Companies should make it their priority to deliver on customer expectations by successfully managing customer engagement. Learn more!
Over the past years, many companies have implemented new e-commerce solutions in order to cover the needs of their business. A common oversight though is paying more attention to the individual features and functions of the e-commerce application instead of focusing on the customer experience. To this end, while many ecommerce application providers successfully meet the B2C or B2B requirements for e-commerce operations, they fail to understand the customers’ needs and expectations. This is because consumer satisfaction can only be attained when all channels are connected and multiple touchpoints work together; ergo, consistency across departments with regard to brand engagement is required. For offering to the customer an exceptional sales journey, customer data and connections across functional endpoints should be built in. Hence, for example, marketing and commerce applications must be kept simple and able to respond to the respective updates and changes instead of the customers and business application users having to deal with potential issues with system integration.
First and foremost, the customer should trust the retailer: This means that data protection and security information must be ensured as well as customer privacy and transparency. Companies need to make sure that there are no “choke points” in network security and all communication channels, such as ecommerce and marketing, are secure and effective. This is one of the keys for obtaining great customer engagement. Moreover, it cannot be stressed how important the right e-commerce analytics are. Having the right people in front of the right products provides a great advantage. Businesses, therefore, need to have platforms that provide real time, or near real time, data integration software. Thus and so, customer service is improved while keeping a central record of customer details prevents the occurrence of potential errors and saves time.
Research findings reveal that more than half customers anticipate a connected service while almost every customer finds a consistent interaction across departments to be of vital importance. However, this is rarely the case since most businesses use various different applications. For this reason, when customers shop across various different channels, it is only natural that problems and complications will arise since different representatives often provide different information, a fact that customers are often unaware of. As customer feedback has indicated, this leads to a problematic or even frustrating experience of having the impression that you communicate with separate entities instead of having to deal with only one company. Such omnichannel strategy therefore is not straightforward and often fails to meet the customer’s expectations in order to be content and re-use the same retailer. What can be implemented to ease the customer is a platform that is connected across channels with effective customer engagement technologies.
Companies should make it their priority to deliver on customer expectations by successfully managing customer engagement, making their e-commerce process simple, intuitive, and enriched with new and smart technologies. During a company’s growth, it is important to focus on enhancing customer experience and, at the same time, save costs on integration solutions. For offering a personalized shopper journey, AI (Artificial Intelligence) can be used, which will provide the customer with targeted product recommendations and guidance to other content pages based on their preferences. At the same time, for a growing company to maintain its success, it requires the right learning tools, not only for the e-commerce process but also for the entire customer engagement ecosystem. Even the process of hiring and training new people comes with more demands and, indirectly, impacts customer service. The organization, therefore, should invest on an application partner that has the right tools and abilities to educate employees so that they can respond to the company’s rising needs and demands. Furthermore, the application partner should have the expertise to investigate the vendor’s R&D (Research and Development) spending, the quantity (total engineers or percentage of spend), and the investments themselves.
Another factor to consider is that each company needs to be aware of how the commerce platform works together with the existing systems for choosing the right application platform. To this end, user reviews are important for knowing how users interact with the system in terms of marketing, merchandising, and service. In this way, as the commerce industry and technology evolve so do the corresponding processes of the retail and its application partner. R&D also holds a major role in a business’ future for ensuring that the company is as competitive, technologically advanced, and customer friendly as possible. Notably, one of the most effective ways for unlocking revenues in e-commerce is agility. When a platform utilizes common tools for customer touchpoints, operations run smoothly, and a great product service is guaranteed. As a result, expensive and time-consuming processes are eliminated and changes are implemented easily, accelerating e-commerce growth.
It is every business’ responsibility to implement the right solutions for elevating the shopping process, keeping every customer pleased and eager to return and re-use the same service. A connected customer platform facilitates all steps entailed in a consumer’s journey, providing holistic experience across all channels and touchpoints.
If you want to offer to your existing and potential customers the most compelling shopping experience with a connected customer platform, visit NetU’s website and contact our experts for more information about Salesforce’s products and services.