“Let your intentions create your methods, and not the other way around.” ~ Peter McWilliams
Now that you’ve been introduced to the idea of updating your website by Designing for Intention, you may be wondering what exactly is meant by the term “Customer Intention.” Further, you may be curious as to how you can get started bringing this type of thinking, and this methodology, into your business. One way to get the ball rolling is to start defining customer intentions for your website.
Before we talk about defining customer intentions, allow me to explain what I mean by the term “Customer Intention”. A Customer Intention is simply: a task a customer aims to complete when coming to a website. It may seem self-explanatory. In fact, it is. However, as you’ll see later on, the term can very often be misunderstood.
When going on to define customer intentions for your website, there is no way around it, you have to start by talking to your most loyal customers. This is truly the key to determining not only customer intentions, but many other facets of customer loyalty.
In regards to intentions, the key information from these conversations you’ll unearth include an understanding of how and when customers interact with your business (i.e. their touch points), and, more importantly, why they interact with each of these touch points. (For example, maybe you find out customers go online to gather research about your products, but they buy brick and mortar because of the customer service.)
After the conversations have concluded, you’ll need to gather and list out all of the website specific Whens, Hows and Whys. Once you’ve listed them, you’ll summarize the list into clear, mutually exclusive, bullet points which each finish the sentence “When a customer goes to the website they intend to…”.
It’s a simple list really. Here is an example we recently created for an e-commerce team redesigning their Dotcom site.
When a customer goes to
- Buy an item
- Stay up to date
- Understand what
makes - Understand what
does - Find a retailer
- Investigate / research a better solution
- Return a product
- Get questions answered
The list seems pretty straightforward, right? Of course this is what customers go to an e-commerce site for. But, be warned! Getting to the list above isn’t as easy as it may seem. Below is an example of what the list probably looked like before the team checked it against findings from conversations they had with loyal customers:
When a customer goes to
- Buy an item
- Sign up for the Newsletter
- Visit the Blog
- Update Account Information
- Find a retailer
- Investigate / research a better solution
- Return a product
- Get questions answered
Notice something different? Check out the bold items in the second list. Notice how subjective and feature specific they are.
It is highly likely you are going to try to put items like “Sign Up for the Newsletter” on your list. This is normal as often times business owners try to squeeze in feature specific items which represent the parts of the website they wish people were coming online to access, instead of being honest about why customers are really going to their site.
This is why it’s important to talk to your most loyal customers. There’s no disputing actually hearing these intentions first hand. Without this insight, your list will undoubtedly lean towards satisfying business goals, which means your website will be designed for business intention rather than customer intention. This means the odds of your website fostering customer loyalty go way, way down.
Knowing this, your final step is to review and edit your list with an eye toward, and an urge for, actual customer insights and extreme honesty. Your goal should be to keep your list of intentions as objective and non-feature specific as possible. How do you know you’ve done it right?
Ultimately, if your list of customer intentions reflects what you heard in your research, and, makes you a little (or a lot) uncomfortable, you know you’ve defined it well.
Once you have created an honest list of Customer Intentions, you’ve started the process of making your website a place that can assist in cultivating customer loyalty, instead of a place where you inundate customers with information you hope they pay attention to.
What’s next after you have the list defined? You can begin to design a user experience that meets, and hopefully exceeds, Customer Intentions, of course. And, you can be sure there is more information on doing so to come.