Partner Article

Could your CMS help you to find buried treasure?

Imagine, for a moment, that instead of providing products or services, the purpose of your business is to help your customers locate buried treasure. How would you go about it? Assuming, of course, that you know where a number of chests filled with gold, silver and jewellery are hidden, would you make it as easy as possible for your customers to find them? Or would you instead make it as difficult as possible, creating a series of incomprehensible maps, and enigmatic, unhelpful instructions?

Of course, in anyone’s book, a good treasure hunt can be a lot of fun, provided the instructions are clear, and the clues are easy to decipher. So why, then, do so many organisations insist on making it difficult for their customers to head in the right direction, by offering long, convoluted routes to their hidden gems and clues that cannot be unravelled? Choosing to behave in this way not only ruins the experience for customers, but can also turn it into an exercise in frustration. It’s true that not every product can be as highly regarded as a chest of buried jewels, but that shouldn’t disguise the fact that too many customers find it difficult to find what they are looking for when it comes to navigating an organisation’s website.

The principle reason for this is that too many organisations underestimate not only the value of their website to their customers, but also the value of the customer experience itself. Clearly, any website worth its salt needs to factor in a number of key considerations; it should have great content, a compelling user interface, and mobile support, for example. However, one of the basic concepts that many organisations habitually ignore in favour of these features is the basic concept of providing easy access to the content your customers are actually looking for.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, more often than not, your customers will be visiting your website for a specific reason. Whether it’s to find out the price of your product or service, or to find out more information about your business, it’s crucial to ensure that they are able to find it as quickly as possible. To your customers, this information can be the treasure that they seek, and for this reason, it’s vital that they are able to find it as quickly and as easily as possible. That’s why it’s vitally important that those doing the work at the back-end have access to a CMS that can enable them to signpost the most relevant content.

There are a number of simple and easy ways to achieve this. Besides incorporating a good search function and easy navigation for users to find what they are looking for, websites can also support real-time targeting if they use the right CMS. This allows the website to use information provided by the visitor to provide recommendations based on previous searches – a function that could be invaluable to e-commerce sites in particular. Making the customer’s experience on the site as easy, relevant and useful as possible is the key.

After all, there’s no use continually displaying information that’s not relevant to what your customers are looking for. If I’m a customer looking for information about a specific product, and yet I find that the link taking me to this information is hidden amongst a lot of other data that isn’t relevant to my query, what would I do? Would it be easier for me to spend a number of minutes searching on the website for the information I need, or would it be quicker and easier for me to go to a competitor’s website where this information is more prominently displayed?

Perhaps, when all’s said and done, the real treasure for the modern-day customer isn’t product information or other data – it’s time. The ability to find information on a website quickly and shave valuable seconds off their day can, in itself, be a treasure trove, which, once opened, can ensure customer loyalty for years to come. This customer experience is vital, not only to the success of your website, but also to the performance of your brand as a whole. The question is, do you have a CMS that can easily point the way to this enhanced experience for your customers? Or are you satisfied with letting them get lost, annoyed and frustrated instead?

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Oliver Jaeger .