How to Elevate Your E-Commerce with Web Chat Software

Posted on February 23, 2022August 16, 2022 Lauren Winder

There are a lot of moving parts to your e-commerce strategy. Is web chat software one of them?

When customers visit your company’s e-commerce website, what happens? Your company has likely spent many hours thinking about the customer experience. No matter how good your UX designers and copywriters are, your site doesn’t replicate the one-to-one service you get from an in-person experience.

But web chat gets you pretty close.

Plus, customers love it. Customer satisfaction when interacting with agents over web chat is 73%, which is higher than both email and phone.

Dive into web chat software and explore how to integrate it into your e-commerce strategy.

How does web chat software work?

Web chat software, like Quiq, uses a widget to enable chat directly on your website. On the front end, customers see a chat icon they can click to reveal a chatbox to instantly connect with your customer service team. There, they can have a conversation with a live agent to get quick answers to their questions.

Alternatively, you can have chatbots automatically welcome guests to your website, ask if they have any questions, and or provide suggestions when customers have stalled.

What you see behind the scenes and on the backend will vary greatly depending on which platform you choose. Quiq’s robust features include visitor tracking, chat history, chat routing to live agents, sentiment analysis, chat continuation, and much more.

The benefits of web chat software.

Even though we’ve all gotten used to the online shopping experience, there’s still something missing: the human element. Web chat software can help your business connect with customers again, much like they do when they step into a brick-and-mortar store.

A human touch brings many benefits to the online shopping experience. Customers are more likely to make an emotional connection when they interact with a person over your website experience. Your live agent can help with sizing, suggest complementary products, and offer personalized advice that won’t make it into your web copy.

Plus, customers expect businesses to engage them in some way, even when they’re just browsing a website. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customers Report, 59% of consumers expect a company to engage them proactively.

There are also a lot of business benefits on the backend to help your customer support agents and ultimately your bottom line.

With web chat, you can:

Connect with customers on their preferred channel
Build customer trust and loyalty
Answer customer questions 24/7
Lower call volumes by engaging proactively with customers
Collect relevant information with chat analytics
Increase conversions
Lower your cart abandonment rate
Improve customer satisfaction rates with quick resolutions

How to use web chat for e-commerce.

Your e-commerce strategy is thorough, but without web chat software to incorporate live customer conversations, it’s incomplete. Here are five ways to use web chat to meet your goals, along with tactics to help you get there.

1. Prep your team for live chat.

Don’t just convert your team from emails and phone calls to live chat and expect everything to go smoothly. Live chat is a different beast, so you should prepare your team accordingly.

Here are some tips to help get them ready for live text conversations:

Decide on a conversation style: Voice conversations don’t always translate well to text. Sometimes it takes a little extra to convey a friendly demeanor. Share with your team how you want them to write to customers. Will they use exclamation points? Emojis? Text-shorthand? Decide how you want to sound and then give your team examples to help them translate it to chat conversations.

Provide quick access to answers: Your support agents need to be able to access information quickly to be able to share it with the customer. Ensure they have access to a knowledge base within the web chat software or within easy reach.

Give them the right tools: Find web chat software with robust features. For example, Quiq provides features like sentiment analysis and AI-powered text prediction to get fast answers to your customers’ questions. Also ensure your team is comfortable with the conversational tools you’re implementing before opening them up to customers.

2. Initiate conversations, selectively.

Ever walked into a brick-and-mortar store only to be scared away by an overanxious store clerk? No one wants to be the pushy salesperson. It’s the same when customers land on your website. You want them to know there’s someone available to help should they need it, but you can’t be too eager with your messages that you annoy them.

Either welcome a visitor to your website or jump in to help at a key crossroad. It’s best not to send multiple messages when the site visitor hasn’t engaged (other than to minimize the window).

3. Trigger conversations before customers bounce.

It’s perfectly fine to have a welcome message greeting your customers when they first land on your site, but you can also introduce chat messages at key points in your buyer journey.

If there’s a specific page or point in the shopping experience that always has your site visitors jumping ship, automatically trigger a welcome note or a simple “How can we help?” message.

Here are some tactics to think about employing:

On a product page: If your site visitors are stalling out on a product page, it’s possible there’s a question they need answered. Maybe they’re looking for more product specs, or they aren’t sure how to determine their sizing. Program a chatbot to ask if they have any questions after 20 seconds of page idling. You can have your chatbot answer the easier, more common questions, or connect them to a live agent should any complex queries come up.

Part of your website web chat plan should include chatbots. To see how you enhance your customer service workflows with AI-powered bots, click here.

At checkout: Do customers fill up their shopping cart and then stall at checkout? Send in a discount code through your chatbot to encourage a sale. A well-timed coupon can trigger a decision and give your customers a gentle nudge to purchase.

