Social media, SEO, marketing and writingThe Four Demands of the Empowered Customer
What type of website experience causes visitors to come back repeatedly? Great ones! Oh, if creating awesome website were only that easy, we’d all have one. Right?
While tactical approaches to designing websites vary widely, successful web strategies are based on a few simple principles –– something I first wrote about nine years ago in a book I co-authored with Laurie Windham about doing business online. In that book, “Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business,” Laurie and I warned businesses that they needed to fulfill the demands of their site visitors, or face their wrath.
The four demands of the empowered customer are:
- Give me what I need when I need it
- Don’t waste my time
- Give me meaningful content, not fluff
- Don’t exploit me
When you factor the demands of the empowered customer together, you realize that people want a Holistic Experience that is based on their interpretation of the rules. Playing on that concept, a Holistic Website integrates marketing, sales and customer usage activities to enable shopping, buying, receiving, and consuming –– in one cohesive site. It puts the user in the center of the universe, anticipating, stimulating and facilitating their behavior. It fulfills the promise of the company’s value proposition by satisfying user needs.
Companies who can combine these holistic insights with solid user centric design and testing will find themselves much better prepared to develop a website that truly delights their customers.
