Customer Engagement In eCommerce Industry

Customer Engagement

“Customer engagement is the ongoing interactions between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer.” – Paul Greenberg (for HubSpot)

Customer expectations have changed in recent years because of technological advancements. eCommerce is focused on building customer experiences for individuals rather than the masses. 

Today, consumers have a plethora of options when it comes to communicating with brands. Unique customers have unique preferences with communication platforms hence brands need to be available across all communication channels like phone, WhatsApp, webchat, email, social media, and more.

There are several touchpoints in the customer journey that influences or prompt the customers to make a purchase. 

Today, most eCommerce retailers are becoming more and more sophisticated with their AI capabilities to grasp audience attention and conversational commerce is certainly leading the way.

When we say conversational eCommerce, we essentially mean a combination of vocal, visual, written, and predictive capabilities. The needs of the consumer are changing so fast that it is a real struggle for brands to keep up with.

In a cutting-edge competition, survival is no cake-eating. If brands want to thrive, they must adopt and adapt to customer needs. Using AI for chatbots is just one way out of many in order to drive the conversation in the era of conversational AI.

The Common Approach:

Ecommerce businesses usually do not hit the markets with a holistic customer engagement plan. A majority of eCommerce businesses begin with basic customer engagement channels like email and phone calls. 

Having said that, it’s absolutely no surprise that consumers want to be treated special and individually. No one likes to feel like they are just another brick in the wall.

People are willing to spend money on the things they want but facilitating a personalized customer experience prompts higher sales and it is not something brands can ignore.

According to research, 86% of consumers are willing to spend more money provided they are facilitated with a seamless customer experience. Customer experience is amongst the most significant brand differentiators, maybe more than the price, or the product itself.

Without a question, if better retention and higher conversions are your targets, investing in engaging your audience might be the best approach.

Today, businesses adopt ticketing platforms and CRM as and when the volume of queries grows. This might look like a good plan but this often ends up in businesses indulging with multiple vendors to empower their customer engagement.

More Vendors – More Inefficiencies

In order to provide the best customer experience, it is vital that tech vendors and service providers must integrate well. Essentially what this means is that It lacks features (agent monitoring), visibility on tickets, smoothness in integration and critical performance metrics are also missed. 

Basically, “who is working on what” is missing and further leads to a chaotic customer engagement setup.

Some other challenges that businesses face with multiple vendors include:

Technological Disconnects: When a brand is involved with multiple vendors for customer engagement, the time and cost increase, and, rarely, information flows back and forth across all parties.

Added Human Resources: Human intervention becomes inevitable when various vendors operate in different formats since the probability of errors shoots. This also often results in delays.

Cost Of Integration – Having multiple vendors incurs costs to companies as brands majorly spend a lot of time coordinating the activities across vendors, rather than charting out a strategy to support the ideal customer experience.

Unsatisfactory Customer Service – If the customer isn’t satisfied with the way a company has handled an order, they are very likely to speak with a customer care agent. The issue could also be with the eCommerce site.

These issues must be resolved immediately which comes with additional costs and time. This further can turn into a loss of sales and customer retention.

Delays And Lapses – The market keeps changing and one has to be on his toes while adjusting to the market while forming strategies. 

With multiple vendors in the picture, it is obvious that there will be inherent delays due to communication lapses. The best way forward for this is to have a single vendor work from initial contact to fulfillment and follow-up, which is integrated and comprehensive.

The Solution

The perfect solution is getting your business a complete customer engagement tech stack with one provider on cloud-powered with AI.

The e-commerce sector succeeds son repeat customers and thus, delivering outstanding customer services is extremely crucial. Ecommerce businesses must facilitate superior service levels across numerous channels and can’t afford to miss even a single customer call. 

Adapting the best practices of customer experience management to create everlasting customer experiences is something that every e-commerce business must aim to accomplish.

Benefits of the solution

  1. Smooth integration
  2. Remote-ready
  3. Transparent agent monitoring
  4. Better insights into business operations
  5. Easy to scale (upgrade for peak season..downgrade after the season)
  6. Continue adding the channels as and when needed
  7. AI-powered voice bot and chatbot to reduce agent load

Final Thoughts

A large volume of customer service concerns around e-commerce revolves around how quickly a business can respond to the customer or resolve the query.

Ecommerce is a highly competitive industry which is why businesses must have a complete customer engagement tech stack with a single provider in order to service today’s demanding customers. AI and cloud just add to the benefits of such platforms

Ameyo delivers an end-to-end delightful customer support experience at all touch-points. 

Moeen Khan

Moeen is currently a Sr. Content Marketer at Ameyo. Moeen is a copywriter, content developer, and content strategist with an ability to relate stories, a flair for detail, and a hint of humor. Moeen loves working with Technology-based companies (He is obsessed with Artificial Intelligence!), Tech, SaaS, Web Development, Mobile App Development, and Agencies. Moeen’s favorite brands are unique, full of character, and have that ostentatious vibe.