2022 Consumer Expectations are Changing, Dramatically

Digital Experiences Are Everything Today

There is no hiding from the fact that everything has changed. From our personal interactions to the transactions with businesses, the reality is that no one can “put the toothpaste back in the tube.” Fundamentally, the market has been exposed to a new way of doing business, and quarantine has reinforced consumers’ preferences for the highest quality experiences when visiting your website. The pace of life and business has increased year over year, and as we are all familiar, there was ample time to shop for that software your team needed or buy those shoes you had been looking at for months.

A McKinsey & Company Study Listed the Following:

• Segmentation. Knowing who is on your website is a step in the right direction, but what do you do once you have a large enough data set? Personalize the experience for your visitors. Welcome them back to your website instead of saying hello. Segmentation allows organizations to send highly targeted, and more importantly relevant information to your customers. This can amount to the difference between achieving top line revenue objectives and falling behind the curve.
• Speed. In 2022, your site speed will impact multiple areas of your strategy, as well as your conversion rate. With Google having announced core changes coming to their algorithm in May 2021, site speed continues to become a central component to the formula for success. However, speed is not only relevant to your sites load times. If customers have a difficult time finding the products or services they are looking for, they are acutely aware that you have competitors, and are confident in their ability to find them. So, the easiest solution is to keep your customers on your website by making your solutions readily available, easy to find via pages designed with the users experience in mind.
• Self-Service. While skepticism will always remain, more than half of businesses believe that digital sales are equally or more effective than pre-COVID-19 sales models, with upwards of 90% of transactions during quarantine taking place digitally, simply because we were forced to. However, the market has had a year to acclimate to a new way of doing business, and many consumers prefer it. According to McKinsey, the shift to a self-service sales model was already underway, and quarantine only furthered the movement with about 74% of organizations moving to remote channels.

So, What Do your Customers Need?

The reality that must be faced is simple; the practices and habits of purchasers have completely changed, making the importance of knowing what your customers are experiencing on your site, and how to improve upon it, the key to continued success. By scaling back the traditional direct sales channels for more self-service options, organizations are empowered with a data driven strategy to shore up the gaps in traditional strategies.

Have we piqued your interest? Hopefully, but if not, we have a freebie for you. In early 2020, McKinsey surveyed what “getting it right” mean to industry leaders, and 30% rated a website having a live chat option during their research stage as one of the top 3 most important requirements.