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I remember a client who tried to launch their new user interface without testing it properly. They were confident everything would go smoothly — until the user feedback came in. It was a reality check. What the design team thought was intuitive? It didn’t land with actual users.

That’s when it hit me: It’s not enough to rely solely on user input. You’ve got to step back and assess the interface from an expert’s perspective, too.

Enter heuristic evaluations.

While user feedback is great, it tends to stay on the surface. Heuristic evaluations let experts dive deeper, spotting usability issues early and measuring the design against tried-and-true usability principles. I see it as a proactive way to catch problems before they snowball into bigger ones. I’ll explore everything you need to know about heuristic evaluations below.

Table of Contents

• What is a Heuristic Evaluation?
• How to Run a Heuristic Evaluation
• The Benefits of Conducting a Heuristic Evaluation
• How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation
• Heuristic Evaluation Best Practices

Heuristic evaluations provide product development teams with an expert assessment of their website’s usability. After the inspection, evaluators give developers and designers a list of potential issues to address.

From there, developers and designers take those insights and make tweaks to improve the overall user experience. When done right, heuristic evaluations can uncover and solve over 80% of usability issues, making it an essential step in creating a smooth and intuitive interface.

Heuristic Evaluation vs. Usability Testing

Both heuristic evaluations and usability tests help uncover usability issues, but the way they’re done — and what they find — are pretty different. Let me break it down for you.

Heuristic evaluation is conducted by industry professionals who use a set of guidelines to evaluate a website or app. These evaluators go through the interface themselves and flag anything that doesn’t meet best practices. They then hand over a list of recommendations to the development team.

Usability testing, on the other hand, puts real users in the driver’s seat. They’re given specific tasks to complete while evaluators watch how it goes—did they finish it, and how long did it take? Sometimes, users are asked for feedback, but it’s usually based on what the dev team wants to know.

To put things into perspective, heuristic evaluation relies on expert judgment, while usability testing gets insights straight from the users themselves.

When to Use a Heuristic Evaluation

You can use a heuristic evaluation at any point in the product development process. However, it‘s most effective when conducted early on in the website or app’s design stages.

Pro tip: I recommend performing heuristic evaluations after every design sprint. This way, your team will have useful feedback about your design before users are exposed to it during testing.

Moreover, heuristic evaluations are more affordable to conduct when the interface is in the early stages of development. The more advanced your interface becomes, the more expensive it will cost to redesign it.

By running your heuristic evaluations early and often, you can ensure usability and avoid costly redesigns.

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The Benefits of Conducting a Heuristic Evaluation

There are many usability tests you can conduct. However, heuristic evaluations provide unique insights that play a major role in the success of your website or app.

Additionally, they can be much more cost-effective and efficient compared to other testing methods.

This should be enough to sway most product teams. But if you’re still on the fence, let me walk you through three key benefits that might change your mind.

1. Efficiency

Heuristic evaluations, in practice, are a relatively simple process to conduct. Depending on the product’s complexity, they can be completed in as little time as a couple of days.

Experts who analyze the interface often work independently. This allows developers to focus on other projects while the evaluators work.

Once the evaluation is complete, designers can then address the errors found in testing. After corrections are made, they can present another version for evaluators to re-test. This creates an efficient feedback loop that continues throughout the development process.

2. Organization

The feedback from a heuristic evaluation can influence how a team prioritizes sprints and projects.

Evaluators provide product management with a list of flaws, organized by their severity. Product owners can use this information to create and sort out their product backlogs.

By using this system for prioritization, product teams are more likely to stay organized and meet their deadlines.

3. Versatility

Heuristic evaluations aren’t a one-and-done analysis. Their findings can be used alongside other usability tests to uncover fresh insights.

For example, after addressing the feedback from a heuristic evaluation, you can check out your product usage reports to measure the success of your changes.

If you notice areas of lower usage, you can then point out those aspects to evaluators.

Heuristic evaluations also provide product developers with qualitative feedback. This helps explain trends appearing in product usage reports.

