Product Images & Online CSAT

The basics of an online business are pretty well known, but research into what makes the “best” online business is still new. Many people have assumptions about what makes a customer satisfied, but their decisions are often fairly questionable.

For example, people are now adding social network options to nearly everything, and most of the time these buttons are not only useless – they can be a little inconvenient. Cover-It-Live, a live blogging software platform, has now made it so that every comment can be “posted to Facebook.” But how often does someone want to post some random person’s question to Facebook? This feature cannot be turned off, and it makes reading the text extremely difficult because any time you scroll over it, the text moves to add the button.

Not everything needs to have a social networking feature, but with little customer satisfaction research into this area, it’s no surprise that people add it.

Yet one aspect that has a clear benefit to customer satisfaction is the addition of product images. As indicated by many different websites, product images help to provide customers with a visual display that assists your website’s experience in many different ways: Product images are a good way to ease doubts for a customer, allowing them to see exactly what they could be getting so that if they like the product, they can purchase it. Product images make the website more attractive, which also improves the customer experience.

People are drawn to images in a way that text simply can’t provide, and that allows them to enjoy your website more. Product images allow people to compare products. Quality product images should not only help you sell every product more, but also view what some products look like when compared to each other, which improves a person’s ability to make a decision.

Customer satisfaction research into online businesses is pretty slim, and simply keeping up with the latest trends is not a good way to make your website better (as in the Cover-It-Live example). If you don’t bother to research what you put into your website yourself, you may end up integrating features that are simply not the best choice for improving the customer experience.

But there are other aspects of a website that have a clear benefit, and product images are one of the best examples.