4 Benefits of Working With a UX-Led Digital Agency

There’s a lot more to high-quality UX and digital design than simply building a pretty website.

In fact, there are lots of pretty websites with terrible UX.

To do it well, you need a lot of research and data, plus the know-how to translate that information into effective human centred design decisions.

With that in mind, here are four key benefits of working with a UX-led digital agency.

1. Understanding What Your Customers Want

User experience isn’t simply a “nice to have” — it’s essential to winning and retaining customers. In fact, one in three people say they would stop doing business with a brand they loved after a single negative experience.

So what makes for a “good” user experience?

That same study referenced above, from PwC, gives us some of the answers. In particular, it notes that consumers prioritise factors such as convenience, easy payment, efficiency, and personalization — all of which are directly or indirectly related to UX.

However, those are some pretty broad areas. Sure, your customers might want you to offer more personalised experiences, but what if it’s not their biggest priority? What if, in reality, all they really want is a faster, simpler checkout process?

You could have sunk a lot of money into personalisation, without ever getting to the core of the improvements that would make the biggest difference to your audience.

UX-led digital agencies can help you here, because they have the ability to run the research in order to identify actionable insights from your existing user base and potential new customers.

 

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2. Guiding Users Toward Your Key Business Goals

Before the dawn of the internet, your competitors were typically businesses in your city, state, or region that offered the same product or service as you.

But that’s no longer the case. Today, your biggest rival could be based on the opposite side of the world. They might have no physical presence in your entire country, yet they can still deliver products to your audience in a handful of days.

With so much competition out there, it’s a wonder anyone ever visits our websites. So when they do, it’s very much in your interest to drive them toward taking some sort of action. Otherwise, what was the point in bringing them to your site in the first place?

This sounds like a simple point, and in many ways it is. Yet so many brands — not just small local businesses, but big multinationals with huge budgets — don’t offer a streamlined user journey that makes it obvious what action people should take next.

A UX-led digital agency will be able to understand the ideal path to conversion, remove any unnecessary steps, and signpost it effectively. That means more conversions, and more revenue.

 

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3. Improving Client Retention

UX design isn’t just about getting new customers to the checkout faster — it’s also about helping you keep hold of the customers you’ve already got.

In reality, UX can improve customer retention in lots of ways. But to give an example, it makes your product or service easier for new users to understand, which means they’re more likely to see clear benefits from it, and enjoy using it. In turn, that means they’re more likely to stick around.

Again, this may sound simple, but many brands still aren’t getting it right. In fact, one in four customers churn as a result of a poor onboarding experience.

Not sure how to improve your onboarding process?

Don’t worry, because a UX-led agency can help you onboard new customers more effectively. They can leverage data to understand where customers are struggling with your existing process, and identify instances where key information is unavailable or difficult to find.

 

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4. Discovering New Trends & Patterns

You might think you understand your customers inside and out. Maybe you commissioned a customer survey two years ago and are confident it gave you all the insights you could ever need.

Unfortunately, that’s probably not the case.

In reality, user behaviours change all the time. We may have once tolerated having to enter a search term in several different ways to track down the result we really wanted, but now we expect Google to get it right first time.

The same is true of your website (or app, or software product). Your customers might have put up with a clunky interface or confusing navigation a few years ago, but as your competitors improve their own user experiences, you need to do the same.

To make matters more challenging, digital journeys have become ever more complex. Users routinely switch from one device to another, so it’s no longer enough to deliver an excellent desktop experience — you need to offer the same level of service on mobile, too.

Digging into the data can help you identify new customer behaviours that you would otherwise have been completely unaware of. This can help you optimise your design and user journey around these trends and patterns.

And once again, a UX-led agency can do all the hard work for you to maximise your results.

 

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