The Importance of Data In Optimizing Retail Profitability Around the Holidays

For retailers, succeeding in the holiday season is not as easy as sitting back and watching the sales roll in. Although many consumers are ready to buy, retailers have to figure out how to find and approach these potential customers. 

Data analytics can be an invaluable tool for retailers to track consumer behavior, monitor trends, and adjust inventory levels to fit demand. After all, there are no worse dampers on a potentially lucrative holiday season for retailers than overstocking or understocking situations.

A tried and true way of winning over consumers during the holiday season is through strategic promotions. Targeted and compelling promotions and discounts can attract customers to make a purchase and then encourage them to buy the rest of their list with you. 

For example, if there is a popular video game system, a retailer can offer a discount, and then the consumer will be more likely to purchase a full-priced game to go along with it. Retailers would be wise to use data-driven insights to identify high-demand products and consumer preferences, as this will identify areas of opportunity for these promotions.

How Retailers Can Improve the Customer Experience this Holiday Season

Many retailers also focus on enhancing the customer experience by providing exceptional customer service. Knowing that many consumers are choosing to shop online these days, retailers should ensure that both their brick-and-mortar stores and online stores offer the best possible experience to their customers, as this can improve satisfaction, loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth.

One of the more covert ways consumers might notice they are being marketed to during the holiday season is by stores playing holiday music in the background. Studies have shown that playing Christmas music in a store environment can cause people to spend more money. As is the case with any method of marketing, music is used to influence a consumer’s mood. In this instance, retailers are trying to elicit festive feelings of joy and nostalgia to make shoppers feel a bit more sentimental and eager to spend.

Another powerful tool that businesses can use to enhance the customer experience this holiday season is experiential marketing. Perhaps the most well-known and iconic example of experiential marketing during the holiday season is allowing families to meet and take pictures with “Santa.” The department store Macy’s claims to have started the tradition of having an in-store St. Nicholas, first offering the experience in 1861.

On the surface, the practice of offering a “mall Santa” seems like an altruistic way of giving children something to smile about. However, it has the added benefit to the establishment — be it a store, mall, or other business — of getting people through the door. When it comes to families, as dad waits in line with the kids for them to meet Santa, mom can take care of the holiday shopping and buy their presents. In many ways, this is the epitome of experiential marketing; it gives consumers an experience that adds value while boosting their perception of the brand and attracting them to the premises for a potential sale.

Retailers should also consider using an omnichannel approach, seamlessly integrating online and offline channels to create the most convenient experience possible for the consumer. Some examples of great omnichannel methods include:

• Buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS): Giving consumers the option to make a purchase online and then pick it up in the retail store benefits both the retailer and the customer. On the customer side, they get the convenience of online shopping without the wait (or cost) of shipping. For retailers, this allows them to eliminate the cost of shipping orders to their customers and get their foot in the door so they can be attracted to make additional purchases.
  
• Curbside pickup: The most apparent benefit of curbside pickup is for customers, who never even have to get out of their car to make a purchase. Because of the increase in customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention thanks to this more convenient shopping process, many retailers have found that this added service has improved sales. Some retailers also give customers the option to add additional purchases onto their order — like Target allowing customers to order drinks from Starbucks when they’re on the way to pick up their groceries — giving consumers an extra service.
  
• Personalized online experience: Many brands have also begun to offer personalized shopping experiences to their online customers. From specialized recommendations powered by artificial intelligence to virtual “fitting rooms” backed by AR and VR technology, it is possible to add extra layers of service and convenience to the online shopping experience to make consumers feel more connected to the brand.

The holiday season can be a bountiful time for retailers if they figure out how to access the deep pockets of consumers who are willing and eager to spend money. By using data-driven insights, improving the customer experience, and offering a seamless in-person and online shopping experience, retailers can be on their way to reaping the maximum profits from their shoppers.

The post Helping Retailers Maximize Profits This Holiday Season appeared first on SiteProNews.

The Evolution of Customer Experience in eCommerce

Customer experience is no longer just about offering a good product or service; it encompasses every touchpoint a customer has with a brand, from the first interaction to the final purchase and beyond. In the early days of eCommerce, the focus was primarily on functionality and usability. However, as the market evolved, so did customer expectations. Today, consumers demand a seamless, personalized, and engaging experience throughout their shopping journey.

Understanding the Impact of CX on eCommerce Success

The impact of customer experience on the success of an eCommerce business cannot be underestimated. Research has consistently shown that customers are willing to pay more for products from companies that provide exceptional experiences. Furthermore, a positive customer experience leads to increased customer retention, repeat purchases, and positive word-of-mouth, all of which contribute to the overall growth and profitability of the business.

On the flip side, a negative experience can have severe consequences. Customers are quick to share their displeasure on social media and review platforms, which can tarnish a brand’s reputation and drive potential customers away. With numerous alternatives just a click away, a single negative interaction can lead to lost opportunities and revenue.

Personalization: The Key to Customer Delight

One of the most potent tools for enhancing customer experience in eCommerce is personalization. By leveraging data analytics and AI-powered algorithms, businesses can gain insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and purchase history. Armed with this information, they can create tailored recommendations, personalized marketing campaigns, and individualized shopping experiences.

From personalized product recommendations on the website to targeted email campaigns, personalization helps customers feel understood and valued. It fosters a sense of loyalty, as customers are more likely to return to a platform that caters to their specific needs and interests.

Seamless User Experience and Intuitive Navigation

In the virtual realm, a seamless user experience and intuitive navigation are paramount. Customers expect websites and apps that are easy to use, visually appealing, and responsive across different devices. Cluttered interfaces, confusing layouts, and slow loading times can lead to frustration and abandonment.

By investing in user experience (UX) design, businesses can streamline the shopping process, making it effortless for customers to find what they are looking for and complete their purchases. Incorporating features such as live chat support and chatbots can also provide real-time assistance, resolving queries promptly and increasing customer satisfaction.

Building Trust and Transparency

In an era of cyber threats and data breaches, building trust and transparency with customers is essential. eCommerce businesses must prioritize security measures to safeguard customer data and financial information. Displaying trust badges and security certifications on the website can reassure customers about the safety of their transactions.

Additionally, transparent policies regarding shipping, returns, and customer support are crucial in setting the right expectations. Honesty about product availability and delivery times helps manage customer expectations, reducing the likelihood of disappointment.

The Role of Customer Support

Customer support plays a vital role in enhancing the virtual shopping experience. Offering multiple channels for support, such as email, phone, and live chat, ensures customers can seek assistance in their preferred mode. Quick response times, knowledgeable representatives, and effective problem-solving are pillars of excellent customer support.

By analyzing customer interactions with support teams, businesses can identify pain points and areas for improvement, address common issues, and provide proactive solutions.

Feedback and Continuous Improvement

To enhance customer experience continually, eCommerce businesses should actively seek feedback from their customers. Conducting surveys, analyzing reviews, and monitoring social media mentions can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

Based on this feedback, businesses can make data-driven improvements to their products, services, and user experience. Implementing a culture of continuous improvement demonstrates a commitment to meeting customer needs and fostering a customer-centric approach.

Conclusion

In the virtual realm of eCommerce, customer experience has emerged as the cornerstone of success. By prioritizing personalization, seamless user experience, transparency, and excellent customer support, businesses can create a virtual shopping experience that delights customers and builds long-lasting relationships. In this competitive landscape, organizations that invest in enhancing customer satisfaction are best positioned to thrive and succeed in the dynamic world of eCommerce.

The post eCommerce and Customer Experience: Enhancing Satisfaction in the Virtual Realm appeared first on SiteProNews.

New-gen technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) supplemented human efforts to take on everything from health to education. Likewise, businesses looked toward these next-gen technologies to remain agile during the uncertain industry shifts.

We also use AI/ML applications in some way or the other. You automatically use Artificial Intelligence features while starting the day with smartphones. It can be unlocked without entering any passwords or pins, via biometric identification such as fingerprints, iris, or facial recognition. Also, there is an option to unlock the smartphone device using a pattern controlled by AI.

After that, you open up other apps like YouTube. Its recommendation system uses AI to provide the most appropriate content that best suits you. The autocomplete features and relevant search results you get while browsing the web are AI-driven.

Take another case in point, if you make a mistake when texting someone, the errors are auto-corrected many times—you know whom to thank. But have you wondered what fuels these AI and ML applications that we use in some way or the other? If not, we are here to answer. Data Annotation is the process that fuels these applications.

Get the Basics Cleared

For AI/ML-based applications to make sense of data requires supervised training. They have to be taught using properly labeled datasets that help them detect, identify, and classify different things in their environment. So, data annotation is the process of adding tags and labels to the input datasets that are to be fed into AI/ML models.

Just like a child is taught what a tree is, smart models have to be taught what a tree is. They have to be fed with accurately labeled datasets that show what a tree is. You also have to teach them which is not a ‘tree’. But if you want the smart model to distinguish between the types of trees, you’ll have to tell them what the different varieties of trees are. Then only it is possible for the AI/ML model to classify if it is a neem tree or a fir tree.

In simple words, AI and ML learn through examples just as the human brain does. Whether it is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model or a computer vision-based model (CV), data annotation is the process that accelerates them all. Accurately tagged datasets help the machine learning algorithms to learn, evolve, and efficiently perform the tasks they are designed for.

Wonders of AI

Businesses of different sizes are adopting AI and ML globally since it holds immense potential. The survey findings of McKinsey Report: The State of AI in 2021 are “The business functions where AI adoption is most common are service operations, product and service development, and marketing and sales, though the most popular use cases span a range of functions.”

Here’s a list of some amazing applications of AI and ML in different industries and how data annotation fuels those applications:

Healthcare

AI paired with ML finds many use cases in the healthcare landscape and it is better to say AI is a boon for the healthcare sector. Medical images like X-Ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, and PET scans are labeled accurately to train the machine learning model. These medical annotated datasets help smart models to learn from previous cases and make predictions about new unlabeled images. This assists healthcare professionals to diagnose different types of diseases such as infections or cancers. Link detection between genetic codes, faster drug discovery, and dental imaging, bone fracture detection is also possible through this.

