It’s imperative you make your customers’ lives easy

Having just read an interesting piece on IT Donut (www.itdonut.co.uk) about major failings in M&S’s new website, the importance of making your customers’ lives easy was brought into sharp focus.

Apparently in the 13 weeks until the middle of June, M&S online sales dropped 8%. The price of the new website? £150 million. Wow.

No doubt a great deal of the cost was incorporated within the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, such as CRM, ordering, fulfilment, etc. But the customer’s online experience is clearly a key reason why sales have dropped, alongside other broader hurdles M&S are experiencing.

As Marketing Week point out:

“…it falls down in the more critical function of making it easy for customers to purchase. Indeed, there are some parts of the site where it is extremely difficult for customers to understand the path they need to take to buy product.”

All of which highlights just how important it is to ensure you make your customers’ lives easy. If it’s online, then provide clear sign posts to what the customer can do next and where on earth they are in the journey. If it’s offline, then your calls to action need to be clear (and of course, backed up by your admin and organisational set up).

Read the full IT Donut article here.