An FAQ page: When customers find your FAQ or contact page, they generally already have a question that needs answering. Be available for customers to ask more specific questions, or get immediate help.

4. Provide personalized upsell opportunities.

Amazon is notorious for attempting to upsell with its algorithms and not doing a very good job. (You buy one country album and you’ll forever see Willie Nelson memorabilia in your product suggestions.)

Customers crave personalization and help from your live agents. And businesses are far from meeting customer expectations. According to Salesforce, 47% of customers say businesses don’t use their personal information for their benefit. Using web chat software to proactively provide product suggestions to your customers can go a long way.

Personalizing your messages is made easier with a service like Quiq. Your live agents get insights into your website visitors’ behaviors and interests. Here are a few ways you can use these features to provide personalized upsell opportunities:

Track page views: Use their search history to get a better idea of their interests and what they’re looking for. If you find your customer is searching for living room furniture and select an armchair, pull matching coffee table or sofa suggestions.

Pick up where you left off: The buyer journey is peppered with interruptions—especially online. If your customer gets called away and returns later, you have their activity history to help them continue the conversation and pick up where they left off.

Provide specialized insights: Do you have several product categories that require different expertise? Pair specialized customer service agents to certain areas of your site. Chat routing ensures conversations are directed to the right agent or bot. That way, you can provide expert help for your customers depending on where they land on your site—and improve conversions as a result.

5. Collect customer feedback.

Collecting customer feedback at multiple points in the customer journey is crucial for business success. You can use chat in many different ways to ask customers for their candid feedback.

Here are a few of the ways you can introduce surveys to your customers through web chat.

Assess agent interactions: Probably the most natural way to ask for feedback is right after a customer has interacted with a live agent. The customer has already established they’re comfortable using the web chat feature, and it’s a great way to evaluate the web chat/live agent experience.

Collect emails for follow-up surveys: Ask customers who are communicating in the web chats to share their email for follow-up surveys. Then you can follow up with more general surveys, like Net Promoter Score® surveys.

Ask about the web experience: Use your web chat to capture a customer’s attention without being as intrusive as a pop-up. Ask about the web experience, offer a CES survey, or ask about general pain points in the buyer process.

What makes web chat with a conversational AI platform especially useful is your ability to ask survey questions and get responses directly within the chatbox. There’s no need to send your customers elsewhere, which would drastically reduce response rates.

Start more conversations with web chat software.

Adding web chat to your e-commerce strategy is a great way to start building customer relationships. Introduce web chat software to your business and bring the human connection.

Using Business Text Messaging? Here’s Why You Should Be!

Posted on February 17, 2022October 31, 2023 Lauren Winder

Emails get buried, hidden in other tabs, lost in spam folders. Facebook can go unchecked. Voicemails ignored. But there’s one channel your customers are sure to notice: Their text messages.

While many businesses rely on email to communicate with their customers, business text messaging is growing in popularity. According to Zendesk’s 2021 CX Trends report, the number of customers who say they prefer text messaging to resolve customer service issues grew 75% in the last year.

And it’s easy to see why. People are connected to their phones nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While there are plenty of opportunities for other messages to get lost in the shuffle, text messages always hit the mark.

Are you using business text messaging to communicate with your customers? Here are the top 7 reasons why you should be.

1. Text messaging crushes other service platforms.

Sending messages through SMS/text messaging is way more effective than other customer communication methods. It has a nearly 100% read rate, compared to an average of around 20% for emails. And 90% of people open text messages within three minutes of receiving them.

Why are text messages so effective? People use text messaging to communicate with those they love most. Because of this, there’s a higher level of inherent trust that comes with a text. Consumers are also typically more protective of their phone numbers than their emails.

There’s also an element of novelty to business text messaging. Since it hasn’t been overrun with spam and marketing messages, like email, people don’t automatically dismiss them.

2. Customers are easily accessible.

Remember a time when everyone just made phone calls because it was easier? That’s text messaging. There’s no going online, no downloading apps, no searching for your brand on social media. It’s nearly foolproof.

Plus, unlike many other messaging platforms, text messaging doesn’t require an internet connection. As long as your customer has a phone plan, they can receive text messages virtually anywhere in the world. This makes it a more easily accessible option for your customers—no matter where they are.

3. Text message conversations are asynchronous.

Texting is a great medium to have two-way conversations that your customers can respond to in their own time. Even though people tend to read and respond to text messages faster than other mediums, it doesn’t require them to sit and wait for a response.

Unlike phone and live chat, text messaging gives your customers a chance to respond in their own time.

Want to know more about the benefits of asynchronous messaging? See how to use it to deliver an exceptional customer experience in this blog post

This facet also benefits your team. Since text messaging doesn’t require the immediate response that live chat does, agents can handle multiple conversations at once.