Retail

AI is expanding virtually and the retail sector is no exception to it. Retailers can boost efficiency via smart inventory management, automated warehouses, and attribute mining without increasing their operational costs. To deliver an elevated customer experience, retailers use AI throughout their product and service cycle—from manufacturing to after-sales customer service interactions and everything in between. The customers experience a great level of comfort through self-checkouts, personalized shopping through product recommendations, visual search enhancement, and so on. This also impacts their current sales and generates greater profits.

Ecommerce

AI/ML has impacted the ecommerce sector significantly. The stakeholders get to know their customers better by evaluating them according to their shopping patterns, preferred products, payment modes used, etc.

Businesses can also personalize shopping recommendations for their customers and detect fake reviews using Natural Language Processors (NLP) models. This improves their annual results and increases ROI. Other advanced features like chatbots, automated customer service, visual product search, and voice search features, all powered by data annotation can also be integrated into their platforms to deliver an elevated user experience.

Finance

Leaders in the finance industry use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to improve customer acquisition and retention, increase revenue generation, enhance customer relations, and better risk management.

Virtual assistants or AI-powered chatbots can work round the clock and help deal with consumer queries much more efficiently. They can also up and cross-sell products to existing customers with intelligent conversations, provide multiple buying options, and eventually, create 24*7 available sales channels for businesses.

Education

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is one of the amazing real-world applications of AI. The MCQ answer sheets in school/college days were analyzed using these devices. Next-gen technologies like artificial neural networks offer a dynamic experience and help the students to enjoy what they are studying.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is another wonder of annotation in machine learning. Using the NLP-based models, students can easily translate their course material from one language to another. As a result, the language barrier is removed and the subject matters and course contents become easily accessible to a wide range of students who can enormously benefit from these.

Final Thoughts

AI/ML-based applications powered by the data annotation process are revolutionizing businesses across different industries and verticals. The data sourced from McKinsey Report: The State of AI in 2021 well supports this statement. “Findings from the 2021 survey indicate that AI adoption is continuing its steady rise: 56 percent of all respondent’s report AI adoption in at least one function, up from 50 percent in 2020.”

So, to be a part of this new-age revolution, companies need data support for AI and ML. consulting professionals or collaborating with experienced companies can help you get high-quality labeled datasets consistently. So, this is the right time to act!

The post How AI/ML Based Applications Powered by Data Annotation Are Elevating Customer Experience Across Industries? appeared first on SiteProNews.

According to a National Retail Federation survey, almost 40 percent of retailers are using some sort of intelligent automation. In fact, it is believed that more than 80 percent of businesses will go in the same direction by 2021. Already, AI and analytics are coming up with massive improvements in quality and responsiveness by automating numerous manual and strenuous tasks.

So, what’s the ideal way forward? 

What is the Need for AI and ML in Customer Experience?

Numerous eCommerce websites utilize updated technology to offer shoppers a satisfying customer experience (CX). AI and ML are gaining attention as they provide several advantages at both ends. It has traversed almost every industry, beginning from smart homes and e-learning to eCommerce. In fact, machine learning and AI find their influence across significant industry domains like web design, content marketing, and others. 

The best part of AI and machine learning abilities is that they help speed up complex chores in an automated manner. Machines and software setups have always assisted in accomplishing tasks that are effort and time-intensive. They are simplifying and helping employees focus on other important tasks.

Using AI and ML to Improve Customer Experience

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have come a long way to improve customer experience and satisfaction levels. Here are a few ways that is happening:

A. Better Understanding of the Customer

Acquiring data and analyzing buyer personas is getting difficult with online ordering becoming more popular. This is where AI and machine learning can come in handy. With new and improved AI marketing features like customized newsletters and automated social media posts, customers are compelled to check out exciting offers from brands. 

For instance, Keen footwear uses website cookies to venture out re-engagement emails to consumers with a 20 percent discount on its products.

Unlike data analytics software, AI has a consistent learning curve. It continually delivers improved actions from analyzed data, anticipating customer behavior. Brands benefit from this feature, providing relevant content, improving sales and conversions, and enhancing customer journeys on their websites. 

Even customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce and Zoho have integrated AI within their ecosystems. This helps enhance real-time decision-making, predictive analysis, and other functional aspects to engage their customers. Furthermore, Amperity, BlueConic, and ActionIQ have also unified AI into traditional Customer Data Platform (CDP) elements to integrate customer data and provide real-time decision-making opportunities for marketers. AI provides a deeper understanding of customer demands, how they interact with websites and their satisfaction levels with businesses.

B. Real-Time Decision-Making and Predictive Behavior Analysis

Customers that are using ad blockers can be presented with alternative UI components to keep them engaged with brands’ offerings. Also, with personalized recommendations, users can be presented with relevant content that will interest them in discovering relevant products or services. These are excellent examples of AI combined with real-time decision-making that can enhance customer experience on websites. 

Using AI helps businesses recognize and understand a customer’s intent through produced data. This helps brands to offer hyper-personalized and relevant content to consumers enriching their online experience.

Meanwhile, predictive analytics combines statistics, data mining, and modeling to anticipate consumer behavior. Being able to analyze large amounts of data in seconds, AI and machine learning produce actionable insights, guiding brands to personalize their customer interactions. 

Here’s a glimpse of predictive analytics being utilized in the healthcare industry. Health Catalyst has optimized its healthcare AI framework to address five levels of analytics. The brand claims that this offering has landed successful collaborations with multiple hospitals and healthcare projects.

C. Getting Your Data Organized

Every corporate system has troves of accumulated data. Machine learning combined with powerful algorithms can sort thousands of emails, documents, and graphics stored on servers and databases. AI and analytics can organize unstructured data and pre-sort them for you. 

In data management, AI proves beneficial in terms of data preparation. This process involves acquiring sets of raw data and optimizing them for further processing and analysis. Data preparation is vital in helping you identify data sources, ones that may overlap, figure out where it’s being used, and whether it’s trustworthy. 

Twitter uses machine learning technology and AI to evaluate tweets and rate them using various metrics. Google is researching several aspects of machine learning, making developments in “ranking algorithms” using natural language processing and prediction systems.

D. Making NLP Actionable & Quantifying the ROI of CX Initiatives

Combining AI with human linguistics is how natural language processing (NLP) is produced. According to this article by SAS, this branch of AI enables computers and systems to understand, interpret, and react to human language. 

Natural language processing allows computers to extract keywords and phrases, analyze the language, translate that to another language, or come up with a response.

Here’s a screenshot from Amazon’s Alexa app that provides an answer to the question: ‘Alexa, what’s Inception?’

ROI measurement on ML and AI initiatives is done through the creation of a proforma. This proforma helps define key performance indicators (KPIs), have a benchmark of comparisons among data sets, and monitor campaign overtime. These key metrics are validated and updated as brands perform A/B tests and GAP analysis. 

E. Leveraging 24-Hour Customer Service with Chatbot Technology

With businesses shifting to fast and efficient methodologies, chatbots have emerged as a key aspect of intelligent automation. 

The most vital application is its use in automated conversations. Modern-day websites disguise these as human interactions, providing a realistic approach. 

In fact, there’s an increasing demand for chatbots and virtual assistants among consumers interacting with various websites. Here’s a chart to demonstrate its popularity.

With chatbots backed by machine learning, firms are bridging the gap between customer expectations and deliverables. Using natural language processing (NLP), chatbots gauge what users are looking for. Further, with its ability to provide 24/7 assistance, organizations benefit from cost-effective round-the-clock service. They lend a helping hand to real support representatives, being trained to tasks like amending an invoice or answering basic questions about company offerings. 

Take a look at this bot developed by Casper. It’s available to chat between 11 pm and 5 am, serving as a companion to those with irregular sleeping habits.

F. Allowing Humans to Do What They Do Best

Quartz quotes in its article, “Automation will take away the parts of our jobs we don’t like and leave room for more meaningful work.” 

Artificial intelligence is improving itself at automating human tasks. Barring repetitive tasks like assembling parts in a factory, AI bots are even mastering complex ones that have traditionally been the specialty of humans. It’s debated that pretty soon, these machine agents will take up many different kinds of jobs and tasks.

Here you will find a YouTube video talking about the phenomenon.

However, a general-purpose AI can’t truly understand users or respond with creativity and empathy. In this article by technologyreview.com, we see that AI still isn’t very good at jobs requiring creativity, critical thinking, leadership, or artistic expression. Rather, automation will free humans from performing specific tasks. 

For instance, AI cannot do creative writing. While it can generate content, it cannot create it without detailed and specific guidelines. Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that auto-creates content from the data stack. It’s being utilized by businesses to generate messaging communication, data reports, and portfolios. 

G. Discovering Impactful Insights with AI-enabled Customer Analytics

While it may require humans significant amounts of time to analyze numbers and large chunks of data, AI can deliver results by performing checks at lightning speeds. 

For example, Under Armour’s partnership with IBM and the potential of Watson AI with its “cognitive coaching”, the development of HealthBox differentiates itself from the competition. By feeding nutrition, training, and sleep information the ecosystem is able to understand data in large volumes, recommend actions, and continuously learn.

AI algorithms systematically leverage billions of data points to develop buyer personas. Some of these touch-points involve previous communications, purchase patterns, onsite transactions, sources of referrals, and more. 

As a result, machine learning algorithms develop abilities to:

• Detect which customer segments should be focused on for campaigns.
• Provide suggestive and likable products to the right customers.
• Avoid promoting certain stocks to buyers who continuously return products.

Artificial Intelligence provides options and insights to react to customer behavior with the most relevant content or products. This can be acquired from previous interactions of website users or via the shipping department.

Future Demand for AI and Machine Learning

The demand for machine learning and AI by businesses willing to enhance their customer experience is expected to increase. In fact, Gartner predicts that almost 70 percent of customer interactions will involve technology backed by AI and machine learning by 2022. This is a direct hike from the 11 percent recorded back in 2017. 

Artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, and virtual assistants have been around for a while, but their capabilities are continually advancing. As per recent research from IDC, AI already proves to be a powerful tool for transforming CX among businesses. Firms that adopted AI and machine learning during their early days, have reported around 25 percent improvement in CX, enriched margins, and enhanced competitiveness. 

Final Thoughts

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have affected several aspects of businesses like prospecting, marketing, and sales. But, most importantly, their most significant contribution has been toward customer service. Undeniably, it has multiple benefits for improving customer experience and interaction through every stage of the customer journey.

So, to stay ahead of the competition, take note of the above-mentioned factors to optimally utilize AI and ML in your customer experience initiatives.

The post Discover the Role of AI and Machine Learning to Improve Customer Experience appeared first on SiteProNews.

“Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking.” – Mark Zuckerberg

Chat applications like WeChat, WhatsApp, and KakaoTalk are more popular than social media platforms, making it even easier for businesses to enhance their live chat experience by migrating to these messengers. With the growth of conversational commerce, companies are extensively using messengers to handle customer service inquiries and improve customer experience.

Some of the benefits of using messaging apps for engaging customers include:

1. Messengers help brands reach a broader customer base.
2. Messengers can be integrated with third-party applications such as a CRM for making data-driven decisions when optimizing your CX strategy.
3. Additional benefits, such as privacy and security.

Here are our best tips to help you create and optimize your Customer Experience (CX) Strategy with the help of messengers.

Choose your messenger wisely

Choosing your messenger for conversational customer service depends on which application(s) your customer base frequents daily and customer demographics. An increasing number of businesses are adopting an Omni-Digital approach of reaching out to their customer base. This means that they utilize multiple digital channels for engaging with their customers.

Out of all the different channels, messaging apps are the most popular channel for engaging with the younger demographics. Based on where your customers live, their choice of platforms to communicate also differ. For example, any business that wishes to adopt a messaging app in their customer service should prioritize using the Facebook Messenger app for its North American customers while using the WeChat applications for its customers in China.

Design your Customer Experience (CX) with the messenger

When integrating messaging apps as a part of the customer service strategy, make sure you build an optimized customer experience. Customers are always expecting friendly and top-notch expertise when communicating with brands. That’s why your choice of messenger should be able to handle the majority of the issues without redirecting to other channels.

The tone and language of the conversations should align with your brand identity and the products you sell. This brings clarity and consistency to such conversations.

Personalize the experience

The most significant advantage of providing customer service via messenger is the personalized touch businesses can provide their clients. With high competition in specific markets, it either personalizes or perishes.

For example, KLM Royal Dutch Airline uses WhatsApp for after-sale customer service. This means customers receive booking confirmations, digital boarding passes, and flight status on their WhatsApp account. KLM also provides customized 24/7 multi-language support for all their flyers.

Automate customer service

Chatbots are one of the main tools for engaging consumers through messaging apps. When implementing such a solution, businesses should keep in mind the technological limits of AI and the platform. Recent studies have found that most consumers prefer interacting with chatbots when checking the status of an order or doing product research.

Another thing to keep in mind is to limit the use case of chatbots to specific issues. This helps by providing an optimal experience where the AI is good at answering questions it has been designed for.

Provide a seamless experience

When building your customer experience, it is essential to remember that AI is still learning and has limitations. Chatbots are mainly used for automated responses and can’t fully resolve all issues. Specific advanced problems require human interaction, making it imperative for your chatbot to recognize whether a consumer is looking for a transactional response or an emotional one.

Providing a seamless transition from the bot to a human agent is a critical characteristic of a great customer experience. Your AI solution should be smart enough to analyze customer intent and detect when a human agent should assist an issue without asking the customer explicitly.

Just like any other day-to-day business operation, brands must monitor specific KPIs or metrics to ensure that the experience offered by the messenger meets/surpasses their set customer expectations.

For instance, specific metrics to track and manage include:

• Average response time. Consumers expect quick answers, meaning the average response time is a metric to be closely monitored.

• Customer waiting time. Customer waiting times for an issue resolution should be limited to around 2–3 hours. For a World Class service, the response time is within an hour, with 15 minutes being the usual set target.

• Customer satisfaction. This can be tracked and managed via short and simple surveys.

• Volumes of messages per day. Monitoring and managing this metric can anticipate peaks and help businesses to prepare accordingly.

Wrapping up

More and more businesses are adopting instant messaging apps as part of engaging with customers digitally. To get the most out of such an experience, you must apply all these tips for an optimized Omni-digital solution that processes interactions efficiently.

The post 6 Tips for Creating Customer Experience via Messengers appeared first on SiteProNews.

“Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking.” – Mark Zuckerberg.

Chat applications like WeChat, WhatsApp, and KakaoTalk are more popular than social media platforms, making it even easier for businesses to enhance their live chat experience by migrating to these messengers. With the growth of conversational commerce, companies are extensively using messengers to handle customer service inquiries and improve customer experience.

Some of the benefits of using messaging apps for engaging customers include:

1. Messengers help brands reach a broader customer base.
2. Messengers can be integrated with third-party applications such as a CRM for making data-driven decisions when optimizing your CX strategy.
3. Additional benefits, such as privacy and security.

Here are our best tips to help you create and optimize your Customer Experience (CX) Strategy with the help of messengers.

Choose your Messenger wisely

Choosing your messenger for conversational customer service depends on which application(s) your customer base frequents daily and customer demographics. An increasing number of businesses are adopting an Omni-Digital approach of reaching out to their customer base. This means that they utilize multiple digital channels for engaging with their customers.

Out of all the different channels, messaging apps are the most popular channel for engaging with the younger demographics. Based on where your customers live, their choice of platforms to communicate also differ. For example, any business that wishes to adopt a messaging app in their customer service should prioritize using the Facebook Messenger app for its North American customers while using the WeChat applications for its customers in China.

Design your Customer Experience (CX) with the messenger

When integrating messaging apps as a part of the customer service strategy, make sure you build an optimized customer experience. Customers are always expecting friendly and top-notch expertise when communicating with brands. That’s why your choice of messenger should be able to handle the majority of the issues without redirecting to other channels.

The tone and language of the conversations should align with your brand identity and the products you sell. This brings clarity and consistency to such conversations.

Personalize the experience

The most significant advantage of providing customer service via messenger is the personalized touch businesses can provide their clients. With high competition in specific markets, it either personalizes or perishes.

For example, KLM Royal Dutch Airline uses WhatsApp for after-sale customer service. This means customers receive booking confirmations, digital boarding passes, and flight status on their WhatsApp account. KLM also provides customized 24/7 multi-language support for all their flyers.

Automate customer service

Chatbots are one of the main tools for engaging consumers through messaging apps. When implementing such a solution, businesses should keep in mind the technological limits of AI and the platform. Recent studies have found that most consumers prefer interacting with chatbots when checking the status of an order or doing product research.

Another thing to keep in mind is to limit the use case of chatbots to specific issues. This helps by providing an optimal experience where the AI is good at answering questions it has been designed for.

Provide a seamless experience

When building your customer experience, it is essential to remember that AI is still learning and has limitations. Chatbots are mainly used for automated responses and can’t fully resolve all issues. Specific advanced problems require human interaction, making it imperative for your chatbot to recognize whether a consumer is looking for a transactional response or an emotional one.

Providing a seamless transition from the bot to a human agent is a critical characteristic of a great customer experience. Your AI solution should be smart enough to analyze customer intent and detect when a human agent should assist an issue without asking the customer explicitly.

Just like any other day-to-day business operation, brands must monitor specific KPIs or metrics to ensure that the experience offered by the messenger meets/surpasses their set customer expectations.

For instance, specific metrics to track and manage include:

• Average response time. Consumers expect quick answers, meaning the average response time is a metric to be closely monitored.

• Customer waiting time. Customer waiting times for an issue resolution should be limited to around 2–3 hours. For a World Class service, the response time is within an hour, with 15 minutes being the usual set target.

• Customer satisfaction. This can be tracked and managed via short and simple surveys.

• Volumes of messages per day. Monitoring and managing this metric can anticipate peaks and help businesses to prepare accordingly.

Wrapping up

More and more businesses are adopting instant messaging apps as part of engaging with customers digitally. To get the most out of such an experience, you must apply all these tips for an optimized Omni-digital solution that processes interactions efficiently.

The post 6 Tips for Creating Customer Experience via Messengers appeared first on SiteProNews.

Given its high degree of security and transparency, this technology will prove to be a key investment area for businesses as we move into a post-pandemic world. This new bitcoin era, however, has left many leaders both confused and excited, and has created widespread disagreement over which qualities are essential in order to call something a blockchain. 

What are cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin? What is the difference between the cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks that businesses are developing that we read about in the news? And as a product manager, how do you know when there is an opportunity to leverage these technologies to drive growth within your customer or employee experience? These are three important questions asked at Bottle Rocket, so we decided to provide our current best answers below.

The Blockchain & Cryptocurrency Puzzle Breakdown

Before thinking about ways to incorporate blockchain and cryptocurrencies into the customer or employee experience, businesses need to understand the puzzle that is blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and how they are supposed to fit together.

The main difference between Bitcoin and business blockchain is the degree to which the network is decentralized (how much human interaction exists within the network), and the types of transactions being recorded. Bitcoin is a fully decentralized network, which means there is no human interaction when sending Bitcoin from one person to another. Most business blockchains are not fully decentralized and require some human interaction to complete the transaction, such as the manual review of a voting ballot before being confirmed to the ledger.

