How neglecting UX could cost you your customers and a lot more

When an offline business tries to go online or even when someone starts their business with an online store, they allocate the budget to development (which in most cases is for the agency they’ve hired) and salaries of their in-house employees whoever is working on the project. Unfortunately, nothing or very little goes to the user experience in most of the cases, atleast here in MENA.

For many of these businesses, UX will only occupy two cells in their budget’s excel sheet. Because they’re trying to be lean and save as much money as possible. What they fail to understand however is the true cost of NOT building a great user experience. More often than not, it’s going to result in missed sales, dissatisfied customers, and disengaged employees.

Businesses and consumers have great expectations when they use software. We want consistent experience on all devices, contexts, and times. When there is a gap between what people expect and what they get, this gap turns into a hidden cost of bad UX which eventually costs your company sales.

We have worked with different businesses over the last few years in Middle East to test their websites and mobile applications. Here, I try to share our main findings to help you get an idea of the true cost of UX.

1) Lost customers

One of the most neglected screens is the signup page, usually, software developers and business owners neglect this page because it comes “built-in” systems they use, so “WHY should we invest redesigning this page?”

Guess what, this page is the first or second most important page on your whole website or app. If a user cannot signup or abandon the signup process, how would you expect them to complete a purchase?!

A simple bug, misleading information, or input validation error could lead a customer to churn from your website. Can you imagine all the money you spent to acquire that customer to be lost? Just because you did not test that single page.

One great metric to look at is how many people finished successfully the signup process compared to how many people started the process.

2) Support

Remember the last time you waited on the phone for your bank call center agent to answer your call. Guess what, that agent is doing the same thing you can do on your online bank, but you can not find that button because they have poor UX.

Enterprises like banks and airlines depend heavily on call centers to support their clients. Many of those calls are questions or requests of things clients can find online but poor UX is preventing them from achieving success.

We tested a bank website in Jordan, where we asked three moms to find the closest bank branch to them. On average it took them 4 minutes to find that branch. That means those ladies will pick up the phone, call that banks support center, to find something that bank has on their website.

That bank will invest more in the support center because more calls are coming every day.

3) Productivity

Have you ever tried to use a swiss knife? Personally no, I am intimidated by it is user experience, I do not want to cut myself.

The same thing goes for software, you do not want your sales team to get confused using a CRM, nor the support team, nor…..

Always ask yourself, am I helping employees doing their job?

4) Opportunity Cost

Loyalty programs are the physical manifestation of UX, the poor user experience will mean non-loyal customers. Which immediately means lost customers.

Whenever you think of UX, remember that last needle shot you took, do you want your website to be a needle shot or a sweet a nice doughnut.

Think of the true cost of UX, you do not want to lose customers, time, or money due to the poor user experience. Understanding customers behaviors, pain points, and metrics of success will increase your chances of winning.