Unlocking Global Growth: Top E-commerce Trends and Tools for Serving Customers Worldwide

Get ready to expand your business beyond borders! With online purchases projected to make up 24% of all retail sales by 2026, e-commerce businesses are in a prime position for global growth. In fact, 57% of online shoppers already shop internationally. If you hope to scale, this is your opportunity to unlock the door to global sales, regardless of your business size.

Tapping the potential of the global market requires more than just a website and products to sell. To succeed, you need the right e-commerce tools that align with the latest trends and meet your business requirements. From cutting-edge technology to intuitive user interfaces, the right tools can be the difference between global domination and missed opportunities.

Here we provide data-driven insights and a global perspective to help you make smart and informed decisions to serve your customers and bring success in a global economy. Let us first understand the current and future trends and forecasts in the e-commerce industry to make smart investments in tools that align with the current market, while also anticipating future needs. 

TREND 1: The Power of Personalised AI for Global Customer Satisfaction

AI is revolutionising eCommerce by allowing businesses to adapt to consumer behaviour and provide personalised shopping experiences. A survey found that 80% of consumers are more likely to return to a business that offers personalised shopping. By 2030, the global personalisation software market is projected to reach over $5 billion. Starbucks is a great example of a business that uses AI and customer behaviour data in their app, like preferences, activity, past purchases, and location, to offer over 400,000 hyper-personalised suggestions, resulting in 60% of their cold beverage orders being customised. The global AI market is projected to reach $407 billion by 2027, and 91.5% of leading brands and companies are already investing in AI. 

What You Can Do:

• Hyper-Personalisation

Leverage AI, machine learning and predictive analytics to personalise the shopping experience based on purchase history, preferences, and behaviour data for individual customers in order to anticipate their needs and even analyse sentiment to gauge customer satisfaction. You can also aim to provide proactive customer support which was identified as a top customer service trend by Forrester Research. For your business, this helps in predictive insights such as forecasting demand for particular products or predicting future purchasing behaviour.

• Chatbots

Use AI-powered intelligent chatbots to handle repetitive customer inquiries, provide self-support options, and process orders thereby empowering your agents to concentrate on priorities.

• Fraud detection

Detect and prevent fraudulent activities, such as credit card fraud, by analysing customer behaviour, data, and transaction patterns.

Tools You Need:

A total experience, unified communications platform like CINNOX can help you converge all customer touchpoints to intelligently automate business processes, integrate smart chatbots that seamlessly switch between automated chats to live agents using chat, voice, video, and file or screen sharing, and provide hyper-personalised customer service. Customer sentiment analysis capabilities additionally build trust and loyalty with your customers, retain them, create advocates, and reduce contact escalations. By allowing the tracking of a customer's real-time IP address to detect anomalies and mitigate risks, or performing identity verification through OTPs when doubts arise, CINNOX helps in fraud detection. With the Data Retention feature, you can have peace of mind knowing that your data is being backed up regularly and stored securely.

Go for tools with these capabilities that give you a competitive edge in the global e-commerce market.

TREND 2: Social Commerce is Revolutionising E-commerce

With social media commerce expected to reach $2.9 trillion by 2026, it's clear that social commerce is the next big thing to master. In fact, this year it's projected to account for 20% of global retail e-commerce sales. Don't miss out on this trend, your business needs to jump in! We can't stress this enough, 2023 trends research data reveals that with nearly 100 million people in the US alone shopping on social media, a high rate of 50% of consumers being social commerce shoppers in China, and the millennials being the biggest social commerce shoppers, it's worth exploring as a global e-commerce business strategy. 

If you want to expand, having a strong brand presence on major social media platforms can help reach a wider audience globally and boost sales. 

What You Can Do:

You can look for tools that enable you to integrate your online stores with major social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, and WeChat. This could include tools for social media advertising, creating shoppable posts, managing orders and inventory across different channels, and tools unifying customer interaction across various channels into one space for your customer service agents. You can also leverage AI-powered chatbots and personalised product recommendations to enhance the social commerce shopping experience for your global customers. 

Tools You Need:

This is where tools like CINNOX come in handy, as they help unify customer touchpoints across social media, digital, and telephone channels (like - live chat, direct calls, web calls, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and SMS, as well as emails) into one chat space for your customer service agents. This unified approach enables complete visibility into your customer's journey in one place, empowering your agents to understand them better, solve problems quickly, and influence purchase decisions.  Additionally, conversational commerce capabilities enable you to engage with their customers in real time through messaging platforms, answering questions, resolving issues, and providing product recommendations that increase sales and customer satisfaction. By streamlining the shopping experience and enabling seamless communication between businesses and customers, CINNOX can help businesses unlock the full potential of social commerce and drive growth in the digital age leading to a better customer experience and satisfaction, helping your business to stay competitive in the social commerce space.