“Blockchain can mean different things to different types of companies. For big companies, it is about making existing markets more efficient & transparent. For small & medium sized companies, collaboration enables them to punch above their weight and launch exciting new last mile like products and services. But, it is at the start up level that digital innovation burns the brightest, creating a new digital economy to transform whole industries on top of this new quality and ownership, or access of data.” — Andy Martin, Blockchain Business Value Design World Wide Leader — IBM

The Relationship Between Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies & Your Customer or Employee Experience

Their utility as an alternative payment option is often better understood and can already be found embedded in most customer experiences. It’s more a question of whether it makes good business sense to offer Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency as a payment option. Consumers typically prefer choice and any customer who uses this channel could result in the avoidance of credit card transaction fees by the business, driving higher profit margins.

Turning to the other side of the same coin, the relationship isn’t as intuitively obvious. Most of this stems from the fact that these are business focused networks that don’t get much visibility by the public. The experience in this instance is typically a web or mobile app used by your employees. This employee experience is a window into the blockchain and its available functions. The quality and ease-of-use of this employee experience will be the main driver of adoption.

The relationship between the customers/employees and blockchain/cryptocurrencies, however, will be largely derived by the design and the user experience of the web and/or mobile application used to interact with it. If businesses want to drive adoption using blockchain and cryptocurrencies, they must make the experience so easy-to-use, that it is intuitively understood by even the most casual observer. 

In order to do this, leaders will need to cultivate a strong understanding of their customer base, their current behaviors, expectations, goals, and assumptions. Indeed, bad design, navigation, and user experience are the main barriers that have prevented adoption growth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It simply isn’t easy to use for most people and thus does not get used as much as it could be.

When to Leverage Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies to Drive Experience Growth

Whether or not it makes sense to invest in blockchain and/or cryptocurrencies to drive growth, depends largely on the benefits that would be gained from automated decision and governance processes and the level of interest from your future customer/employee base. Below are three common areas to consider when evaluating your customer or employee experience for opportunities to drive growth through blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

1. Cross B2B silo collaboration (reconciliation, provenance or a visibility issue) (Source — Andy Martin, IBM)
2. Data that needs to be shared is too valuable to let a 3rd party govern on your behalf (Source — Andy Martin, IBM)
3. Customer interest supports additional payment options

As a product manager, it is important to consistently take the pulse of the businesses decision and governance model taking place inside your business right now. An easy way to do this is to simply write down every decision made internally and externally with third parties. Once this list has been made, evaluate each decision using a multidimensional lens that includes the amount of time to complete each decision and the amount of friction it causes (none, low, medium, high). 

Once this is complete, filter the list so that the decisions with the highest level of friction and that take the most time to complete on average are on top and proceed in descending order down the list. These are the areas that represent your best opportunities to drive growth through blockchain and cryptocurrencies. For the highest-ranked items, do a cost-benefit analysist to see if a blockchain solution could help expedite these processes internally. This will then help you build out your strategy, create your service blueprint, and get you to launch in real time. Like everything else, you’ll want to continuously monitor, evolve, and grow.

In Summary 

Product managers and product growth SMEs should keep a consistent pulse on their governance models and perform regular reviews to determine when it makes sense to leverage this technology.

Click Here to Download a Spreadsheet Template

The post When to Leverage Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies to Drive Experience Growth appeared first on SiteProNews.

After all, the key to building a loyal brand following and acquiring new customers without breaking the bank is to elevate CX as much as possible. To do this, you need a good CRM solution, and you need to use it to fuel other teams in order to improve external communication – mainly sales and customer support. Let’s take a look how all of this ties together and how you can use your CRM software to drive customer experience forward.

It all starts with personalized interactions

Personalization is the name of the digital marketing game, but it also permeates the business world as a whole. Sales, marketing, support, PR, all of these and other external processes can be personalized to address the unique needs of the individual or the target group of consumers and your online audience as a whole. If you’re not personalizing your interactions and communication, then you’re just another faceless brand that doesn’t care about its customers – or at least that’s how the world is going to perceive your company. This is why personalization is imperative, and why it is essential in elevating the overall customer experience.

Of course, you can’t hope to achieve this without the right customer information in your hands, which is where your CRM tool comes into play. Aside from personalizing just the marketing processes, you want to use your CRM data to personalize your entire digital presence, including your website and social media, as well as all external communication whether it’s via phone, email, direct messaging, or other. 

Keeping in touch to build customer loyalty

Customer acquisition and customer retention should be your two primary objectives; however, there is no denying that the latter is the key to long-term success. Customer retention typically denotes customer loyalty as well, because returning customers are a clear sign that their past experiences and interactions with your brand have been positive and rewarding. It also means that your brand is memorable and engaging enough to keep them coming back instead of heading over to your competitors’ websites.

There are many ways to build customer loyalty, but for all the fancy solutions and strategies out there, simply keeping in touch is much more affordable and highly effective. CRM allows you to send regular emails, messages, news, updates, and tailored offers. This is a great way to check in on your customers, but if you really want them to fall in love with your brand, you will stop pushing products and instead ask them how satisfied they are, if there is any way you can assist them, and just let them know that you’re here to address their every need. The modern customer appreciates a brand that keeps in touch for their well-being instead of using the opportunity to make a quick repeat sale.

Pouring CRM data into external communication

Communication is the driving force behind sales, marketing support, and many other processes, which means that you need to optimize and perfect it to appeal to your online audience. Two things you need to achieve that: CRM and a comprehensive communication system like VoIP. Voice over internet protocol already brings call analytics to your company that you can use to make smarter decisions, but when complemented by your CRM data, you can take external communication to the next level.

That said, it’s not just about the data, it’s also about the VoIP system and the features it brings to the table. For example, the leading VoIP provider Nextiva offers call analytics but also the numerous communication tools that allows you to put that data to good use. After all, what good is knowing that your customers prefer mobile communication if you only use email? Find the right VoIP plan, and use your CRM data to communicate more efficiently and effectively.

Building an offer they can’t refuse

Personalized communication is a powerful way to build loyalty and bring new customers to your website, but so is building an offer tailored to the individual. If you want to make every customer’s experience in dealing with your brand a positive one, then you need to tailor your offer and even your online presence to their needs and preferences.

This means pulling the data from your CRM and VoIP analytics tools to optimize your website to the exact liking of a repeat customer, for example. In practice, this means that different returning customers will see different versions of your site based on their past interests, browsing history, purchases, and interactions with your brand. You can use this data to craft tailored offers that will inspire them to make another purchase and keep coming back to your brand.

Responding quickly and being omnipresent

Lastly, it’s important to note that CRM software allows you to identify the right channels for external communication, but more importantly, it helps you develop other sales and communication channels to drive the customer experience forward. Leveraging CRM data and its various features allows your sales and support staff to become omnipresent in the online world, meaning that they’re always ready and able to respond to messages, pick up calls, and engage with leads in a way that fits their needs and preferences.

Wrapping up

Focusing on continuously improving the customer’s experience is the way to ensure long-term growth, and to do that, you need a good CRM tool. That said, CRM is not the answer to all your problems, so make sure to leverage its functionalities to fuel all other departments, particularly sales and support in order to generate leads and build a loyal customer base.

The post 5 Great Ways to Use CRM Software to Elevate Customer Experience and Improve Support appeared first on SiteProNews.

File compression technology was one of the earliest examples of how big companies tried to accelerate web performance: in 2006 Amazon found that 100 milliseconds of additional page load time made the company lose profits by 1% and decided to start compressing images. Six years later, Facebook became 30% faster after having applied the same approach. 

Today, media files are still the major factor that influence web performance. How do you deal with this without losing your site’s UX authenticity and product visibility?

Web Performance Affects Customer Experience. How?

Better web performance is a top of priority for digital marketers these days. The reason is — in a highly competitive environment such as e-commerce users have a multitude of options to choose from. If one site doesn’t work properly, they will abandon it and go to another. 

According to Uploadcare observations, two main aspects of web site performance affect customer experience:

Responsive design

It’s not full-screen pictures and custom animation but a proper UX design that push a user to become a customer. At the same time, no matter how your design is thought out, it will not increase site conversion if it is displayed incorrectly on the user’s screen.

There are over 24,000 types of Android devices with screens, plus a smaller number of Apple mobile devices, so a lack of adaptive delivery will make businesses lose customers. If one site doesn’t work properly, people will abandon it and move on to another. 

Page speed level 

Tech errors may occur as a result of traffic surges and caching limitations on your web platform, users’ device, or server. Imagine the situation when users put time and effort into looking for a product. Applying too many filters or surfing from one page to another may lead to sudden page shutdowns. 

If a website is overflowing with media files that only the newest devices can support; if the site contains structure flaws, or a server is not powerful enough to handle intensive traffic, a web platform is doomed to regular tech failures. 

5 Mistakes that Lead to Poor Web Performance 

How can you improve site customer experience through web performance improvements? There are 5 major tech factors that need to be examined. 3 out of 5 can be fixed with the right CDN—content delivery network—and a small budget.  

1. Low server capabilities and its distant location

Low-budget servers and hosting can’t serve many users at once. A single personal server is also physically vulnerable to physical damage. And don’t forget about geo coverage! The farther the user is from the server, the slower the site’s response comes to them, and the lower the page loading speed.

2. Code density and plugins

Code complexity and a large number of redirects slow down info exchange. Therefore, website optimization is an important task for engineers. CSS volume and plugins affect page loading speed as well because they increase the general number of requests.

3. Traffic surges and RTTs

Simple servers will be overloaded if hundreds or thousands of people click buttons on your site simultaneously. Instead of serving at least some clients, your server may refuse to work at all. 

4. Too many large images

The heaviest files on your page are pictures and videos. When a user decides to visit your page, your server starts sending bits of content. The more of these bits, the slower the page will be fully displayed. The best image formats for page design are JPG, PNG, GIF, and the newest format called WebP. The worst options are TIFF and BMP.

5. Old CMS versions 

Don’t build your website using old tools! This decade, you can create with always-up-to-date software, paying for it only once (subscription and license purchase). Tools like WordPress, Drupal, and Wix are constantly upgrading online. And what is more important—sites built with them are also upgrading. In contrast, sites that are built in a custom way and were launched from corporate servers need to be updated manually by in-house engineers.

