Marketing
November 17, 2021
•
5
min read
Despite an economic downturn in the first half of 2020, major e-commerce players such as Amazon and Shopify are still able to reach record-breaking sales in Q2 2020. Amazon’s net sales increased 40% to $88.9 billion, compared to $63.4 billion in Q2 2019; and their operating income nearly doubled to $5.8 billion.
Shopify is also gaining ground as new online stores created via their platform grew 71% in Q2 2020 compared to the first quarter of the year. Their 90-day free trial campaign in April and May attracted a lot of newcomers to the platform. Big brand names like Heinz and Lindt were able to launch their e-commerce stores on Shopify in just a few days during the pandemic, enabling e-commerce functionality to many businesses that hadn’t shifted their online sales in-house yet. Shopify’s aggressive strategy clearly paid off, with their Q2 2020 GMV growing 119% compared to Q2 2019.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked the shift of consumer behavior to online purchasing, leading to rapid growth in the e-commerce market. With many cities still imposing strict social distancing policy, businesses that lean on e-commerce are doing significantly better than brick and mortar retailers.
Fashion retailer Zara plans to close over a thousand stores worldwide to focus on e-commerce.
Many leading brands and retailers are hopping on the e-commerce hype-train, believing it to be the key to overcome COVID-19 and the imminent economic recession, but simply pushing an existing business model online may not be sufficient. Today’s online market is made up of demanding customers who want not just the best value, but the best customer experience as well. In fact, 73% of consumers point to customer experience as a top factor in their purchasing decisions. Online shops may lack immediacy and real-world presence, but they can make up for it with convenience and better customer experience across online touchpoints.
Read more: Your complete guide to being an omnichannel business
Optimise Your Online Touchpoints with CINNOX
Google reported that the number of online consumer touchpoints in a customer journey may range between 20 to 500, depending on industry, product or service.
Maintaining a seamless customer experience across multiple touchpoints is no easy task. Agents using a more conventional customer service setup may have a hard time following their nimble customers on a multitude of touchpoints, and juggling several customer engagement tools often leads to long and unproductive enquiry sessions or inconsistent service quality. If you want to improve customer experience across every online touchpoint, you need an all-in-one digital solution that offers the versatility and functionality to tackle the fast-moving and volatile global online market. CINNOX as a customer engagement and team collaboration platform is designed specifically to help businesses provide a seamless customer experience across every online touchpoint.
In the following sections, we will focus on e-commerce platforms, website, Social Media, phone calls and SMS, and explore how CINNOX can help you enhance customer experience across these customer touchpoints.
Provide Better Customer Service on Your Online Shop
82% of consumers look for an immediate response from brands on marketing or sales questions.
For any e-commerce business, technology is always the key to transform customer experience. CINNOXis a readily available all-in-one platform that can bring live chat, video call and call features to your online shop in the form of a web widget.
You can also set Smart Routing rules to intelligently connect customers to the best agent based on time, traffic, geography, and historical customer interactions. With the CINNOX widget enabled, visitors can reach your agents and get instant customer support whenever they need it.
The CINNOX widget supports integration with major e-commerce platforms, including Shopify and BigCommerce. You can easily add the widget to your shop page through the use of a custom code. For more details, please refer to our Integration Guides below.
Shopify Integration Guide
BigCommerce Integration Guide
Enable Instant Response on Your Website
0.05 seconds, that is all it takes for people to form an opinion about your website.
If your company has a strong online presence, your website is likely to be the most important gateway for your business. Most of your existing and potential customers will most likely browse through your website some point in their customer journey, and lacking instant customer support on your website can be a fatal flaw. Instead of leaving your contact info on a contact page, a web widget allows visitors to contact your agents in just a few clicks.
You can easily impress visitors with a professional and on-brand communication web widget. The CINNOX web widget is fully customisable and brings the full communication package, including live chat, voice call, video call, dynamic directories and Smart Routing to your website. Agents can easily manage enquiries from website visitors, seamlessly transition between live chat and call sessions, and convert more leads into sales effectively.
The CINNOX Widget can be easily installed on any web page. It comes with plugins for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal for fast and easy integration. It also supports other popular website builders such as Wix and Squarespace.
Engage Facebook Customers with Messenger Integration
Facebook has over 2.7 billion monthly active users, and you can easily expand your customer reach with Facebook Messenger integration.
Social media like Facebook is still very relevant today. Many brands rely heavily on Facebook to connect with their customers, and they have to deal with an overwhelming number of enquiries on their social media accounts. The problem with Facebook Messenger is that it lacks proper CRM functions, and many customers get frustrated when they have to repeat their questions to multiple customer service agents.
90% of people have used social media in some way to communicate directly with a brand
If you run an online business with a strong presence on Facebook, you will need an omnichannel communication platform to manage your Facebook conversations. With CINNOX, you can easily engage returning and potential customers from Facebook. Agents can send and receive messages without leaving the CINNOX dashboard. All customer information is conveniently and securely stored on the platform for easy access by all agents, ensuring a seamless and consistent customer experience for every Facebook visitor.
Read more: WhatsApp Business for e-commerce
Add Full Telco Functions to Any Device
Technology development in recent years has opened up many new communication channels, but telco channels are still a major player in the business world. If you going for an omnichannel marketing approach, phone calls and SMS features are still essential for your business. Many communication solutions such as WhatsApp and Zoom try to replicate phone call functions on a digital platform, but they all suffer from different levels of call quality, usability and stability issues. Professional customer service cannot rely on low quality and unsecure digital apps, so you need an all-in-one communication platform that can provide genuine telco features and top-tier call quality.
CINNOX is one of the very few solutions that can bring the full range of real telco features to your customer engagement setup. It supports International Toll-free, Local DID (direct inward dialing) and UIFN (Universal Toll Free) numbers, and even your own phone number after verification. The carrier-grade service comes with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.95% through a privately distributed network, so agents can communicate clearly and efficiently with customers through low latency and crystal-clear voice quality.
CINNOX also supports SMS messaging and bulk SMS. You can easily design your SMS campaigns and import your own contact lists. The Campaign Manager system also helps you estimate the cost of each campaign and will ask management staff for approval before launch. No more complicated SMS platform and convoluted price plan!
If you've read this far, you're probably already working hard to make your customers happy! When you pair your efforts with a total experience platform like CINNOX together with the tips we shared above, they should help you onboard new customers, retain existing customers, and keep everyone coming back for more.
