ecommerce ai
3 ways to enhance customer engagement in eCommerce
Does it ever feel like you don’t know who your customers are anymore? They were in your store one minute and the next they are flirting with your competitor! How do you retain the loyalty and attention of your core clients? You spent hours on the perfect descriptions and photos of your products but your customers aren’t engaging. We share some tips below to rocket power your CX and engagement.
We share your views
Whatever size your company, the tools to power your engagement are becoming ever more serious and useful. It is important but not sufficient to fire up Google Analytics and download a report on engagement. You need to be proactive in communicating to your clients. Chatbots are a huge rage now, but chatbots are not, strictly speaking, new.
We have had the concept around in an analogue form as an FAQ page since forever. Where the analytics begin to become important is when the chatbot provider can give you actionable insight. It is not enough to answer a question, you must ensure your chatbot provider can give you insight into the frequency of certain questions, sentiment analysis of the tone of the queries and satisfaction numbers.
Chatbots are not for the customers, they are for you, the merchant. Delvify is careful in its use of NLP to engage with the clients to determine what their business goals are and make tools for businesses, not business for tools.
Corporate values must not be isolated either, if you have good corporate values you should highlight them so customers want to be associated with your brand and not the other way around. Having the same values as your target audience will help build trust and credibility with them and the resonance between you and them will transform your loyal customer base to become your brand advocates.
Dip into Technology
Lina Weichbrodt, a former senior engineer at Zalando cautions us to be really careful when we are monitoring machine learning services used onsite. The normal problems such as latency, errors, traffic and saturation apply but also, if the model served is under or over fitted to your data (don’t look for perfection), even if it’s just the interaction between services.
The best way is to deliver clear definitions to your suppliers. For example, she suggested saying “for personalized recommendations on a Home Page, we expect 65% of responses to have at least four personalized articles in under 200ms.” She also cautions not to monitor user actions as the data is noisy and sparse and a pain to manage. Instead, use heuristics for what you want: real time collection, simple and easy to understand, actionable alerts, comparable across domains or models.
You need this
As we mentioned Chatbots above, the same holds true for Visual AI. If you have a recommendation tool on your site, is the tool simply throwing up random stock at your visitors? Or are you delivering a personalized experience? The more personalized it is, the easier it is for consumers to navigate through your site and find what they are looking for.
Delvify is careful to curate its Visual Recommendations so that you can boost your best (or least) selling items and personalize the experience for those that must have the trends and those that want a good bargain (or both). The CX must not be static, and you should ask your suppliers if the technology is dynamic and engaging. The chance to engage your customer can be delivered by a robot, but the human has to choose what to deliver. You know your customer base the best, curate all the insights you are able to get from them on social media platforms and data to assemble the best recommendation tool for your platform.
Be socially sensitive
If you remember three years ago, Pepsi goofed by creating a commercial that paired a reality star, Kendall Jenner, with what they thought was a cultural moment – the BLM protests. It is important that you stick to your own values and don’t try to adopt someone else’s. The falsity will show through!
Wendy’s took a different approach and used its Twitter account for some light-hearted humor. When the stakes are high (like the BLM protests), tread carefully and show sensitivity. When the stakes are low (your next hamburger), go all in. By creating a unique persona through social media, you can stand out from your competitors and capture the attention of your audience.
Social media platforms have taken customer engagement to the next level where consumers are able to interact directly with brands and vice versa. Being able to build up a brand personality via these platforms have enabled brands to close the distance between themselves and their target audience. A GlobalWebIndex survey conducted in September 2019 found that 20% of millennials and 22% of Gen Z consumers in the U.S. and U.K. have bought items based on an influencer or celebrity recommendation on a social media channel. Thanks to TikTok, beauty product sales on Amazon almost doubled in April 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, according to Glossy.
It is not just TikTok that have had major success in 2020, Instagram business accounts have seen an average 1.46% monthly followers growth and Twitter shows that 67% of all B2B businesses are using Twitter.
As you can see, just providing good CX throughout the purchase journey isn’t the end of the process. In order to keep your customers coming back to you, you must develop a brand personality and let it shine out from your competitors. But remember, be culturally sensitive and appropriate!
Get in touch with our team today if you would like to find out more to see how we can help improve both your CX and CE!
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