Now that you have established your one message from the top, your look & feel, and your focus on saving your customer's precious time through ease of use and quick response times, it is important to define the products or services that you will deliver through your web sites and touch points. For each of these products or services, we need to define the process, funnel, or cycle that we want to encourage a customer to follow through our web sites and properties.
I have long been a disciple of customer scenario mapping as defined and practiced by the Patricia Seybold Group. This is the best way to describe and learn about what the customer needs to be productive and how you can improve their experience by discovering what you do know and don't know about satisfying their needs. You can read much more on the topic through the research and tutorials published here: http://www.customers.com/articles/category/topic-map/customer-experience-voc/
The customer experience that you create is the sum of all of the touch points and messaging that you provide for the customer as they follow your scenario as they use your services or products. Your objective is to make their experience as positive as possible. The best way to do this is to enable your customer to quickly accomplish their task or satisfy their research so they can take action and move on to the next phase of their process.
Agility is your secret sauce. Quickly test your design against your customer scenarios and look for possible points of abandonment. Tuning these steps quickly to improve the progress along the way and reduce abandonment of your funnel is the nature of agile web design. The faster you react to customer actions and feedback to improve this process, the more successful you will be.
I closely monitor and live by customer activity and feedback about their usage of my web properties. If your customer goes to the trouble of telling you what is not working for them or even better, to suggest how you might improve your process to exceed their expectations, it is priceless. You have to take advantage of this direction and act on it.