4. Texting customers increases agent efficiency.

Business text messaging isn’t just good for your customers. Your customer support agents benefit, too.

Live communication channels like voice and live chat can bog down your agents’ time. They have to give their full attention to whomever they’re speaking with, which could be an easy answer or a long-drawn-out conversation. It’s an efficiency killer.

Since text messaging is asynchronous, agents can handle multiple conversations at once. In the time it would have taken to complete one phone call, a customer service representative can handle 6–8 conversations. That’s increasing their efficiency seven-fold.

5. Simply put: It’s what your customers prefer.

Most of your customers use text messaging to communicate with their favorite people every day. But they also want to chat with businesses, too.

Not only is it tapping into a medium they already know and love, but it’s also more casual than other channels. Younger generations especially prefer having more casual conversations with brands. Email can feel overly formal and phone conversations even more so. Text messaging, however, strikes the right balance.

6. It has multimedia, or “rich”, capabilities.

These days, there’s so much more to text messaging than just text. SMS/text messaging gives you the ability to give customers engaging and unique interactions.

Are they having a hard time implementing your product? Share a how-to video. Are they loving your service and want to connect with other customers? Send a link to your online community. You can even have them send images or videos to explain their needs so you can provide customized product suggestions. The opportunities are endless.

Want to enrich your text messaging but not sure how or where to start? First, learn more about rich messaging here >

7. Your competitors are using it.

We know what your parents would say… “If Johnny jumped off a bridge, would you?”

Snarky responses aside, there are definite drawbacks to being a late-adopter of a messaging medium. While offering text messaging to your customers now is still considered a differentiator, it won’t be that way for long.

Offering text messaging as a customer support option and enabling customers to opt-in to marketing offers now will give your business an advantage—or at least allow you to keep up with your competitors.

How to begin using business text messaging

So how should you use text messaging for your business? Focus your efforts on three main areas: Marketing, customer service, and customer loyalty.

Marketing

More and more businesses are offering discounts with text messaging opt-ins. And they’re extremely effective.

To market your business through text messaging, follow these important tips:

Increase engagement with compelling content: Use all of text messaging’s rich features to spark interest in your audience.
Personalize messages: Cultivate the 1:1 experience your customers crave. Instead of relying on mass messaging, experiment with tags and segmentations—group customers based on interests, past purchases, or even locations.

The right conversational platform can even help you turn texting into a powerful revenue generator. See how you can process secure transactions with Quiq

Customer support

Utilizing two-way texting for customer service is a great way to meet customer needs (for many of the reasons listed above). Your customers want to hear from you via SMS/text.

Leverage these tips for amazing customer service over text messaging:

Be personable: Customers use text messaging because it’s a familiar and conversational platform. Tap into those feelings with personable communications. Have agents introduce themselves, use appropriate texting shorthand, and even throw out an emoji or two.
Convert calls to text: Increase efficiency and customer satisfaction by converting phone calls to text messages. Customers can opt-out of long wait times and get their problems solved faster.
Integrate chatbots: Part of the appeal of texting is that it’s a 24/7 channel. When your customer service agents aren’t available, ensure there’s a friendly chatbot on the other end that can provide helpful answers or respond with a timeframe for connecting with a live agent.

Customer loyalty

Think beyond customer support and go the extra mile to encourage customer loyalty. Use business text messaging to have conversations with your customers about their purchases, send appointment reminders, notify them of upcoming sales or expiring warranties… There are tons of opportunities to engage with your customers to generate loyalty.

Here are a few strategies to keep in mind:

Pick points throughout the customer journey: Sending a coupon is just one step in the process. Reach out to customers at various points throughout their purchase journey. Send them appointment reminders, notify them of re-stocks, ask for feedback, or even offer loyalty perks.
Don’t abuse the privilege: Just like other forms of customer communication, too many marketing messages can have the opposite effect.

Remember: Bad interactions weigh heavier on customers’ minds than ones that go above and beyond.

Tap into business messaging with Quiq

No matter how you choose to use business text messaging, Quiq is here to help.

Message one or millions with Quiq’s messaging platform, whether you’re a package tracking link, sharing the latest sale details, or notifying customers of a service outage. Reach your customers wherever they are on the channel they prefer.

7 Ways Chatbots Help Teams Move Faster

Posted on February 9, 2022February 5, 2024 Lauren Winder

For many years, it seemed like “chatbot” was a bad word.

People likened them to automated voice attendants. Many businesses would put chatbots on their websites without much strategy or thought—using them to effectively act as a search engine.

But that mentality has changed. Technology has caught up with the implementation, and using chatbots as part of your customer service strategy is essential.

In fact, Zendesk reports that high-performing customer service teams are 2.9x more likely to use AI-powered chatbots to help with agent workflow.

Now, you can weave chatbots into every part of your customer service to help your support team work faster.