TREND 3: Omnichannel Capabilities

According to McKinsey, customers (nearly 75%) use multiple channels- about ten channels, before making a purchase. This means They interact with your brand on social media, browse your website, and compare competitor products before finally hitting that "buy" button. To keep up with their expectations, e-commerce businesses need to offer seamless experiences across all channels.

Some of the current top customer service channels are the following:

• Telecom channels (PSTN, SMS)
• Websites and mobile (widget communication such as web chat, web call, video call)
• Social channels (FB Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE)
• Emails
• SDK

The more channels a business has, the more market shares it gains. 

However, understand that it is not just about being present on multiple channels. It is about unifying the customer's experiences and data, breaking the multiple silos, for quicker problem resolution and a better total experience.

What You Can Do:

Be ready with seamless omnichannel experiences, reduce the friction for your customers (and employees) when they choose different modes of communication to interact with your brand and break down data silos for cross-functional collaboration. 

Tools You Need: 

Omnichannel Vs Multichannel: Most businesses today are multichannel using different platforms for sales, but true omnichannel is not just being multichannel. It should be as simple as unifying the customer's touchpoints across social media, digital, and telephone channels under one roof. Imagine your agent having a single unified chatroom for a customer coming from email, calls, VOIP, social chats, web inquiries, and calls!

TREND 4: Mobile Commerce 

Did you know that 74% of retail traffic and 63% of online shopping orders come from mobile devices? This trend is only expected to grow, with global retail m-commerce sales projected to make up 69.9% of total e-commerce sales by 2024.

What You Can Do and Tools You Need:

To handle the trend of mobile commerce for global customers, bring in the mobile-first mentality instead of just optimising your website for mobile. Provide easy mobile payment options like Apple Pay and UPI. Aim for quick and easy connection with customers through QR codes or weblinks on your marketing assets that take customers right to your best agents' chatroom. Offer seamless device-switching options for customer support interactions. 

Check out the following usage scenario of Instant QR code scanning to reach customer support:

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TREND 5: Customer Service, the Make-or-Break for E-commerce Success in 2023

Customer service is the beating heart of any successful e-commerce brand, especially when serving a global customer base. In fact, 87% of consumers say they would spend less or leave a brand altogether if they experience poor customer service. To win and retain customers, it's crucial to provide seamless and uninterrupted support around the clock.

What You Can Do and Tools You Need:

Empower your Agents to Serve Global customers better!

• Make customer support easily accessible with QR codes and weblinks placed on your products or marketing materials.
• Manage all voice and digital customer interactions within a single, unified interface regardless of customer location. Access critical information and real-time customer context at every step, empowering agents to anticipate customer needs and take the next best actions. This ensures the best customer experience, every time.
• Implement robust self-service options with intelligent automation, such as chatbots, to address frequently asked questions and free up agents' time to spend with customers who need them the most.
• Collect context information like customer's engagement journey on your website, previous chat history, and preferences to offer tailored solutions.
• Use smart routing and sticky routing features to match customers with the right agent and bind with the same agent who served them before, nurturing relationships and making customers feel valued. Yes, you heard it right, did you notice this ‘smart enquiry web widget with multimedia-sharing capacity’ on our website?
• Utilise AI-powered transcription to quickly search and digest recordings instead of putting customers on hold. This allows agents to spend more time with customers and deliver personalised experiences based on sentiment analysis.
• Assist agents in finding information quickly with ‘labelled queries’ and ‘structured data’. Labelling queries help other agents filter them by keywords, reducing manual searching time. Structured data can help uncover the root cause of issues.
• Encourage collaboration among agents and teams by removing data silos and centralising data, enabling confident decision-making and knowledge-sharing.
• Real-time dashboard allows you to keep track of customer and agent interactions at a glance, ensuring customer interaction data is in sync with customer identity, behavioural data, and transaction/purchase data from a centralised data pool. This empowers businesses to make informed decision making and handle inquiries quickly.
• Identify top-performing agents and share their success stories to inspire and motivate your team.

In Nutshell

Choosing the right e-commerce tools may, to some extent, depend on the features that suit your business style, budget, needs and target audience. But, irrespective of those, businesses should invest in tools with critically essential features that align with the trends in the industry to stay competitive and offer top-notch customer support, without breaking the bank. At the end of the day, the right tools can help you increase revenue, expand your customer base, and take your business to the next level. So don't miss out on the opportunity to serve your global customers better - talk to us today to find out how we can help you find the right tools for your business and surpass your competition.

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