BEATING THE BOUNCE
If there’s one thing online retailers hate, it’s customers who “bounce”.
That’s the term for what happens when an internet shopper abandons a web store — sometimes even after they have loaded up their virtual shopping cart.
Consumers are fickle creatures and abandon brands for any number of reasons. Aware that one bad experience can turn a shopper against them forever, US retailers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve service and keep customers loyal.
Some are testing new “Customer 360” software that lets them build a Facebook-style profile of each shopper, to understand what they want and how to keep them happy and clicking on “pay”. Chatbots are increasingly common and getting better at holding a meaningful conversation with customers. And behind the scenes, retailers are training customer-support people to act more like traditional salespeople.
“Retailers have realised consumers hyper-adopt and hyperabandon brands like never before,” says Brendan Witcher, a Forrester analyst who researches e-commerce and technology trends. “The products don’t really matter anymore. What does matter is the experience — and service is a key part of that.”
As always, Amazon.com looms over the industry. By and large, Amazon customers stay loyal, thanks to its Prime subscription, free shipping and peerless customer service.
Some retailers are pinning their hopes on Customer 360 software, so named because it’s designed to give them a 360-degree view of shoppers. The idea is to bring together on one screen data from the traditionally separate marketing, help-desk and sales departments, making it possible to build a Facebook-style profile of each shopper.
Patrick Stokes, who leads Salesforce’s Customer 360 project, says the software will help retailers provide service that feels “a lot more like an Amazon experience”.
Once your cellphone number pops up on a service agent’s screen, they’ll have an immediate history of your relationship with the brand: every purchase you’ve made, every product you’ve returned, every advertisement you’ve clicked on and every item you’ve tossed out of your basket before checkout. You will no longer have to spell out your name, find your order number or try to remember the last purchase you made — it will all be at the agent’s fingertips.
Shoppers are increasingly comfortable buying big-ticket items online, from dining sets to kitchen appliances. The last thing a retailer wants is for someone to bounce after putting thousands of dollars worth of purchases in their cart.
Build.com, a home improvement web store based in Chico, California, has built a 300-person team of project experts who help customers navigate the bewildering array of brands and products listed on the site.
“In the last two to three years, customers have started to buy more complex, larger sized orders online,” says president Russ Wheeler. “They are doing entire kitchen remodels online.”
One of the cheapest ways retailers can improve online service is to enlist chatbots. These digital helpmates have steadily improved in the past few years thanks to machine learning algorithms that have become better at carrying on humanlike conversations and even at anticipating customers’ needs.
Some people find chatbots creepy, but many shoppers have become used to them.
Chat-based marketing via Facebook lets retailers communicate with customers in the channels they inhabit 24/7, says Caroline Klatt, who runs Headliner Labs, a startup offering this service to Wander Beauty and other retailers. “This is going to expand the help desk from only waiting for inbound customer complaints to enabling them to do more than that,” she says.
—