Keep reading to see how bots streamline workflows and maximize agent efficiency.

1. Answer common questions

Chatbots do not replace human agents. They can, however, alleviate the volume of inquiries by answering simple, repetitive questions.

Questions like:

Where’s my order?
Does this come in other sizes/colors
What’s the return policy?
What are your hours?
How do I reset my password?

This list isn’t comprehensive, as you can customize your chatbot to answer common questions your agents receive.

Don’t underestimate chatbots’ ability to answer customer questions. Daily Harvest, a meal kit delivery service and Quiq client, reduced the demand on their agents’ time with a custom chatbot.

Sage, their digital care guide, now assists with common inquiries and contains 60% of conversations.

This means only 40% of conversations were elevated to a live agent—a far cry from what they managed before Sage came along.

See how Daily Harvest and Quiq worked together to get such excellent results >

2. Collect information upfront

How much time do agents spend collecting and entering customer information? Customers message your support team and are peppered with twenty questions before they can even get to the reason for their call.

Instead, use a chatbot as your welcome wagon.

They can help customers instantly and succinctly gather all the information needed to serve them. Just like your agents would, the chatbot can enter it into your conversational platform so that the data is readily available should they need to be transferred to a live agent.

Now that agents don’t have to collect information, they can jump right in to answer questions and solve problems.

3. Improve response times

Whether acting as a welcome wagon or answering questions, chatbots are faster. They have access to all the same databases that your agents do, and they can predict what customers will say as they’re typing.

This means they’re already gathering information for possible responses before the customer even sends the message.

And response times matter to customers.

Over 60% say the most important aspect of good customer service is getting their issues resolved quickly, according to Zendesk.

4. Chatbots are available 24/7

Your customer service team needs to sleep! But chatbots… Well, they don’t.

They can work through the night and deliver the 24/7 on-demand customer service that your customers crave.

Not only does this please your customers, but it also reduces the backlog your employees walk into every morning.

If your friendly bot answered the easy questions throughout the night, there would be fewer customer inquiries come morning.

5. Troubleshoot problems

Did you ever wait on hold for tech support only to be told to turn your computer off and on again? How frustrated did that make you?

Chatbots help keep that from happening to your customers.

Chatbots can walk customers through troubleshooting the moment they reach out without making them wait for a live agent.

If it’s a simple solution, the customers can solve the problem without ever elevating the ticket to a live agent. Customers get a quick resolution, and your team can spend time on more complex issues.

When customers do reach your support staff, they’ve already attempted the quick fixes, saving your team members from having to walk them through simple solutions.

Customers already know they have a significant problem, and agents can get right to work identifying and solving the issue.

6. Customer routing

According to Zendesk’s CX Trends report, 52% of company leaders plan on boosting agents’ flexibility to solve specialized problems in the next year. It will empower agents to dive deeper into customer issues and become better problem solvers.

However, certain agents specializing in specific problems will increase the need for customer routing.

Instead of making a customer wait for a live agent, then figuring out it needs to go to a specialist in another department, a chatbot can handle that in the initial conversation.

Customers don’t have to wait multiple times to reach the right person, and agents don’t spend time routing the tickets themselves.

By the way, this works especially well for companies with a central customer service team and many departments. Handing this task off to chatbots will take one more thing off the shoulders of your agents.

7. Improve agent morale

Morale is a tough subject in customer service. Helping customers (who may be less than courteous) with their problems can take its toll on your team.

Only 15% of agents are extremely satisfied with their workload, reports Zendesk.

One thing chatbots can do is alleviate the monotony.

Answering the same handful of questions all day is bound to dampen spirits and slow down your team. Handling these types of inquiries with a chatbot before they ever get to a live agent will lighten the load.

Yes, questions may be more challenging, but your team will feel like they’re making a difference—instead of answering “Where’s my package” 15 times a day.

Find out what Quiq chatbots can do for your customer service team >

Bonus: 2 more ways chatbots can help outside customer service

Speeding up customer service is a great way to use bots, but there are other opportunities to work it into your company’s workflow.

1. Qualify leads

Chatbots can even assist other teams beyond customer service. Whether people reach out through your same customer service channels or connect through a different channel with your sales team, chatbots can make a difference.

Let’s face it. Not everyone who inquires about your product or service is the right match for your company.

And while the sales team is well-equipped to identify qualified leads, it takes time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

Chatbots can assist your sales and marketing efforts by qualifying leads before sending them to your sales team or CRM. That way, your team isn’t spinning their wheels talking to leads that aren’t going to end up in a sale.

2. Process payments

With e-commerce sales booming, businesses have been asking customer service teams to spend more time assisting customers before the sale—and even completing the purchase within your messaging platform.

Instead of sending customers back to their carts (which increases the likelihood of abandonment), bring in a chatbot to complete the sale.

