You have only half a second to make an excellent first impression with your customers with your digital experience. Per the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at Harvard, most people form a first impression of a website in 500 milliseconds. So, the question is whether you are proud or concerned about your digital experience after hearing this stat?

This episode explores the science behind how people form first impressions of digital experience and some of the ways you can use psychology and the behavioral sciences to improve your chances of making a good one. 

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

First impressions are lasting impressions. First impressions also become the anchor for experience evaluation, meaning that customers adjust either up or down from their first impression point. So, the better your first impression, the higher your first impression, the higher your customers' final evaluation of the digital experience will be.

How we evaluate websites has many other influences also. First, we tend to compare websites to the best websites we have ever used. For example, when I track a package on any website, I expect it to have the same level of clarity and information as Amazon. However, most of them do not. Also, we have experience with a wide variety of websites that set expectations or that we use as a comparison against our digital experiences.

Digital experiences give you new challenges and new opportunities in the area of customer experience also. One challenge is that you cannot see how your digital experience affects customers because you aren’t there. However, as we covered in a different podcast about measuring customer emotions, there are ways to gather this data. One of the new opportunities a digital experience presents is that it is easy to test what works and what doesn’t because you can measure everything. Moreover, as we have said in other podcasts about Digital Transformation, changing a digital experience is easier than changing a different channel, like a retail store or a call center.

The bottom line is whether it's face-to-face, on the phone, digitally, or through social media, people take in information and form an impression based on it. Understanding that, the key idea to remember is that all the things that improve an offline experience also apply in the digital experience. Here are few highlights of the conversation: 

• 01:47 Colin shares the story of how we met his father-in-law and made a less-than-ideal first impression. 
• 05:43 Ryan summarizes the findings from the research published about website first impressions.
• 07:52 We explain how first impressions can affect the overall impression of your digital experience.
• 14:43 Ryan explains how you can use ideas from customer segmentation to improve the first impression of the website. 
• 17:36 We discuss the importance of measuring customers emotions in digital experience and how you can do that.
• 21:22 Ryan explains the website may not be your digital experience’s entry point for customers, so mind the other ways customers come to you online as well. 
• 23:14 We share our key takeaways for what you should do to optimize the possibilities of making an excellent digital first impression.

 

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. 

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 22,000 subscribers. 

Experience Health Check: You already have an experience, even if you weren't deliberate about it. Our Experience Health Check can help you understand what you have today. Colin or one of our team can assess your digital or physical Customer Experience, interacting with your organization as a customer to define what is good and what needs improving. Then, they will provide a list of recommendations for critical next steps for your organization. Click here to learn more. 

How can we help?

Click here to learn more about Beyond Philosophy's Suite of Services.