How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

The specifics of a heuristic evaluation vary based on the type of service or application you’re testing. However, I recommend following these seven common steps to run an effective evaluation:

1. Determine what you’re testing.

The first step in a heuristic evaluation is determining exactly what you’re testing. This means narrowing the scope to keep the evaluation focused.

For example, if I’m testing an ecommerce website, I could hone in on the product search function, the checkout flow, or the overall navigation. This saves me from going in circles and makes the findings more actionable.

2. Clearly define context and goals.

Next, I set the stage by defining the purpose.

Am I looking to improve user satisfaction? Maybe I’m trying to boost conversion rates or streamline first-time user experiences.

Let’s stick with my ecommerce example — if the goal is to reduce cart abandonment, then everything I evaluate will zero in on that. It helps keep the evaluation on target.

3. Select a team of evaluators.

Here, I’ll choose a team of evaluators who know heuristic principles and have experience in UX or interface design.

For my ecommerce site, I’d ideally bring in UX designers who’ve worked on retail platforms. The team size will vary, but I recommend going for at least two evaluators to avoid bias — any more than ten can make the data harder to handle.

4. Choose your heuristics.

With the goals and team set, I‘ll then choose a heuristic framework. If you’re stuck, you can rely on a common framework, such as Molich and Nielsen. This model covers areas like consistency, feedback, error prevention, and flexibility.

In my ecommerce evaluation, for example, I’ll ask my team to ensure the checkout process is intuitive and frustration-free.

5. Give evaluators specific instructions.

Before evaluators begin, they should have clear instructions on:

• what they’ll be testing
• which rating scales to use
• how to flag any issues they come across during the process

In my ecommerce case, I’d ask evaluators to perform a typical task, like searching for a product and completing a purchase. I’d also guide them on how to log issues, like unclear error messages or clunky navigation.

6. Conduct multiple evaluations.

Multiple evaluations allow for a deeper and more refined analysis. In the first evaluation, the team may freely explore the interface. In subsequent evaluations, they will hone in on specific usability problems and flag those for review.

For instance, in the first pass of my e-commerce website, an evaluator might spot a confusing product filter. During the second pass, they would dive deeper into how that issue affects the shopping experience and provide detailed feedback.

7. Collect results.

Finally, I’ll collect the evaluators’ reports and go over them together.

Let’s say the team finds that users frequently struggle with a missing guest checkout option, causing cart abandonment. I’d make fixing that a priority to boost conversions.

Pro tip: Consider using HubSpot’s Free UX Templates to pull everything together after a heuristic evaluation. They make it easy to capture all the important details, spot patterns, and rank the issues that need fixing. Plus, it’s a breeze to share clear recommendations with the team or stakeholders, so everyone is on the same page.

Heuristic Evaluation Best Practices

Use these five best practices to ensure accuracy and consistency in your heuristic evaluations:

Heuristic evaluation best practices

1. The earlier you start, the better.

Conduct heuristic evaluations as early as possible, ideally after the functional prototypes are ready.

At this stage, making design changes is more flexible and cost-effective. Early evaluations can catch critical usability issues before they become ingrained in the product, saving you from costly reworks down the line.

2. Keep the focus narrow.

Rather than trying to evaluate everything at once, zero in on a specific set of functions or even a single function. This focused approach allows evaluators to provide deeper, more actionable feedback.

By honing in on critical areas, you can drive improvements quickly and iterate on them early.

3. Choose the right heuristics.

Not every heuristic will be right for your evaluation.

For example, one of Molich and Nielsen‘s heuristics is the provision of clearly marked exits when users click on the wrong link. If you’re evaluating products that have just come out of prototyping, these exits may not be in place. This measurement, therefore, provides no value.

Instead, choose heuristics relevant to the current product stage to avoid irrelevant feedback and focus on aspects that genuinely need your attention.

4. Create a consistent scale.

Consistency in scoring — whether it’s a 1-10 scale, percentage, or yes/no — ensures you can compare feedback across different evaluators and features. You can aggregate findings effectively and prioritize fixes.

In contrast, inconsistent scales create ambiguity, making it difficult to pinpoint where the most significant issues lie.

5. Remember the role of heuristic evaluation.

Remember that heuristic evaluation isn’t a replacement for end-user testing.

