Times have changed and so has customer service. We see now more customers shopping online than offline. The coronavirus led to a fast increase in digital adoption and in buying and selling online. According to Shopify analytics, more than 150 million people made their first online purchase in 2020. What did they find out? Well, how easy it is to buy everything you need with just a few clicks while relaxing on your sofa at home. The huge customer demand brought more brands into the online selling landscape and many of them see now this business model as their core business model. Therefore, there is no excuse for skipping out on quality customer service. Even before the covid situation customer expectation was reaching a peak but after the pandemic, the expectation of great customer experience is even higher. This means that just having a beautiful-designed website, a simple checkout method that accepts a variety of payment methods, and maybe a decent chatbot is not enough anymore.
What clients want is personalization, engagement and the information to be delivered to them fast and efficiently. They want to be heard, helped, and advised during their whole buying journey. It is not just about a simple buying process anymore, but it is about offering a buying experience. We can think of luxury brands as real-world examples. How do luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, Balenciaga, and others, differentiate from accessible brands like ZARA or H&M. Does it rely only on high-quality products? No, but it starts with a high-quality product and continues with the ultimate customer experience. Without the customer experience, they would not be able to sell their products as they do now. It is the personalized buying experience that you get in their shops, the personal assistant that advises you at every step and makes sure that you have everything that you need in this experience.
So we see that at the center of all great experiences lies a conversation. And while maybe it is not possible to deliver in shops like ZARA or H&M the same experience and it is probably ok to be like that. But in the online world rules change,because the advance in technology and the low costs that it has right now, offer brands from any level the possibility to deliver such experiences in their online shops. But like today's density of markets, which makes it very hard for businesses to differentiate themselves and stand out from the crowd, this is also the case with technology.
The challenge for brands here is to deliver great customer experience through conversations by implementing the technology which suits them best from a brand strategy point, infrastructure perspective, but also economic perspective. This is hard to achieve because of the many solutions that technology has to offer in this regard, and it requires a holistic approach from brands and implementation partners. To wrap it up, the challenge that brands face right now is finding the perfect mix of creativity, human experience, and technology, that will translate in to a great scalable customer experience.
Streamline the process of digital commerce by replacing part or all of it with natural, real-time communication between your brand and customers. Instead of wasting time by searching around for information or some product on your website, customers can instead open their preferred messaging app or the live chat app (embedded in your website) and ask you directly for help. More than that, the best solutions on the market allow us to complete the buying process, from searching for the product to ordering and paying for it, directly in the chat app. Depending on your business scenario, you can choose to have one of your employees, a customer support team, or a chatbot, that leverages the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, on your side of the chat application. In the end, the vision we want to accomplish is the engagement with customers at every step of their buying experience in the most human and empathic way possible. They should always feel that the brand is empathic and present along their whole journey as customers.
The creativity and human experience touch that is part of the bigger solution will be out of scope here but will be discussed in future articles. Instead, we will focus on the technology solutions available to us, that will help us implement conversational commerce in our business strategy. The first step is to look at your business requirements and answer some questions. Note that this analysis can be very complex and differs from business to business, meaning that this article serves only as an overview and basic introduction to what the process looks like. Some questions that you first need to answer are:
After answering these questions, you will have a clearer understanding of what your business needs really are and where you really need to focus your attention. Based on the answers you get after going through the previously mentioned questions you can now map or better said translate everything into a conversational commerce implementation strategy. As mentioned, this is just an overview of the process involved in the adoption of conversational commerce. We would point out that the process of implementing the needed technology in your business is not necessarily the hardest part but ensuring that your team and infrastructure are ready can be the most difficult part. That is why you must handle also aspects like change management and how everything will impact your organization. Conversational commerce is in the end just another solution that is meant to help your people and brand deliver better and faster to your clients, so you must make sure they are aware of that. So based on your answers you can choose from 4 types of conversational commerce solutions:
The live chat will enable you to connect your customers directly with your customer support team, whereas the chatbot can take the place of the customer support team entirely or can support them in balancing the workload, by answering questions or managing conversations with clients. Messaging applications like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or WeChat are a direct way to open a conversation with one of your clients without the need of bringing them to your website. This works like any other conversation that you have on these types of applications. You can choose a chatbot for managing these conversations or your customer support team. This is entirely depending on your business requirements. The last option would be using voice assistance like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to answer your client's questions. In the end there is no "one size fits all" solution and we think that all these solutions can work great together in hybrid scenarios as they all have the power to complement each other. We will keep this short and end this article with what we think are, some general guidelines of when to use which solution:
In our next articles, we will take each of these options and go into detail on how you can best implement them and what the specific benefits are, that your business gets by implementing them. But until then, if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us for some more clarifications or free tips.😉