Try a CDN to Improve Customer Experience

A CDN (content delivery network) is an alternative way to transfer data from digital storage to users’ devices and back which requires fewer resources and lower device capacities. A CDN’s ecosystem consists of a certain number of servers set in different geo regions. The approach maximizes page loading speed, enriches their CX, makes company scalability possible, and reduces most common risks. 

Using the example of Uploadcare, we want to show why image CDN is helpful for business.

Page loading speed becomes higher 

A CDN optimizes data transfer time by automatically selecting a server base that is physically closer to the particular user. Check your site performance before and after Uploadcare integration with the PageDetox tool.  

Traffic surge is not a problem

A CDN distributes users’ requests between multiple servers within its ecosystem. That’s why traffic surges will not cause platform shutdowns or low web performance.  

Use more visuals 

A content distribution network responds to requests faster than an average corporate server system because it has a huge capacity reserve. A CDN also allows you to stay flexible. Do not purchase highly-productive hosting if you don’t know whether you need it or not. 

Instead, the system adapts to your needs and the price of its use depends on them. You also save on program code—an adaptive delivery feature provides your customers with a native experience regardless of their device types.

Your website is cyber protected 

It’s almost impossible to destroy a CDN infrastructure. The technology allows you to create backups of data packages and resists denial-of-service attacks. Built-in mechanisms of suspicious request blocking turn CDN into a solution for e-health, e-commerce medicine, and e-banking startups.

Bottom Line

Low web performance is the major reason why online customer experience might be poor, and low page loading speed is the number one cause of bad web performance. Although the issue could be resolved with careful coding, it is not always possible to foresee things like traffic surges, product scaling, or company geo expansion. 

The Uploadcare image CDN is a budget conscious yet proven way to avoid delays serving users from any region, to protect corporate and private data, and to improve customer experience by providing users with native UX.

The post How Web Performance Accelerates Retail Customer Experience appeared first on SiteProNews.

In short, they are looking for not just customer experience but an overarching customer care. If a company delivers this, in return it can harvest bounties grander than customer retention: satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Customer care is a complex set of measures aimed at creating a personalized, responsive and proactive environment. Getting it up and running used to be a hard job that required a plethora of disparate tools – until SAP C/4HANA, also known as SAP Customer Experience, was introduced.   

Previously marketed as SAP Hybris, the software was reinvented in 2018 as a suite of four Service Cloud solutions – for commerce, marketing, customer service, and sales – with a single UI, data model, and the underlying AI named SAP Leonardo. The key goal of the updated platform is to deliver a 360-degree customer view – the number-one prerequisite for outstanding customer care. So today we will have a good look at what’s under the hood of this advanced AI-powered solution and how it can promote customer care enablement.

Be Wherever Customers Need You

Gone are the times when the tried-and-true phone sufficed as the only medium of support; even adding a chatbot to the website won’t save the day anymore. According to Salesforce, modern customers use up to ten channels to communicate with a company, which means that your service teams must be accessible via nine of them at least – from 24/7 chatbots to social media and WhatsApp – to keep up.

Customer care implies not only omnichannel support but also deep personalization of all customer interactions. The research by Zendesk shows that 42% of consumers blame their bad experience on being forced to explain the problem to each new support rep over and over again. The customers of today won’t tolerate being treated like an ID number, and in the majority of cases will leave after the respective experience. 

Beyond that, customers hate being bothered for nothing but would greatly appreciate if brands predicted their future needs and sent valuable notification and suggestions. For example, this could be a reminder from a contact lens retailer that their customer’s current product will expire in five days, together with the reorder link attached. 

All this may seem like a hard challenge to shoulder in one go, yet SAP Service Cloud from the SAP C/4HANA suite provides the necessary features to cover today’s customer care requirements.

SAP Service Cloud

With SAP Service Cloud, you can orchestrate a seamless and holistic customer care experience. Integrated with the rest of the SAP C/4HANA suite, it provides support teams with an immediate access to all the customer information available in the system, from warranty documentation on purchases to transaction history. The solution puts an end to information silos, which have been traditionally obstructing support reps’ performance, and provides them with the vital context to personalize customer interactions.

SAP Service Cloud also includes an AI chatbot available 24/7 to answer customers’ questions and resolve their problems. Thanks to advanced natural language processing capabilities, the bot renders near-human communication, so the conversation feels natural to the customer. The AI can also take uncomplicated or routine actions in real time, but if the situation requires a live agent’s involvement, it will automatically transfer the task and the full conversation history to the appropriate support representative so that no context is lost.

SAP’s artificial intelligence system Leonardo is a very potent instrument, and the company has a lofty agenda to adapt it for proactive customer support. According to Jens Trotzky, Head of AI Technology for SAP Support, the work is already underway. The company’s AI experts are collaborating on “highly support-specific innovations” that are aimed at improving the relevance of automated customer interaction and strengthening brands’ credibility with their customers.

Help Customers Help Themselves

Until recently, self-service has been a blatantly overlooked aspect of customer care. Meanwhile, the internet and smartphones made consumers more independent and accustomed to getting information and answers in just a few clicks. As a result, customer support expectations changed drastically: now customers want the opportunity to solve product or service issues via self-service portals. 

The best thing about self-service portals is that they prove to be cost-effective to businesses. Do-it-yourself support costs very little compared to live support service. All this makes self-help a win-win solution that responds to customers’ behavior tendencies and curbs customer support costs. With that in mind, let’s explore what customer self-service capabilities SAP C/4HANA has to offer. 

SAP Knowledge Central by MindTouch

Knowledge Central is a third-party SAP tool for setting up both internal and customer-oriented knowledge portals. Flawlessly integrated into SAP C/4HANA, it allows companies to deliver high-quality illustrative self-help materials and neatly organize them into an accessible knowledge hub. This tool offers advanced features such as content ranking and natural language search, which significantly reduces customers’ effort and drives their loyalty.

SAP Jam Collaboration

SAP Jam Collaboration is a more multi-faceted solution than the previous one. Apart from providing the ground for a SAP Service Cloud-integratable knowledge base, it gives customers content contribution and discussion options. Letting your audience tell their stories or voice their concerns is a great way to demonstrate you care about what they have to say. 

To Wrap It Up

Straightforward, one-size-fits-all customer support has no place in today’s environment where customers expect highly-personalized and innovative care. Customer care is indeed a more demanding activity to arrange and maintain, but offers a viable competitive advantage as a payoff.

SAP С/4HANA offers an all-in-one solution to the challenges of providing personalized customer experience and is especially favorable for customer care setups. Each tool outlined in the article serves its individual purpose, but all of them are cross-integrated within a solid corporate ecosystem and can be accessed from a single interface. So, if you have decided to transform your customer support strategy into the next-generation customer care, it’s worth considering the SAP С/4HANA option.

The post A Cross-over to Customer Care with SAP Customer Experience appeared first on SiteProNews.

For instance, an e-learning enterprise may leverage the Quora platform and telemarketing more often than email marketing, while an e-commerce company will make use of its website more often than any other platform. Impressive answers on a ‘question and answer’ platform entice students and professionals to opt for courses in emerging technologies, whereas a remarkable product description and review on a robust website will attract more and more customers to make purchases.

Despite the subtle differences in utilization, there is a consensus about various marketing platforms and what their overall impact is on customer experience. Marketers use almost all of these platforms at different stages of their marketing efforts. And some platforms are not used by some businesses, while playing a significant role for others.

Without further ado, let’s discuss five such marketing platforms, how they impact customer experience (CX), and how you must leverage them for your business.

Emails (Email Marketing)

In communicating with prospects and customers, email is the preferred medium of 86 percent of B2B marketers. Why? Because it is the most cost-effective medium of communication. Think about it; all you have to do is frame the message depicting how your business can bring value for the buyer. Then frame the message in an exquisite email and press the send button. Your message has reached your customer’s inbox instantly.

Impact on CX:

From the customer’s point of view, an email is the least nagging form of marketing communication. With an email, you are giving the customers their own time and peace of mind to consume the content about your business. Decisions made after thorough consideration and careful thought processes are taken for the long-term and are generally not reversed.

Also, customers may be seeking a product or service that may be unavailable. Based on their past purchases and preferences, you can leverage predictive analytics to suggest the products that might captivate their interest.

The best example of this strategy is that of Amazon’s. By collecting data points such as name, search query, brand affinity, browsing habits, etc. and applying item-to-item collaborative filtering, they recommend products that you like and many times purchase happily.

How to Leverage Email Marketing?

For 59 percent of marketers, email is the most effective revenue generation tool. Email is the best marketing medium for B2B and B2C.  Send personalized emails that address customer pain points. Use automation to make your email marketing more effective. Do not, however, overwhelm your prospects by bombarding their inboxes. Instead use email marketing in moderation.

Social Media Platforms

Social media is used by 84% of people with access to the internet. This is the reason why  almost all online businesses use social media platforms. While B2B companies rely mostly on LinkedIn, B2C businesses rely more on Facebook and Instagram. Tik Tok and Snapchat are also being used extensively nowadays and all of these social media platforms are becoming an integral part of everyone’s life.

Impact on CX:

Social media platforms have given immense power to consumers and have provided quicker outreach for marketers and influencers. Did you know, 52% of online brand discovery happens on social media platforms? This means if brands are promoting their products or services on social media platforms, most customers will eventually become aware of it. But also do remember that social media platforms have empowered customers and that can have devastating implications on businesses, if they are not serving their customers well.

While buyers of earlier generations could do very little other than wail about a bad experience, social media has given the buyers of this generation the ability to wail less and do more, tarnishing the reputation of businesses that fail to deliver value to their customers.

How to Leverage Social Media?

3.48 billion people, i.e., 45% of the world population is using a form of social media. So, almost half of the world falls under the radar of your prospective customers. But not everyone uses all of the social media platforms in a similar way, and you should pick the platform for your business carefully. For B2B clients, LinkedIn should be the first platform of choice, while if you are a vendor of apparel and merchandise that make teenagers swoon, Instagram and Facebook should be your platform of choice.