Customers get an easy way to make a purchase and your agents can move on to the next ticket.

Welcome a chatbot to your team

Chatbots don’t replace your customer service team—they work with your team to deliver faster, more efficient customer service.

When you integrate bots into your support workflows, the possibilities are endless: response times shrink, customer satisfaction rises, and agents’ morales improve.

Not a bad word anymore, right?

Asynchronous Messaging: How to Use it to Deliver Exceptional Customer Service

Posted on January 18, 2022January 24, 2023 Lauren Winder

Messaging is good. Asynchronous messaging is better.

Let’s face it. Customers have little tolerance for inconveniences of any kind. Whether that’s waiting around for a response, repeating information, or finding an immediate solution to their problem.

Customer service teams aim to serve, so having the available channels to give customers the exact experience they want is crucial to increasing customer satisfaction.

What is asynchronous messaging?

Imagine you’re the customer. You’re busy but need help returning a pair of boots (that just aren’t your style) that your well-meaning dad bought you for your birthday. A completely random example…

You reach out to the live chat service on the eCommerce website to initiate the return, but you’re interrupted midway through the conversation. There’s an immediate work problem that needs your attention. The kids are fighting. The sky is falling. Whatever it may be, you have to start the process all over again.

Frustrating, right? It’s just a simple return!

Well, asynchronous messaging (sometimes called async messaging or asynchronous chat) takes the stress out of that conversation. It doesn’t require both parties to be present at the same time to complete the interaction. You can simply jump back in once you’ve taken care of life’s responsibilities. This is asynchronous messaging at its best.

SMS/text messages, WhatsApp, and Facebook Chat are all prime examples of asynchronous messaging in action. Conversations can start, stop, and resume whenever either person is available.

At the other end of the spectrum is synchronous messaging. It’s typically a live, one-to-one chat between a customer and a customer service representative.

What makes it so different? There’s usually a clear beginning and end to a synchronous chat. A customer reaches out with a specific question or to find a solution to their problem, and the conversation ends once those needs are met.

Think of it like a typical phone interaction—just using messaging instead of voice. And since synchronous messaging is so similar to phone interactions, it often comes with the same drawbacks.

Customers have to wait for a live agent.
If the agent can’t answer a question, the customer has to be rerouted.
Agents can only serve one person at a time.
Complex problems take up more of your agents’ time.
If a customer gets interrupted, the chat ends without a resolution.

Now that you know what asynchronous messaging is, keep reading to learn about the benefits for your customers, your support team, and your bottom line.

Getting started: 7 benefits of asynchronous messaging.

Think of asynchronous messaging somewhere between live chat and email. Customers typically expect a quick—but not instant—response. This flexibility allows your team to deliver exceptional customer service in a time that works for the customer and your team.

But that’s not the only benefit. Here are seven benefits of adding asynchronous messaging to your customer service arsenal.

Customers can fit you into their busy days. Life is busy. We’re always multitasking. There are too many distractions—it’s a lot. Asynchronous messaging gives customers the flexibility to fit you into their schedules. They don’t have to block time out of their day for a lengthy live chat or wait for business hours to get someone on the phone. Instead, they can get their support requests taken care of on their own time, at their own pace.
Less wait time. Since agents can jump in and out of multiple conversations—as many as 30 at a time—customers spend less time “on hold” waiting to connect with a live agent. And that is really important to customers. Zendesk reports that over 60% say getting their issues resolved quickly is the most important aspect of good customer service. With asynchronous messaging, customers can get answers while going about their day.
No repeated information. One of the things that frustrates customers the most is to have to repeat their problem. No matter whether they get disconnected from a live chat or transferred to multiple people before they get an answer to their problem, repeating themselves almost always leads to a bad experience. With asynchronous messaging and a conversational platform behind it, customers (and agents) can pick up the conversation right where they left off. There’s no information lost between sessions. Their conversation history is available for agents to reference at any time.
Resolve problems in less time. While asynchronous messaging potentially drags out conversations (depending on how quickly your customers respond), agents often spend less working time per interaction. Quiq clients can reduce work time by 25–40% when converting calls to messaging. This is because agents can quickly address those frequently asked questions that don’t necessarily require a phone call (think password reset process and hours of operations). Simple problems get solved faster, while more complex problems have the breathing room to come to a thorough resolution.
Prioritize customer requests. During peak times, when your team is truly overwhelmed, asynchronous messaging helps your agents triage customer requests. Collect customer information, sentiment, and problem upfront to determine how quickly the problem needs to be addressed. A customer service agent can immediately help an angry customer with a simple problem and close out the ticket quickly. While a neutral person with a more complex question can wait a little longer for your agents to figure out the right response.
Meet support demands with fewer agents. Much like phone calls, synchronous messaging requires one agent per customer interaction. To meet demand and avoid long wait times, you need a higher volume of staff members at all times. This also means that you likely have to hire extra team members to support peak times. Asynchronous messaging can help with that. Since your support team can take part in multiple conversations at once, you can serve more customers with fewer agents. This is particularly helpful now when baseline support ticket requests have gone up 20% since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Zendesk.
Get more opportunities to initiate a conversation. Since conversations are more flexible, customers are more likely to engage with customer service reps at different stages within the the customer lifecycle. Customers don’t have to set aside big chunks of time for conversations and your team will have more context to help serve them better. From starting a conversation from Maps with Apple Messages for Business or using Facebook Messenger to ask about size options, there’s ample opportunity to serve customers and increase revenue.