Sure, heuristic evaluations help identify key interface usability issues. However, this narrow focus means they can’t provide broader behavioral insights, like other end-user evaluations.

Be sure to combine heuristic insights with feedback from actual users to get a holistic view of your product’s performance.

Fostering Feedback With a Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic evaluations are the perfect starting point when you’re building an app or service.

When I first learned about heuristic evaluations, I was surprised by how quickly they flagged critical usability issues that would have otherwise slipped under the radar. I‘ve seen firsthand how starting with this method can reveal major usability issues right off the bat, giving you a chance to fix things before users even experience frustration. This way, when you finally get customer feedback, it’s more about fine-tuning than tackling big problems. A sure win!

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

My career in customer success taught me that customer relations are built and nurtured by creating advocates for your brand.

I remember one such customer in the financial services industry who was not a fan of our product despite attempts from our team to win them over. The customer was adamant about seeing the changes to our product that they wanted. I took the time to provide the customer with the right resources that suited their use case and helped them better utilize our product. I’m happy to report this customer eventually became a staunch advocate of the product and grew with our company.

This example is one of many that showcase the importance of great customer relations. If you’re looking to improve the customer experience and increase revenue, it’s essential to understand what successful customer relations look like and how you can create it at your business.

Table of Contents

• What Is Customer Relations?
• What Are Positive Customer Relations?
• Key Factors to Building Positive Customer Relationships
• What Is a Customer Relations Executive?
• Customer Relations Manager
• Importance of Effective Consumer Relations

Importance of Effective Consumer Relations

Developing an amazing product remains one of the primary challenges a company needs to overcome in order to be successful. However, I believe strong customer relations are what truly determine the success of a business.

Today‘s consumers have more industry influence than they’ve ever had before, allowing them to focus on more than just the product that you are selling them. Now, consumers are interested in what you‘re selling them, how you’re selling it, and what happens after you’ve sold it to them.

This shift has added pressure on companies to invest in their customer service teams to meet rising expectations. Microsoft reports that organizations are enhancing their customer service team’s productivity to provide a more holistic experience and meet expectations for customer service.

Businesses are now facing the challenge of creating an excellent customer experience that’s consistent across every interaction. To achieve this, many companies are now focusing on how they manage their customer relationships. This is where customer relations comes into the spotlight.

Customer relations aims to create a mutually beneficial relationship with the customer that extends beyond the initial purchase.

Customer relations is present in all aspects of a business, but it’s most prevalent in the customer service department. Customer service teams, customer support, customer success, and product development all play important roles in building healthy customer relationships.

Customer relations also extend to marketing and sales teams as well, since these departments have a significant influence over the company’s interactions with the customer.

What Functions Does Customer Relations Include?

Customer relations includes both the reactive and proactive functions performed by your customer service teams.

Reactive functions are the efforts made by your team to solve issues that are reported by customers. This includes responding to customer complaints and troubleshooting issues with the support team. Being available to resolve unexpected customer roadblocks is essential for brands that are looking to build strong customer relationships.

Proactive functions are the measures taken to ensure a long-term relationship with customers. These efforts are aimed at fostering a superior customer experience by consistently satisfying evolving customer needs. Customer success teams do this by providing updates on the product, and promoting discounts. This helps companies create lasting impressions on customers who eventually become evangelists.

Customer Service vs. Customer Relations

While they are similar, customer service and customer relations have one distinct difference.

Customer service is what your company provides to ensure a meaningful customer relationship. It is an inbound function that’s now expected by customers at the first point of interaction with your business. Companies can provide proactive features, but most customer service functions are delivered in response to customer actions.

Customer relations differs because it consists of both the inbound and outbound measures taken by your company. It considers your organization‘s ability to react to issues as well as your approach to bettering future experiences. Customer relations focus on the proactive steps you’re taking to engage customers and improve the customer experience.

Customer relations encompasses all of the important functions that customer service teams perform, but also includes the efforts made throughout customer interactions. While responding to immediate customer needs is a great way to provide excellent customer service, searching for long-standing solutions to future anticipated roadblocks is how your company can build positive customer relations.