Websites

A website is a medium that showcases your products and services to people. It is the first impression of your business. The foremost thing most people do after coming to know about your business is to visit your website. If it lacks quality and appeal, your prospects will turn away from you and associate themselves with one of your competitors who may not necessarily have better products and services than yours, but definitely a better website.

Impact on CX:

The importance of the structure and quality of a business website on customer experience can be determined by the fact that 75% of Internet users, according to a study by Stanford, judge the credibility of a business solely based on their website. 

Also, if a website takes 4 seconds or more to load, 25% of its visitors abandon the site. Considering that websites are the gateway of the journey that converts visitors into buyers, businesses must make serious efforts to enhance the journey beginning with the gateway.

How to Leverage Websites:

Websites can be slippery ground when it comes to user attention. A survey by the Nielsen Norman Group found that only 16% of users read articles word by word on a website, while 79% of users simply glance over the content. Therefore, your website must be visually appealing and have meaningful, concise content. Mixing different types of content like infographics, videos, podcasts, etc. is a better idea if you want your website to have a vibrant look and feel.

Banner Advertisements     

Banner advertisements work in confluence with websites. They can provide brand exposure in an exciting, interactive way. By displaying the right ads in the right places, you can grab  customer attention. Many marketers use impressive banner content that redirects users to various website sections.

Impact on CX:

Banner ads are quite successful in the B2C space since they tend to draw users who might be in quest of what you are advertising or look at it with new interest. Of course, the latter also depends upon the quality of your banner advertisement.

When it comes to the B2B space, it is not always wise to overly focus on banner ads. B2B executives and buyers are more often than not looking for information and prefer not to spend time on ads meant to elicit excitement more than provide information. You can, nevertheless, create banner ads with several redirects, but the essence will be lost without guaranteeing B2B success.

How to Leverage Banner Ads:

Make your website interactive with interactive banner ads. If possible, add mini-games to it. Banner ads draw customer attention to your products and services, just do it in a way that causes them to observe, stop, and engage with your brand. In the B2B landscape, use it with discretion and with moderation in B2C channels.

Direct Mails

Direct mails may be an old platform, but they are not outdated. With a median ROI of 29%, direct mail stands in the third position in effectiveness behind email marketing and social media marketing. More important is the fact that it loses to social media marketing by only 1 percentage point.

Direct mails enable you to reach your audience, grab their attention, and connect to them, all at a personal level. And this is the reason why direct mail in this digital age is still prevalent and will remain so.

Impact on CX:

Believe it or not, there are more people in the world today who still prefer direct mail as the most viable mode of advertisement. 73% of people believe and prefer direct mail for advertising, while 57% expressed that receiving mail makes them feel valued and special. The result is more conversion. Nearly 66% of people bought a product because of direct marketing.

How to Leverage Direct Marketing:

Direct marketing is leveraged in both B2B and B2C sectors with somewhat equal success. B2B leaders, in particular, give more preference to direct mail because it is less disruptive. Direct mails also get more response when compared to other digital marketing platforms.

This brings us to the end of our selected list of marketing platforms.

Wrapping it up

Although comprehensive, this list is not exhaustive. There might be several other platforms used extensively by businesses of a specific niche. If you believe we have missed out on a significant platform, you can always leave a word for in the comments section.

All the five platforms that we have covered in this article impact customer experience in their own way. Companies leverage these platforms in parallel to increase their lead generation and then conversion to make a profit. Whatever your strategy always remember to make customer experience your foremost concern.

The post How Different Marketing Platforms Impact Customer Experience appeared first on SiteProNews.

With that said, a bad customer service experience is even more influential on people’s purchase behavior. 66% of B2B customers and 52% of B2C customers would stop buying from a brand if they received a bad customer service interaction. This makes it crucial to avoid customer service mistakes that could negatively affect customer experience.

So here are four of the worst customer service mistakes you should avoid at all cost.

1. Not Being Responsive Enough

Responsiveness is one of the top factors that influence people’s customer service experiences. A Sprout Social study also found that responsiveness was the top brand action that would prompt consumers to buy something.

So if you’re not responsive enough when customers come to you with an issue or question, you risk ruining their customer service experience. 

Long hold times, taking days to respond to emails, etc. are major causes of customer frustration. You should try avoiding these mistakes as much as possible. 

You can reduce long hold times by opening up other channels for customer service such as live chats, chatbot support, social media messaging, etc. Opening up other customer service channels also means you could significantly reduce the amount of email enquiries, which will be easier to manage. 

If you’re low on resources, you don’t necessarily have to hire more people to handle customer service either. Investing in a reliable chatbot solution will do the trick. 

For instance, Amadeus, a travel solutions provider, was able to deflect 70% of their customer support enquiries from traditional channels after investing in AgentBots’, Aivo’s chatbot.. Powered with machine learning technology, the chatbot managed to learn from every interaction, which improved the accuracy of its answers.

2. Confining Customers to a Single Channel

If you only have one channel to provide customer support, you’re setting yourself up for disaster. When customers have limited options to get support, it could be a major cause for frustration. 

Let’s say that you only provide phone support. This means you’ll experience longer wait times and have a lot more frustrated customers because everyone is calling, regardless of the severity of their issue. 

You should deflect some of the enquiries to other channels and make customer support accessible through multiple options. 

In addition to calls and emails, set up chat support and social media support as well. But remember that social media support doesn’t just end with responding to people’s direct queries. You should also conduct regular social media monitoring to look for posts and comments where people are sharing their bad experiences. 

And even with chat support, give customers the option to use chatbots and live chats. You could start with chatbots to answer basic questions and then give customers the option to speak to an agent if their issue couldn’t be resolved by the chatbot. 

You could also have live chat agents available for a specific duration every day, while chatbots take over when your agents are unavailable. 

On top of all this, you should also provide self-service options to your customers. Have FAQ pages available for some of the most common issues so people can get quick answers for minor problems. This can significantly reduce the amount of customer support enquiries, making them easier to manage regardless of the channel. 

For instance, Amazon offers answers to multiple self-help topics to resolve minor issues.

They also offer two options to contact customer service – through chat or by setting up a call.

When you choose the chat option, you get a chatbot asking you basic questions in case it can get resolved without speaking to an agent. Otherwise, it directs you to a live chat agent to handle the issue.

3. Failing to Streamline Your Documentation

Someone calls customer service to follow up about an ongoing issue. They’ve made the call a few times before and the issue has been logged by customer support. 

However, the caller has to explain the issue and relay the same information for the fifth time, even though the company has already logged the issue. You can imagine how frustrating this scenario would be.

This occurs because you don’t have a proper system to unify all of your records and documentation. So customer service reps cannot access the necessary details at the right time, or they have to scour through multiple files to find the right one.

This makes it crucial for businesses to invest in a customer support platform that easily integrates with their CRMs so agents can quickly and easily access customer information. 

This will enable you to deliver more personalized customer service experiences. Platforms like Salesforce Starter is a cost-effective solution for small businesses to unify all their customer info. This platform will allow you to manage all your customer support tickets in one place.

4. Failing to Invest in Your Customer Service Team

Not investing in your customer service team is easily one of the most harmful mistakes that you can make. 

Maybe you’re not hiring enough people to handle customer support enquiries. Maybe you’re not providing sufficient and ongoing training to your staff. Either way, this could build up and negatively impact the customer service experience you’re providing. 

When you don’t have enough staff to handle all of your enquiries, you’ll have frustrated and overworked employees trying to deal with frustrated customers. 

Without sufficient training, your team may not know the right process to handle delicate situations such as irate customers. They may not even know what to say to avoid angering your customers or how vital their position is. 

So it’s crucial to make an ongoing investment in your customer service team. Consult with team leads to understand the unique needs of your team members. 

Perhaps you need to hire more people to ease their burden. Perhaps their equipment is constantly acting up and preventing them from doing their job well. 

You should also organize regular refresher training sessions and show your employees some appreciation when they deserve it.

Final Thoughts

The quality of customer service you provide can make or break your business. Not only does it affect sales, but also customer loyalty. So make sure you find solutions to avoid the mistakes highlighted above and start providing better, more memorable customer service experiences.

The post 4 Terrible Customer Service Mistakes You Should Avoid at Any Cost appeared first on SiteProNews.

Having a lasting business has gone beyond having the best product. Today you need to know how best you can communicate the value of what you are selling, and keep individuals interested enough that they keep coming back.

To this end, marketing itself now focuses more on what is called “Relationship Marketing.” The term means establishing relationships with customers that would last beyond their first trial of your product.

It also means forming a profoundly personal relationship between consumers and brands, and it is built over an extended period, and born out of trust, reliability, and loyalty.

In the 21st century, a large percentage of marketing has shifted to the internet via social media. As a result, more and more companies are losing touch with their old customers, as they tend to focus more on attracting new ones through social media content.

However, studies have shown that it is essential to retain old clientele while sourcing for new ones. It’s especially important for long-term success strategies, and for this to happen, companies must engage more with their current clients.

Now, a business owner might wonder about the usefulness of relationship marketing since more than half of the world population are online and are conducting business virtually. The answer is simple and your questions will be answered shortly.

Note that even online marketing has an element of relationship marketing; here are seven main reasons why the latter is essential to business:

1. It Improves Customer Experience

Every business owner knows that a customer having an excellent experience with products or services rendered is vital. You don’t want people who patronize you to leave feeling disappointed.

What you want is for people who use your services or products to have a feeling of deep satisfaction. That satisfaction should start from the moment they make contact with your sales agent until they have taken delivery of their product.

Relationship marketing, where you have one-on-one interaction with customers or prospects, can bring about the above. 

Even if the person only wanted to make inquiries, the way you present your business and treat the person would determine whether they’ll make a purchase at that moment, return to do so, or never return.

2. It Ensures Better Feedback from Customers

Feedback is the positive or negative response you get from those who use your products or services. The guarantee that you’ll receive an excellent response from your customers depends on the relationship that exists between you and them.