How to make the most out of asynchronous messaging.

Messaging as a whole has significantly grown in popularity since the pandemic began, and it has done so at a faster rate than any other channel. Support tickets coming in from messaging channels rose by 48%, compared to a 15% increase from live chat.

If you haven’t embraced asynchronous messaging yet, we have a few best practices to shape your approach and help you get started.

Design your asynchronous messaging strategy around your agents waiting for the customer—not the other way around. While it gives your agents the ability to manage multiple conversations, the benefit should really be for the customers’ flexibility. If you use asynchronous chat to spread your team too thin, the experience can end up feeling like email, which no one likes.
One way to improve response times and decrease the time agents spend per interaction? Use a chatbot to welcome customers and collect pertinent information beforehand. This way, customers get served quickly, and agents can spend their time problem-solving instead of gathering information.
Want to stand out? Don’t treat messaging like email. In 2020, Zendesk reported that it takes more than 11 hours, on average, to close messaging tickets. That’s compared to 30 minutes for voice and live chat and 11.5 hours for email or web form tickets.
While messaging gives your team more flexibility to respond, customers still expect a response time in under 5 minutes. Try staffing it as you would with voice and live chat to start. Then, adjust as your team becomes more efficient and you invest in other ways to streamline service.
Remember to track actual work time. Overall, asynchronous messaging will have high-resolution times since you can resolve issues in two minutes, two hours, or two days. Giving customers the freedom to respond at their own convenience can superficially elevate those numbers. But remember: if a customer is responsible for the delay, a two-day conversation can result in a lower work time and a higher customer satisfaction rate. So take resolution times with a grain of salt. A conversational platform like Quiq can help you measure actual work time.

Start using asynchronous messaging and deliver stellar customer service.

With customers flocking to messaging channels, it’s a great time for your customer service team to adopt asynchronous messaging. The best way to set your team up for success? With a conversational platform, like Quiq.

Turn any messaging channel into an asynchronous experience. With Quiq, you can:

Manage conversations across multiple channels
Serve customers based on sentiment
Increase agent efficiency and boost customer satisfaction

Top 3 Things to Know About Apple Messages for Business

Posted on January 12, 2022October 31, 2023 Lauren Winder

How much do you know about Apple Messages for Business?

We know what you’re thinking. Not *another* messaging platform.

But hear us out. Business Messages is one of the most organic messaging experiences you can offer your customers.

There’s no denying that Apple knows how to create a great customer experience. From their Genius Bars to their MacBook packaging, there’s care and attention paid to every small detail.

And that extends to their Business Messages feature. We’re answering three basic questions to help you discover what it is and how to use it to improve your customer experience below.

What is Apple Messages for Business?

Apple Messages for Business allows users to connect with your business through Apple’s native Messaging app on their iOS- or macOS-enabled devices. With more than 1 billion iPhone users, you have a simple way to connect with your customers.

When you enable Apple Messages for Business, users get one-on-one access to your representatives directly in Maps, Safari, Search, Siri, Spotlight, and even within your iOS app. All they have to do is click the messaging icon, and they’re taken to their messaging apps.

Your customers don’t need to navigate through an automated phone tree, search for an email address on your website, or download an app—they can simply open up the Messages app and start chatting with a customer service representative right away.

What can you do with Apple Messages for Business?

Besides enabling customers to connect with you as easily as they do with their favorite people, Apple Messages for Business offers a variety of features you can leverage to improve your customer experience.

Rich messaging

So much more than a text. Rich messaging allows you to send images, links, share a location, read receipts and more.

Send a rich link that displays website information from within the message. Customers can verify it’s the information they’re looking for before tapping the link, and they’re provided an easy way to get back to the conversation after they’ve visited the site.

Retailers can use messaging to send product images, insurance companies can ask for pictures of car damage, or you can share nearby brick-and-mortar locations.

Appointment scheduling

Let customers schedule appointments right from within messaging. Customers can see if it conflicts with their schedule, automatically add the appointment to their iCal, and get reminders to ensure they don’t miss it.

