This time, the blog has its roots in doing my own master’s thesis for university. Although scientific articles are sometimes far from real life marketing, I still think that scientific research mostly outperforms “mutual” publications 100-0.
Zeithalm and partners in the first half of 2000 diligently researched what factors are important to people when evaluating service quality in an online environment. Have you also thought about these things?
1. Contents
The most important feature of your website is its content. The text that people read about your site is very important and more importantly, keep the content on your site up to date. There are too many sites on the web that are out of date, even if they represent a running business. It will give a very frozen picture of your business if the website has not been updated and the information on your website is out of date. In addition, it is impossible for your new customers to assess whether your business is already running normally.
In addition, the content of your site must be
- Easy to understand
- precisely descriptive
- clear prices
- Described from the point of view of the reader (what is the reason why the reader reads your content)
Products, services and usage are changing rapidly. Be sure to update them on your website as well.. Very few companies are so similar year after year that the texts on their website can be the same for a long time.
So take a calendar hour during the current week to check if the text on your site is up to date.
2. Your website must be user friendly.
Of course, for people to like doing business on your website, it needs to be top notch in terms of usability. A poorly designed site will quickly drive the user away.
By the way, have you ever wondered how many mobile devices are already visiting your site?
On our website, almost half of the users browse from their phone or tablet. Nowadays, it is paramount that your site is also mobile friendly. There shouldn’t be much of a problem with site availability when people get frustrated and switch to an online service.
To test the usability, there is also a professional who will analyze the usability of your website if you are not familiar with the subject.
3. Privacy and Security
Is personal information or money moving through your site? Do you have a loyalty system? The processing of personal information and its security online is a topic of interest to people. Because very few people can independently assess the trustworthiness of a website, you need to give them other ways to trust your site.
The most typical way to build trust between a company and people is give a face to the company that is, the people behind the action. Also contact details of the physical office give people the confidence that there is a correct and honest company behind the business.
4. Site design
The appearance of the site is closely related to usability, but it also affects the willingness of people to use your online service. From this, there are numerous studies on what kind of design people like and how images should fit into it.
The most important thing, however, is that you keep your site clean and that people can quickly find the information they’re looking for on your site.
5. People’s satisfaction with the service
Satisfaction is formed when people receive the service they expect. These expectations are based on information from your site that your customers expect to receive a certain level of service. Regardless of what you sell your service for online, make sure you deliver it at the level you promised.
There are many levels of service promises and it’s always a good idea to ask customers how satisfied they are.
Have you managed to convey the right level of description of your service to people and convert them into your loyal customers? That is the goal of all of us.
The sum of the sums
Now we’re back to basics. However, these are the things on which to build an online business.
If you are more interested in the subject, I recommend reading the article on which this text is based. It is one of the world’s most cited scientific publications on Internet services and is always up-to-date.