If you are a multinational, relationship marketing is carried out by your sales agents. And if these agents who serve as representatives do not have a cordial relationship with clients, they’ll leave your product and go for another one.

Feedback under relationship marketing also means that your customers would be eager to inform you on the areas you need to improve on. It means that they would rather stay with you than go to another brand.

Note that if they’ve been giving reviews without seeing the necessary changes, they will leave to another brand. If that happens, it would mean that your relationship marketing is defective, and it can cost you your business.

3. It Builds Your Referrals

We live in a world of referrals. So referrals are a form of marketing by individuals who have used a product, found it to be everything they expected, got excellent treatment from the salesperson(s) and then go on to tell others about it. 

It’s free marketing made with testimonies, and it costs companies nothing but good relationship marketing. However, if your relationship marketing is crappy, and your customers don’t get treated right, then it is guaranteed that the only report they’ll give about you is negative, with zero referrals.

Most brands today get new customers from referrals more than the adverts they spend millions on. Adverts will get your product known. However, don’t forget that others are offering what you are, and consumers often have a brand they use and trust. So the only way to win them over is by someone pointing them your way.

4. It Keeps You Informed About the Needs of Your Customers

Let’s point out that relationship marketing goes beyond effectively pitching your product in a polite and friendly way, to developing an excellent rapport. People appreciate it when they are heard, and sometimes they prefer to share deep personal problems with a stranger.

With relationship marketing, when you notice the frowns and overly-excited look, make sure to offer words of comfort or pay a compliment. It will leave the person you are dealing with feeling like you saw him or her as more than the next quick sale.

This will also help you discover what they need to ensure you are providing them with the best service and meeting their needs. For example, Starbucks introduced free Wi-Fi after its customers suggested it.

Without effective relationship marketing, they would have kept the suggestion to themselves and gone elsewhere to get it. Such an approach might have resulted in Starbucks losing a lot of customers.

5. It Leads To New Business Ideas

As mentioned above, knowing what your customers need helps you give them what they want, and it can also help you birth new business ideas.

Most companies branch into other ventures after starting with one because of the ideas that came to them from the information they gathered from their customers.

Having a good relationship means that you get to find out what your customers are using and what they wished you had, which could lead to a new business venture.

Also, if a customer wants to form a partnership, chances are, you might get picked because there’s already an existing relationship.

6. It Helps Enhance Your Uniqueness

Relationship marketing sets you apart from your competitors and helps you create your brand in a unique way that meets your customers’ needs.

A lot of business owners might sell the same thing or render the same services. However, there’s a reason why McDonald’s is still in business, and other fast-food chains have folded up over the years.

In today’s world, you need to have something that sets you apart, and building relationships with your customers will deliver it. Moreover, relationship marketing will ensure you stay relevant for a long time.

7. It Fosters Loyalty

This is one of the most significant reasons why relationship marketing is essential. Treating people well, having a good relationship, and giving them excellent products and services fosters loyalty, and it means they’ll always stay with you.

Some people have shopped in a particular location for a long time or ordered from a company. When you ask questions, you’ll find that their loyalty is based on the great relationship they have with the business owners/staff.

Change might be constant, but people don’t want to change the status quo. And that thin line that divides keeping a customer, losing one, or gaining another, is called relationship marketing.

Human interactions are still a significant part of life despite the digital world we now live in. So learn to value relationships and utilize them sufficiently to make your business grow and stay relevant.

The post 7 Reasons Why Relationship Marketing Is Important for Business appeared first on SiteProNews.

Customer experience is a term used to categorize and describe the experience a customer receives while interacting with a business’s marketing and sales messages.

Ideally, these interactions will make up a “path to conversion”, also called a customer journey, that facilitates the progression of a potential customer from introduction to completed sale and beyond.

It might seem like a relatively new concern for eCommerce companies looking to improve conversion rates and sales on their websites but before the online shift, brick-and-mortar retailers focused on customer experience for many years by using upsell bins, improving store design, and optimizing POS and checkout.

In fact, for traditional retailers, like Abercrombie & Fitch, Build A Bear, and Nordstrom, customer experience has been successfully employed to differentiate themselves from their competitors and create a brand synonymous with quality.

This emphasis has also impacted the bottom line for these companies. Forrester reports that improving CX can increase profitability by more than 500%, as well as reducing customer acquisition and employee hiring costs.

What is a Positive Ecommerce Customer Experience?

CX starts with engaging customers with relevant events well before the sale, and continues after the sale with advocacy and brand loyalty.

What goes into creating a positive eCommerce customer experience?

• a user-friendly website
• a rapid checkout process
• personalized shopping experiences
• clear product pages
• easy returns
• outstanding customer support

If your analytics dashboard is showing an increase in repeat traffic that’s a pretty good indicator of a great customer experience. Bonus points go to positive customer experiences that not only bring in repeat business but also turn those customers into advocates for your brand that spread the word.

What is a Customer Experience Strategy?

A customer experience strategy defines, describes, and details how to deliver a positive and meaningful customer experience across all sales and marketing channels. However, in 2019, as online customer journeys become increasingly complex, creating an omnichannel CX strategy is complicated. To name a few, a CX strategy should consider factors such as marketplace data, consumer research and vision and should specify how to improve key areas, including:

• Ease of use
• Ease of purchase
• Catering to individual customer needs
• Accessibility

An effective customer experience strategy involves all departments in a company. By doing so, your company will be able to create a unified effort and process designed to improve the customer experience.

How can your company create or improve a customer experience strategy? Here are nine tips to get you started.

The 9 Secret Ingredients for a Great CX Strategy

1. Define the Right Style

Your CX strategy changes depending on the predictability of your market, and to every market there is a different strategic style. The Harvard Business Review, suggests the four strategic styles below. They include:

Classical: This style is best for companies that operate in highly predictable industries. Companies utilizing a classical style build a favorable market position by planning well into the future, and remaining with the same strategy for several years. Ask yourself: Can I sustain my customer experience strategy for many years forward?

Adaptive: This is best for companies in unpredictable industries. Such companies require a more adaptive strategy that can be easily and rapidly changed. Ask yourself: Is my infrastructure one that can change rapidly? Is the decision making process quick and easily adaptable?

Shaping: This is one step beyond the adaptive style. While it too changes frequently, it focuses beyond the boundaries of the company to define new markets, standards and business practices. Ask yourself: Do I leave room for market feedback to power rapid decision making?

Visionary: This bold and entrepreneurial style can create entirely new markets or visions, and views the environment as a way to be molded to a company’s advantage. But it’s more similar to a classical strategy, because companies take calculated steps to reach goals without switching tactics. Ask yourself: What does the future hold for the industry and how can we provide a customer experience that disrupts it?

Which CX strategy style is the right one for your eCommerce business? It depends on many factors such as your offering, management styles, human resources, technological infrastructure, the market, and several other factors.

Ecommerce Strategy Styles

Products that have rigid demand, a high percentage of repeat customers, and a small number of competitors, such as B2B eCommerce, are better suited for the classical approach. Apparel, however, which is characterized by high competition and lack of product differentiation, is a good match for the adaptive model.

A shaping or even a visionary strategy is great for eCommerce brands looking to differentiate themselves and stay ahead in a competitive market but, at the same time, can sustain the long term vision necessary to facilitate it.

2. Create a Journey for Your Strategy

While it doesn’t have to entertain, a good strategy should tell a good story. First, ask yourself what is the correct place to start? Some might start with detailing the goals up front. Some might prefer to opt for a “problem – solution” type of story, which details current challenges and their solutions.

Second, establish a theme by asking what is the main point of your customer experience strategy? Like any good story, your strategy should have a build up to a literary climax. For example, in the “problem – solution” model the climax is reached when presenting suggested solutions and their foreseeable outcomes. Finally, a good strategy brings it all together with a solid conclusion.

3. Map Your Customer Data

Map out the touchpoints, collect data, and figure out how to optimize the process. We all collect data. However, for your data to effectively fuel decision it should address questions such as:

• How do customers find you?
• Why do they choose you over your competition?
• How easy is it for them to browse your website?
• Is your website mobile-friendly?
• Are the product images clear and compelling?
• How quickly can they check out?
• What is their unboxing experience like?
• How easy is it for them to leave reviews?
• What sort of incentives do they receive to purchase again?
• How (often) do they receive customer support?

Ecommerce customer data should answer these questions.

4. Go for Omnichannel

Striving for an omnichannel experience is an important part of an effective CX strategy. Omnichannel businesses provide customers with a seamless integrated shopping experience, whether it’s from a desktop, a mobile device, by phone or in a brick-and-mortar store.

No matter where they shop, customers receive the same experience and messaging through every channel. The result is an effortless shopping experience.

When creating a CX strategy, it’s necessary to keep in mind the omnichannel experiences that most customers will traverse.

Therefore, if you presently operate an eCommerce brand, map out your current customer journeys across all channels (A). Then, map out the desired customer journeys expected to improve conversion rates, reduce acquisition costs, and boost overall revenue (B). Finally, your customer experience strategy should detail how to get from A to B.

5. Focus on the Customer

Always maintain a customer-centric approach. Ask yourself: What do my customers want? And what is the best way I can provide it?

Don’t assume that you know what is best for your customers. Spend time talking to them and collecting data. Find out what is important to them, why they choose the products that they do, and what matters to them when they shop. Focus on their needs. It’s all about them.

For most of you, a/b testing, user recordings, and VPN solutions are already being implemented to learn about how your customers interact with your web properties and apps. However, in 2019, the main issue impacting the customer journey and reducing online revenue will be malware and, more specifically, malvertising.

For example, Dollar Shave Club recently discovered that over 10% of their website visitors received malware advertising while on their website, which resulted in fewer subscriptions.

Using Namogoo, Dollar Shave Club was able to experience a significant spike in their subscriber conversion rates by, first, spotting that their customers were being hijacked by malicious ad injections, and, second, blocking those injections to improve the customer journey and boost conversion rates.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: https://www.namogoo.com/blog/consumer-behavior-psychology/9-secret-ingredients-to-a-great-customer-experience-strategy/

The post 9 Secret Ingredients to a Great Customer Experience Strategy appeared first on SiteProNews.