Augmented reality

Help customers decide if a product fits in their home. Using their iPhone camera and augmented reality, customers can visualize a product in their homes.

List picker

Simplify customer choice by letting them pick from a pre-populated list. Use it to help them pick locations, item size, color, or service.

Accept payments with Apple Pay

Eliminate abandoned carts by completing sales right within Messages. You can send payment requests with Apple Pay and make it so much easier for customers to complete a transaction. No more entering in extra information, and no getting up from the couch to get your credit card… Just instant gratification.

Collect (secure) customer information

What’s one thing customers hate most about customer service? Having to repeat themselves and give out their information to multiple people. Apple Business Chat removes this obstacle by providing the customer information you need. Plus, messages are long-lived. No matter when a customer reaches out, their previous conversation will live in the messaging platform so you can pick up right where you left off. Just like messaging a friend.

What are the benefits of using Apple Messages for Business?

Apple Messages for Business provides many opportunities to delight customers while still streamlining your customer support process. Benefits of Apple Messages for Business include:

The ability to encourage messaging with Message Suggest.
Delivery of a seamless customer experience.
Incorporation of both live agents and chatbots.

Encourage messaging with Message Suggest

Typically, customers can message you by tapping a messaging icon. But you can boost messages and reduce your call volumes with Apple Message Suggest. Customers can tap on your business phone number from anywhere within iOS or macOS, including websites, social media, business directories, etc., and they’ll be given the option to message instead of call.

Adding Message Suggest can help reduce call volume and drive traffic to messaging, which is often more efficient and cost-effective.

Deliver a seamless customer experience

Think of Apple Messages for Business as an extension of your brand experience. You control your business contact info the user sees when they search your name, including logo, contact information, and more.

You can even customize the call-to-action text for Apple Suggest. Instead of the standard, “Why call when you can message?”, consider a simple “Text us” or an encouraging “Get faster service when you send a text.”

Incorporate both live agents and chatbots

One of the requirements for having an Apple Messages for Business account is having live agents available to respond to customer inquiries. But that doesn’t mean you have to have someone at the ready at all times. You can still use chatbots at specific points of the interaction to ensure instant service at all times.

Use bots to:

Welcome customers
Automate the checkout process
Gather customer information
Troubleshoot simple customer issues
Collect feedback

Since messaging can happen at any time, you can use bots to service customer questions 24/7, such as:

Checking order statuses
Canceling an order
Scheduling appointments
Confirming account balances

You can still utilize bots to help you deliver the best experience to your customers while tapping in live agents to provide that one-on-one support.

Take a deep dive into Apple Messages for Business.

We’ve just scratched the surface on what you can do with Apple Messages for Business to surprise and delight your customers. By giving customers a way to connect with your business that they know, love, and use daily, you’re creating a comfortable and inviting experience for them. P.S. To use Apple Messages for Business, you’re required to use a messaging service provider like Quiq.

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Business Messaging 101: Best Practices by Channel

Posted on December 22, 2021February 21, 2023 Lauren Winder

If you haven’t heard yet, business messaging is a big deal.

We’re moving away from endless phonebanks and multi-hour wait times to multiple business messaging channels. And customers love it. 89% of customers would like to use messages to communicate with businesses, reported Twilio.

The pandemic accelerated messaging popularity in 2021. According to Zendesk’s 2021 CX Trends Report, in-app messaging popularity grew by 36%, SMS/text messaging by 75%, and social messaging by 110%.

While it has become an essential part of your customer communication strategy, it’s admittedly confusing. There are multiple platforms, endless rules, and many nuances between each.

We’ve created a best practices guide to help you embark on your business messaging initiative. It covers:

Adding messaging can elevate your customer satisfaction, increase agent efficiency, reduce call volumes, and more.

Continue reading for business messaging best practices.

The basic principles of business messaging

Start with a plan. What type of goals are you setting? Are you simply trying to lower costs? Reduce call volume? Or do you have a long-term strategy to improve your CSAT and increase revenue? Whether starting with incremental goals or going all in, lay it out clearly in the early planning stages. This will determine which channels you focus on, how you’ll train your staff, and which conversation platform you invest in.
Keep conversations organized. Juggling multiple channels of asynchronous communication gets chaotic. Switching between platforms, monitoring multiple conversations—it just doesn’t work if support agents don’t have a way to keep it organized. Conversational platforms are the way to do this. Quiq’s intuitive interface keeps conversations organized, with easily accessible history, simple conversation switching, and help only a click away.
Stay true to your brand voice and tone. Your customer service agents are the voice of your company, so they should follow your brand voice and tone guidelines when interacting with customers. Some businesses write chatbot scripts to be overly formal: avoiding contractions, using proper English, and completing their thought in one long sentence. But this isn’t an English paper! If your brand voice uses conversational language, so should your chatbot. It’ll feel more natural to your customers AND your support agents.
Create a messaging style guide. Your marketing team has a style guide—what about your customer service team? Give your customer support agents a comprehensive guide covering everything from emoji use (as in, use this ? but never this ?) to contractions to appropriate text-speak (LOL, JK, TL;DR, IYKYK, but never WTF). Utilizing a tool like Quiq’s predictive text can also help support agents with messaging. It’ll help support team members stay on brand, have good grammar, and get answers to customers faster.
Tailor your strategy by channel. Although you want to keep your brand voice consistent, you should tailor your communication strategies to the platform you’re on. For example, talking to a customer using live chat on your website should be a different experience than Facebook Messenger. You get to decide what works best for each platform. Consider message length, emoji usage, and formality when designated platform best practices.

