Conversational Commerce

Introduction

It's the busiest time of the year for e-commerce professionals. Inboxes are being flooded with BFCM best practices, and it can be difficult to decipher what recommendations to implement given strained time and resources. This year in particular, there’s volatility in the air and it’s especially important to make sure your foundation and holiday season campaigns are set up for success.

Let’s focus on the most vital and often overlooked area of opportunity for brands this time of year: customer communication. This topic breaks down into what a brand communicates about its products and how a brand communicates with its customers.

Let’s face it, shopping is just not that important this year. With an upcoming election, the environmental crises happening in the country, social justice movements, and COVID-19, people are focusing on what really matters. Brands that have retained their authenticity throughout COVID-19 are doing well in the current environment, especially if that authenticity includes a mission-driven component. Spotify’s annual global trends report surveyed millennials and Gen Z and found that “young people expect brands to take a stand, but what they really want is engagement and inspiration instead of posturing.” Brands that are talking about their values and how they equate to this new world should capitalize on that storytelling in the coming months, but only if there is substance to back it up. When potential customers do focus on shopping this year, they’ll likely want to align it with their personal values. So what should brands do to engage in this conversation?

Statistically speaking, a customer’s first impression of an e-commerce site will be formalized within just 3 seconds, and is based on a combination of understanding the value proposition, load time, art direction, and ease of navigation. Customers should quickly understand the why and the what of your brand when they land on your site. Otherwise, you've lost them.

Using a tool like Gorgias, it’s a great opportunity to send a message when the customer hits the landing page or a specific collection or product detail page. While customers are used to seeing promotional messages during the holiday season, it may surprise them to find that the first point of communication is actually acknowledging the important issues our country is dealing with. Take a look at Patagonia’s homepage, which features almost exclusively content about the upcoming election, the environment, and antiracism.

Some ideas and best practices can include:

• Give customers the chance to explore the company’s mission by highlighting the About page.

• Make sure your support team has the resources available to share with customers if they are asking about sustainable materials or specific organizations that the brand donates to.

• If a product or collection is tied to a mission, be proactive about sharing that on the appropriate pages. All of these messages can be set up and with macros so that a customer experience representative can effectively automate their responses.

On the customer support side of things, the name of the game for CX teams is automation. The hard work is all in the preparation and setup. By the time you get into the holiday season, you should only be focused on optimizing workflows and responding to outlier, more personalized help requests.

The Verbal+Visual team recently sat down with Gorgias to understand what we should be looking out for on behalf of our clients in Q4. Gorgias’ customer support tool makes it easy to set up a support infrastructure that is scalable and creates consistency in your brand’s tone of response.

Macros

A macro in Gorgias is a premade template that can be inserted as a response in an open support ticket. Macros can include things like customer name, order number, customer address, loyalty program login, file attachments, and webhook triggers to activate other applications.

With macros set up, it’s easy for CX teams to respond to common requests and questions via email, chat, or other social media channels. For example, if a customer is asking where their order is, a template can be ready to go to send out that message. Support messages become personalized and scalable at the same time. It’s important for CX teams to make a list of common macros that should be set up. CX and E-commerce teams should coordinate to call out potential use cases and recommend commonly used information.

Automations

Setting up flows based on customer requests is also crucial to becoming more efficient as a CX team. The biggest difference between traditional and automated customer service is that the latter can work 24/7, gather real-time feedback, and provide answers instantly. All of this, of course, can improve customer experience immensely.

There are a number of automation examples that Gorgias has documented on their support site. To see a list of some of these automations, explore here. One of the most important automations will be responding to customers or providing support hours during non-business hours. Having a support chat icon on your site is helpful but it can be damaging if there are not clear expectations for when support teams are actually available for customers. Along with notifying customers when support is live, it’s simple set up automations for questions that don’t require a live response. For example, inquires like "Where is my order" can easily be automated to reply with a macro that includes a variable for the tracking link based on the customer’s email address.

If you haven’t set up CX automations we recommend doing so as soon as possible. Automations become more useful as you gain real insights from customers. You’ll need time to make sure these support request flows are optimized and that requires testing on a live site. There’s still enough time to begin gathering those insights and refining your processes over the next month.

Final Thoughts

We’ve been writing a lot about the opportunity in front of mission-driven and thoughtful brands to really make a mark and build brand loyalty this year. The best way for brands to do that is by building trust with the customer; trust in the products and values the brand is selling, and trust in the way they communicate with customers in an almost entirely digital world.

E-commerce activity is already exploding in this elongated holiday season shopping bonanza, and the fastest way to gain or lose a customer during those crucial months will be determined by customer communication. Being prepared is crucial, and if you’re late to thinking about your CX strategy for the holiday season, focus on setting up automations for the biggest customer pain points and finding moments of impact to convey your brand’s message.

Earlier in 2020, IBM and the NRF reported on the rise of an emerging customer profile: the so-called “always-on” consumer. The study, which included close to 20,000 consumers spread across 29 countries, revealed that 71% are willing to pay a premium price to buy from brands that practice transparency. That transparency starts with a solid strategy for communicating with customers and being authentic with your brand’s values, and ends with high lifetime value clients while flexing your mission-driven muscle in an impactful way.

We all could use some good news this year. Let’s use thoughtful consumption as a vehicle for positive change in 2020 and beyond.