Benefits of Positive Customer Relations

Positive customer relations can result in an array of benefits for your company, including more potential leads and higher customer retention rates. Below are several benefits that positive customer relations can provide for your company.

Increased Customer Retention

Companies that do a better job of managing customer relations are more likely to see higher customer retention rates. In fact, studies show that 86% of customers will part ways with a company after two poor customer experiences.

Customers know when your company is being genuine and willing to overlook your mistakes so long as you demonstrate a dedication to their success. That transparency is essential when reducing churn as well as when you’re enriching a customer relationship. It can also be financially beneficial too, as increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase your profits by 25% to 95%.

Increased Customer Loyalty

When you have a good history with your customers, it becomes more difficult for your competitors to lure people away from your brand. Customer loyalty is highly valuable for businesses, as repeat customers are more likely to buy from you than leads that have not yet converted.

Building positive customer relations drives customer loyalty because it creates an intangible incentive for the customer to return to the same business. While it may cost more for companies to invest in building positive customer relations, the payoff in customer loyalty can be instrumental for generating consistent revenue over time.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Oftentimes, it can be hard to tell whether your customers are truly happy with your business or not. However, strong customer relations can act as your insurance policy for preventing these unidentified customers from churning without warning. A customer with a NPS promoter score has a 600-1400% higher customer lifetime value than a detractor.

Increased Customer Feedback

Positive customer relations give companies more insight into their customer’s problems because it creates an open channel of communication for relaying customer feedback. This leads to better customer interactions, which increases trust and positively influences buying decisions.

Studies have even found that consumers believe that a good experience with a company has more influence over their purchase decision than advertising does. The tradeoff of investing in customer satisfaction is creating memorable customer experiences.

Every company should aim at building positive customer relations, but hitting your target can be a lot easier said than done. It takes effort from the entire company to build long-lasting customer relationships.

In the next section, I’ll break down the most important components for fostering positive customer relations at your company.

Throughout my experiences in customer relations. I have learned that numerous factors can influence a customer relationship. When building customer relationships, organizations need to take a company-wide approach that’s focused on promoting a customer-centric mindset.

To do that, I’m going to review several key factors that businesses should consider when pursuing positive customer relations.

1. Invest in employee training.

I believe great customer experience comes from the product being sold and the customer interactions. Your customer service teams must be highly skilled in their trade and motivated by solving customer problems quickly.

Customer service training should include developing the “soft” skills such as improving active listening, developing a professional communication style, and how to solve problems efficiently in your organizational framework.

While you might expect your team to have these skills, continuous training helps align them to your organization’s standards, policies, and procedures – resulting in a more consistent customer experience.

2. Create a fulfilling workplace for your customer service reps.

Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines famously said, “If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” This seems intuitive: If a customer service rep is having a bad enough day and the customer perceives this, it can reflect in the experience.

Studies have also shown that happy workers are also 12% more productive. Moreover, productive reps can accelerate quicker resolution times and higher rates of customer satisfaction.

3. Improve first call resolution rate.

58% of customers will pay more for a better experience, as great customer experiences are becoming the norm today. One metric to concentrate on when creating a frictionless service model is first-call resolution (FCR) — the percentage of calls that get resolved with no follow-up needed.

This critical metric improves satisfaction (more calls equate to more frustration) and your team’s internal efficiency.

The more calls that are resolved completely, the less your systems are taxed by call volume.

4. Leverage software to increase efficiency.

Speaking of enablement, companies faced with higher volumes of support and service cases should consider adopting customer experience platforms to help manage your customer relations. Adding functionality to manage the omni-channel experience can boost the ability of your customer service, support, and success teams to monitor customer interactions effectively.

Customer experience platforms can include a customer relationship management tool (CRM). Software can help your team create satisfying experiences for every person who interacts with your business.

5. Create opportunities for self-service.

You may not have the bandwidth to provide on-demand one-to-one support at all hours of the day. To combat that, ensure that you’re providing the tools for your customers to get help when they need it, even without the help of a rep.

Chatbots can disseminate information and guide website visitors to the right areas on your website. Knowledge bases can address some of the most common questions customers have.

Even though some customers will prefer calling in, these other tools can satisfy your more self-sufficient customers while still increasing satisfaction by continuing to solve problems.

