feedback

There are a lot of ways to collect information about UX, but social media is where you find consumers at their most candid.

When your organization takes online feedback and uses it to improve the UX, you’ll have a significant impact on how customers interact with your website, products, and services. Of course, you can make all the improvements at once, but by prioritizing the improvements and keeping things simple, your organization can make a big positive impact on customer satisfaction, sales, and reputation.