When did you last have a bad experience with a company, product, or service? Did you take your better half to dinner, and the employees there weren’t respectful at all? Did you visit a website, but it did not respond as it should, plus advertising pop-ups started to pour?

What about good experiences? When was the last time you bought cosmetics and the store salesperson greeted you with a big smile, made a great deal of effort and helped you with the tips? Did you call a help centre and a friendly person answered, listened to you and actually helped you to solve the problem?

Which of the above experiences would you mention to a good friend or a family member? I believe the unpleasant ones that made you feel bad. All of these situations are happening to us on a daily basis and have a strong impact on our opinion on a certain brand.

What exactly is user experience?
The easiest way to describe the user experience is the way we feel when using a product or service. What we like, what disturbs us, do we feel anger or pleasure.

So why should companies focus more on the user experience?
As already mentioned, user experience affects our opinion on a brand.

A positive experience with a company, product or service is therefore important, in particular, because of the following:
1. It influences company or brand loyalty
A positive experience is the biggest factor in deciding whether we will return to a particular brand or company as a user of its services. A user that returns to the company to purchase products or use its services is of course far more important. It is estimated that it is about six times more expensive to acquire a new user than to keep an existing one.

2. It influences our decision whether or not we recommend a company, service or product to others
If satisfied with a particular service or product, we will usually recommend it to a friend or a family member. Moreover, because they trust us, they decide to use it or buy it themselves. It is all very similar to the activities of the most powerful digital influencers that reign on social networks today. Companies use the reputation of these influences among their followers to promote their products and services. Satisfied users of our services are our biggest ambassadors.

3. According to this Forbes magazine article, each dollar invested in developing the user experience brings 100 more dollars, which means an exceptional multiplier effect.

4. By investing in the user experience development, a company saves on acquiring new customers, user support and costs of each product or a service sold.

5. A 2016 survey shows that companies that have invested heavily in developing user experience have recorded a 75% jump in sales.

6. User experience is what distinguishes a company from its competition, because we all like to go back to where we feel comfortable and respected.

The biggest digital moguls like AirBnB, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. channel much more of their resources into developing a good user experience than into advertising of their services.

In today’s world, which is completely saturated with classic advertising, we have already subconsciously started ignoring all that content and seek the recommendations of friends, acquaintances and people we trust.

You know what they say: “A good reputation echoes far and wide, and a bad one even further and wider.”