6. Be accessible.

While it helps to have things like self-service help desks, your team still needs to be there when the customer has a problem.

To provide an excellent customer experience, your service and support teams need to be readily available to help. Today, 77% of customers revealed that it takes too long to get help from an agent.

Technology can help ease some of the stress for your customer service team, but it can never recreate the memorable experience that a live rep can provide. Being accessible for human interaction is crucial to creating a meaningful customer relationship.

7. Show appreciation.

Creating a great customer experience involves providing moments of delight, and exceeding customer expectations. This is important as culture shifts toward loyalty to the brands that provide the best experience. Consider rewarding your best customers within your loyalty program or other tokens of your appreciation.

8. Measure and improve customer satisfaction.

Making your customers happy doesn’t have to be intangible. Ask for feedback from your customers and develop a system for measuring that feedback routinely. This could be in the form of customer satisfaction surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Use this feedback and commit to acting on it. As you implement this feedback, your scores improve, and you know you’re improving your customer relations.

9. Create an online community for customers.

There’s no better way to improve customer relations than by allowing your customers to connect with each other — and with specialists on your team. Creating an online community, either through a forum on your website or a Facebook group, ensures continued engagement from your customers with your company and products. Customers will also feel supported along the way by other users.

If you create a community, make sure your team helps maintain it and responds to queries that require their expertise. That way, customers won’t feel their questions and concerns are ignored. This becomes increasingly vital in building customer relationships, as the community becomes increasingly active.

10. Provide education programs that help your customers grow better.

Educating your customers to help them grow their business is one of the best ways to improve customer relations. Especially if your product has a steep learning curve, you can create a YouTube series that walks users through the platform.

You can create education programs that help your customers with challenges they face. Solving those issues through meaningful content and solutions can increase retention rates, acquisition, and positive customer relations.

11. Be personable.

Perhaps the most important tip is to be personable in all of your customer interactions. That means that every phone call, email, chat, or other interaction with your company should be with an actual representative who signs off with their name. Even automated service email campaigns can be housed in platforms that provide personalization tokens.

Giving your company a human name and face is one of the best ways for customers to connect and continue interacting with you.

12. Create a customer-first culture.

Companies that want to create positive customer relations need to instill a customer-centric culture into the organization. This culture has to be focused on customer success as well as creating long-term solutions for every customer.

Companies can do this by creating a customer journey map that outlines the buyer’s journey for customers. Employees will be clear on how they can help customers when they can see how and where they play a role in their success. It also helps to hire a customer relations executive who can lead the development of customer relationships.

Customer relations executives motivate employees to deliver products and services that will enhance the customer’s interactions with the brand. If they also manage the entire customer relations team, they may be called a customer relations manager.

Skills Needed for Customer Relations

A successful customer relations manager possesses a diverse set of skills that will help them improve the company’s relationship with customers. When you’re interviewing candidates, ensure they have the following skills:

• Problem-solving. When the customer relations program isn’t working or when brand sentiment takes a turn for the worse, a customer relations manager should be able to work through the issues and find a solution that prioritizes the customer experience.
• Interpersonal relations. Customer relations managers work with people constantly. They are either managing them or interacting with customers. Your candidate must have people skills to be successful.
• Data analysis. Customer relations managers should be passionate about collecting feedback from customers. Similarly, they should be able to analyze the data effectively, to glean actionable insights.
• Creativity. Customer relations is an ever-evolving process that will require new ideas, initiatives, and programs over time. As such, a customer relations manager should conceptualize initiatives that focus on customer retention and loyalty.

Hiring a customer relations manager is vital if you want to improve your customer relationships. You can start improving those relationships right now by advocating a customer-centric mindset.

Customer Relations is the Key to Your Business’ Success

Listening to customer feedback became invaluable knowledge for me throughout my career. This gave me areas to remove friction, enhance the customer experience for others, and apply feedback in a tangible and long-lasting manner.

I have seen firsthand that building a robust customer relations function creates a thoughtful experience that prioritizes customer needs. This has tangible benefits to increase retention, provide meaningful feedback, and lead growth.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.