Retailers Are Testing Facebook-Style Shopper Profiles to Battle Amazon
Retailers Are Testing Facebook-Style Shopper Profiles to Battle Amazon
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(Bloomberg) --
Jessica Ferro recently ordered $200 worth of makeup from Sephora’s online
app—and then waited a month for it to arrive. Despite conversations
with multiple customer-service agents, the shipment had gone to
her old address in Joliet, Illinois. She didn’t yell or document her
experience on Yelp or Twitter. Ferro, 34, did what came naturally:
She took her business elsewhere—to Wander Beauty, an online makeup seller that
has put a premium on customer service by enlisting chatbots she can
talk with whenever and wherever she wants.
“You have to make
customers as happy as you can because there are so many options out there,”
Ferro says. “What’s going to stop them from going somewhere else?”
During the recent
five-day shopping frenzy that runs every year from Thanksgiving through Black
Friday and Cyber Monday, so-called bounce rates, when a shopper abandons a web
store—sometimes even after loading up their cart with goodies—increased each
day, according to Monetate, which monitors commerce on desktops and mobile
devices. All those bouncers offset some of the gains retailers made in
attracting more consumers to their websites. On Thanksgiving, a big mobile
shopping day, bounce rates increased 12 percent compared with 2017, according
to Monetate.
Consumers are fickle
creatures and abandon brands for any number of reasons,
from late deliveries to damaged merchandise. Aware that one bad
experience can turn a shopper against them forever, retailers are spending
hundreds of millions of dollars to improve service and keep customers
loyal.
Some are testing new
“Customer 360” software from Salesforce.com Inc. and upstart rival Freshworks
Inc. that lets them build a Facebook-style profile of each shopper, the better
to understand what they want and how to keep them happy and clicking
“pay.” Chatbots are increasingly ubiquitous 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 with
the expertise once available only at top brick-and-mortar establishments.
“Retailers have
realized consumers hyper-adopt and hyper-abandon 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
Inc. looms over the industry. The world’s largest online retailer may be
taking its lumps these days for its hiring or headquarters-hunting
practices, but Amazon customers by and large stay loyal thanks to the
company’s Prime subscription, free shipping and peerless customer
service. Sure there are complaints about the occasional delayed shipment
or unscrupulous third-party merchant, but the Seattle leviathan remains the
industry benchmark.
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 dashboard data from the traditionally siloed marketing, help-desk and
sales departments, making it possible to build a Facebook-style profile of each
shopper. Patrick Stokes, the senior vice president leading
Salesforce’s Customer 360 project, says the new software will help
retailers provide customer 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 surname, dig through your email to find your order number or try to recall
the last purchase you made—it will all be at the agent’s fingertips.
“Every customer hates
it when they have to repeat themselves,” says Freshworks Chief Executive
Officer Girish Mathrubootham. He started Freshworks after spending months
tangling with a shipping company when his 40-inch Samsung television was
smashed on route to Chennai, India, when he moved back there from Austin,
Texas. Freshworks software can help retailers suggest new items and offer
discounts on products, based on a customer’s previous shopping behavior. The
company says it has more than 150,000 global clients, including Hugo Boss,
Bridgestone and HP.
Stokes says retailers
testing Salesforce’s version of the technology report falling call-center
wait times and improved customer-service ratings. Crocs Inc. is
impressed so far, says e-commerce chief Harvey Bierman. The goal, he says,
is to make sure help desk agents “know as much about the customer as the
customer knows about themselves.”
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.”
Wheeler says project
experts undergo six weeks of training and 100 hours of online tutorials
before picking up their headsets. Paid on commission and expected to hit
monthly sales targets, they manage an entire purchase, offering
advice and researching any questions a customer might have about a
specific appliance, faucet or light fixture.
Cameron
Ellingsen, a project expert for four years, says he has considerable
autonomy but avoids the hard sell and focuses on helping customers find what
they want. “I’m here to walk them through their entire project,” he
says.
One of the cheapest
ways retailers can improve online service is to enlist chatbots, often via
Facebook, Instagram or Slack. These digital helpmates have steadily
improved in the last few years thanks to machine learning algorithms that have
become better at carrying on human-like conversations and even anticipating
customers’ needs.
When a
shopper opens the Wander Beauty website, a chatbot will automatically ask
for the person’s skin tone. If they open the message, the conversation
will continue in Facebook Messenger until it gets too technical—a request for a
moisturizer with high SPF levels, say, or makeup that won’t exacerbate a skin
condition—and a human customer service agent will take it from there, suggesting
specific products and how they work together.
Some people find
chatbots creepy and their hovering presence invasive. But many shoppers
have become used to them much the way most of us would rather use an ATM than
deal with a human teller.
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.
A quick scan of Yelp
or Twitter makes it clear retailers still have a long way to go before they
perfect customer service online, but Forrester analyst Witcher is
convinced “a new era is upon us.”
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.
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