When it comes to major sales holidays, few events can make or break the viability of eCommerce stores quite like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

News dating from 2017 (Reuters) stated that according to Adobe Analytics, US retailers made sales worth $7.9 billion during Thanksgiving and Black Friday in 2017, which is around 18% more than what they earned from the Black Friday 2016. The Cyber Monday 2017, on the other hand, made $6.59 billion in sales and was, by far, the biggest U.S. online shopping day to date, which is again a 17% increase from 2017.

We may safely deduce from these figures that failing to take the holiday season seriously, especially Black Friday and Cyber Monday, can lead to lost revenue and sales potential.

To help you avoid this unwanted outcome, we’ve compiled a comprehensive checklist that aims to improve your omnichannel eCommerce experience across your official website, mobile app, kiosks, other devices, and even in-store amenities.

With this guidance, there’s no reason why you can’t make the most out of this year’s Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday sales rush.

1. Provide Your Sales Audience with Product and Service Information as Soon as Possible

“40% of customers begin researching and doing their holiday shopping as early as October.” – Corey Ferreira, Shopify

Digital consumers start scouring branded sites for information about best Black Friday deals even before the holiday season begins. So, you need to be prepared for this incoming traffic that starts well before the events.

During the lead up to this holiday shopping season, you should incorporate the following improvements to your site, in order to ensure  that digital customers have an experience that is conducive to setting up a purchase once your Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale begins:

• Revamped product information pages
• Conspicuous and easily understood homepage navigational buttons
• Pop-out overlay windows that trigger in accordance with consumer activity and interest
• Once your site is upto the mark and ready to provide these “early bird” shoppers with the information they crave, be sure to let them know about these improvements via your email contact list, social media profiles, and other channels that funnel into your greater digital customer experience.

2. Plan out Your Sales a Week Before the Event

When we talk about sharing this information with your digital following, a part of getting ahead of the curve comes in the form of planning out sales and promotions at least a week before the arrival of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and even Thanksgiving.

“Look at all of your products and plan your sales ahead of time instead of putting on a sale last minute.” – Corey Ferreira, Shopify

One of the best ways to go about this process is via a “planned sales map,” ensuring that the digital customer experience flows smoothly once the wheels for this holiday sale are in motion. Creating a grid that covers the following sales details can help simplify this process significantly. Make sure you include:

• Sale Items
• Regular Price
• Sale Price
• Sale Date Start
• Sale Date End
• Sale Type
• Promotional Angle
• Additional Notes

Naturally, this is just a baseline in terms of an organizational approach. Your brand can always add to or remove from this grid of information as needed.

3. Test Your Site for its Ability to Handle the Incoming Surge of Traffic

Once you have these interested shoppers flooding your site, it’s vital to the success of your holiday season campaign that the digital backbone of your domain is able to handle this surge of traffic. Otherwise, you run the risk of facing the worst digital customer experience nightmare possible – a crashed or unresponsive site during the biggest sale event of the year.

Before the big rush on your website/app begins, test out your server load capacity by connecting with your trusted team of eCommerce development experts or via a performance testing tool. Two of the best options on this front include Loadimpact.com and Blitz.io.

Loadimpact.com offers a free server test that gauges the durability of your standard desktop and mobile sites.

Blitz.io offers similar testing capabilities, all from a cloud-based platform. Once your test is complete, the team behind this tool can provide you with an in-depth analysis that covers the particulars of software stacks, hardware resources, and related service providers.

4. Think Mobile First and Ensure Your Mobile Experience is Functional across Multiple Devices

According to a report by Statista, as of 2018, U.S. mobile retail commerce sales form around 40% of total U.S. ecommerce retail sales. This is projected to be around 54% by 2021. Evidently, thinking mobile first is not only important but also inevitable.

Also, with such increase in demand from mobile users, ensuring your mobile offerings are consistent and functional across numerous devices is also a big aspect of the digital customer experience for the holiday ecommerce season.

As pointed out by Rachel Sprung from HubSpot Blog, your brand can offer a great mobile digital customer experience by incorporating the following “on-the-go” optimization techniques and assets into its mobile site:

• Large, easily clickable buttons
• Simple and straightforward navigational paths
• Clickable menus that expand when needed
• Smart usage of images and graphics that don’t detract from load times and touchscreen interaction

And not just this, it’s also important to optimize experience across platforms – primarily, iOS and Android – to ensure that your target audience is not missed. A grid design plan for your app can help on this front.

You must also ensure consistency in app features on both platforms, at the same time keeping the user interface as well as the user’s convenience in mind.

5. Go High on Advertising Holiday Sales with Graphics

Create a visual experience for your users. Adding sale banners and/or changing the header image on the homepage is an extremely effective way to keep your audience informed, and even better, curious.

Brands, such as Amazon, use these graphics most intelligently to keep their users coming back for holiday season sales.

6. Keep your Social Media Followers Informed and Engaged

In terms of elevating your omnichannel experience to a position that stands as the gold standard of your industry, a few aspects must never be overlooked. A well-thought-out social media management strategy is one of them.

As Jaxon Lam of the Hootsuite blog explains, customers are more likely than ever before to make a purchase based on how you conduct yourself within these digital channels.

Grabbing the attention of your followers and creating a great digital customer experience on these networks starts with promoting your holiday sales early and often. Much like the early bird site visitors, your social audience craves early access to these promotions. So drum up some interest by teasing out these Cyber Monday/Black Friday online deals as social exclusives.

Incorporate trackable links and calls-to-action (CTAs) within these promotional posts to funnel traffic back to your site. Aside from helping to bridge the gap between your social and website experiences, this practice also helps your brand gather highly-valuable consumer data that can help refine future marketing operations and enhance retargeting efforts.

Finally, be as engaging as possible. Actively answering users’ questions and replying to comments shows your audience that your organization is willing to make the social portion of the digital customer experience a value-driven and an interactive affair during this (or any other) holiday sales season.

7. Integrate Live Chat Functionality when Possible

Today, customers demand more in terms of expedient responsiveness than even what social media chats have to offer. In this case, the key to keeping your customer experience at peak levels, comes in the form of integrating live chat functionality within your various digital channels.

Having a response at the ready and being able to answer customer questions in real time, are powerful additions to your site or app and could serve as the difference between securing a sale and facing another wasted opportunity during the Black Friday online shopping sales surge.

This is where chatbots come to the rescue. Chatbots are, in fact, revolutionizing CRM. With AI making such immense advances that benefit so many aspects of a business including customer relationship management, chatbots are the most close-at-hand application of AI that businesses can use to their advantage.

8. Plan for Capturing Lost Sales and Abandoned Carts via Email Marketing Retargeting

One of the most overlooked facets of a great digital customer experience is understanding and accepting the fact that even the best sales deals will leave some shoppers on the fence. However, by acknowledging this reality, your brand can plant the seeds for a smart and effective plan that aims to convert these uncertain digital customers.

A surprising fact from Brilliance – the mobile cart abandonment rate during Black Friday sales witnessed an increase of 15.9% in spite of improved US and overall shopping experience.

The best way to go about this process is via an email marketing campaign, that shows those customers who abandon their carts on your website; that your brand does care about its business; and that it is dedicated to providing an intertwined and cohesive omnichannel experience.

If you plan on remarketing to cart abandoners during Black Friday, you need to understand that timing and acceptance are the two key factors, which can make or break this strategy:

Since Black Friday and Cyber Monday have shorter purchase cycles than usual sales, it’s perfectly fine to send 2 to 3 emails over 2 to 3 days.

Keeping this interaction to one or two emails total and accepting the fact that not every remarketing effort will end in a sales conversion, ensures that your brand doesn’t come off as overbearing or “spammy.”

9. Build an In-store Experience that Completes the Omnichannel Digital Customer Experience

Part of providing a great digital customer experience on Black Friday comes from blurring the lines between your brick-and-mortar store and your online products and services on various devices and interfaces.

Sample devices and in-store kiosks that show off the features and functionality of your mobile app or site are a great way to immerse these customers in the digital experience, all while enhancing their ability to garner information about your products and services.

Additionally, requests for online feedback after a sale, as well as harvesting customer email addresses, allows your brand to lay the foundation for repeat site traffic and a growing email marketing contact list. To maximize the potential of this approach, it is important to invest in customer journey optimization for omnichannel retail.

Understanding customer journeys through customer analytics is the key to managing an omnichannel setup. Because how customers interact and deal with digital channels is dynamic and extremely demanding, especially during holiday sales. The aim should be to meet their needs right when they need, and more importantly, where they need.

10. Track or Measure the Success of Your Digital Customer Experience Improvements

One of the biggest mistakes your brand can make when it comes to optimizing its Black Friday/Cyber Monday digital customer experience is in assuming that the process ends once shoppers have wrapped up their transactions at the digital checkout.

In reality, maintaining the holiday season eCommerce checklist is a never-ending and constantly evolving commitment to providing the best services and features possible to your audience.

Thankfully, tracking sales numbers, engagement on social media, in-store and online customer surveys, etc., provide your business with valuable insights into the digital customer experience.

Consider keeping an eye on the following metrics during this holiday season:

• Cost Per Click (CPC)
• Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
• Return on Investment (ROI)
• Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
• Customer Complaints

The insights offered by these metrics and feedback can serve as the basis for future optimization and continued refinement, thereby ensuring that each holiday sales season is better than the last for your business.

Conclusion

The holiday season is just around the corner. Make sure you have a plan in place to make Black Friday and Cyber Monday the best time of the year for your business.

From merging functionalities and services across multiple channels to preparing for next year’s Black Friday frenzy, creating a great digital customer experience requires plenty of time, effort, investment, and energy. However, the benefits and gains of truly winning over your audience during this crucial period is well worth all the hard work that goes into this process.

The post The Essential eCommerce Checklist for Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2018 appeared first on SiteProNews.