
Your customer experience matters – you’ve set up your website, social presence and other online outlets to engage your customers and get them to choose you over your competitors. You’ve done all the necessary work – chosen your profile pictures and your banners, added great video content and made your online home a showcase for all that your company does. And then it’s safe to go about your business, right? Add fresh content and wait for the orders to roll in?
A recent experience demonstrates that you can’t just walk away and assume that your customers are experiencing your site or feed the way you thought they were. Google’s Chrome browser made a change in version 66, released just a few months ago – any video playing automatically is muted by the browser, requiring the user to make a choice to unmute to hear the audio. Chances are good you had no idea that the change was coming; chances are also good your average customer is upgrading their browser automatically. Chrome now represents over 60% of the market share for both mobile and desktop users (details here if you’re interested). So if you built your site around a beautifully created video you set to autoplay, your customers aren’t getting the experience you intended.
As we discussed recently in our post on other people’s platforms, similar impacts are felt by changes to algorithms on social media sites. A quick search on algorithm changes will bring up hundreds of articles on how Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and all the others will tweak or broadly adjust how they rank and display content. These changes can be devastating to companies depending on those platforms for their customer lifelines.
Most of the social media platforms offer an option to allow a user to view their profile as another user would see it; it’s a good idea to do that periodically to check your assumptions about your online presence. Let’s have a conversation about the way you think you present yourself vs how others actually see you.