Messaging best practices by channel

Web chat and live messaging

Web chat or live chat is when you embed a chat box directly on your website. Expect this channel to get a lot of action—especially if you’re in e-commerce.

Customers often come to your site for two reasons: to purchase something or get a question answered. Live chat should help them do both.

Send a welcome message. While you don’t want to bombard web visitors with popups, make sure they know live chat is available. Send a friendly welcome message letting them know how they can use the chat function, if they’ll be connecting with a person or a bot, or even a featured sale. The point is not to be aggressive but to let them know they have support whenever needed.
Tailor messages based on where they’ve been. Use Quiq to track which website pages a customer has visited to guess intent. Are they fishing around on your support page? They likely have a question they can’t answer with your knowledge base. You can even get creative and offer sizing help or product suggestions based on the items they’ve viewed.
Make your teams’ availability clear. Manning live chat 24/7 is difficult, but there are ways to ensure your customers get their questions answered. Program a Quiq chatbot to offer away messages when no one’s available, share wait times, or even answer questions and point customers to other self-service options.

Business SMS/text messaging

Text messaging has become an increasingly popular way to connect with customers and often crushes email open rates. And unlike many of the other messaging platforms, text messaging doesn’t require an internet connection. Anyone with a phone plan can receive text messages, making it an easily accessible option for your customers.

Keep it casual. Text messaging is still a primarily personal medium. You use it to chat with friends and family more than businesses, and your customers are the same. This means a casual, friendly tone is best over text messaging. Avoid being too formal and keep messages short and to the point.
Personalize messages. Text messaging is all about cultivating a 1:1 experience with your customers. While you can use text messages to send mass communications to your customers, try segmenting based on interests, past purchases, or even locations. And add personalization tags for that extra touch.
Make it a two-way conversation. While text messages are great for communicating deals and exclusive content, customers want to respond and ask questions. According to Attentive, almost 70% of customers say they would be extremely likely or likely to receive customer service over a text message.
Message one or millions. Quiq’s messaging platform can be configured to send one-to-one text messages or reach an entire customer segment. So whether you’re sending a package tracking link, notifying customers of a service outage, or offering a coupon, you can reach your customers quickly, and in the manner they prefer.
Convert calls to text. Give customers who call your busy customer support center the option to send a text message instead. Phone IVRs work well, but giving your customer the option to text when agents are busy is an easy and effective way to surprise and delight them. Instead, integrate texting with your IVR for an easy “press 1 to text” experience.
Embrace multimedia. Over half of customers (51.1%) are more likely to make a purchase if they receive a text message with media (GIFs, images and video), reports Attentive. Show off personalized product suggestions, share knowledge base articles, or have fun with memes—if your brand voice allows for it.

Facebook Messenger

Since 1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger globally, it’s safe to say you can find your customers there, too. But there are some social media pitfalls to navigate as you go.

Be responsive. Facebook adds “Very responsive to messages” badges to company pages that have a 90% response rate and consistently respond in 15 minutes or less.
Follow the customers’ lead. Judging your customers’ cadence is a big part of messaging on a social platform like Facebook. Some highly active users may expect a naturally flowing conversation with quick answers. But some may jump in and out of the platform while doing other things. When that happens, agents need to be able to pick up the conversation where it left off. Quiq’s intuitive platform keeps the conversation history and pertinent information handy, so agents can jump in and out of conversations without ever missing a beat.
Take advantage of rich messaging. Emojis? Memes? Gifs? Videos? Facebook Messenger supports it all. While you still want to talk to your customers in a way your brand would, there’s more freedom to have a little fun in Messenger. Use these sparingly and in the right setting to appeal to your customers. Fair warning: Overuse can make you sound glib or out of touch. You can also use Facebook’s multimedia capabilities to get to the bottom of a customer issue faster. They can send images of damaged items, and agents can share how-to videos or other resources. Overall you can shorten your resolution time and leave customers happy.
Use bots in multiple ways. Many Facebook users expect the same response times on nights and weekends as they do during the week. Use Quiq’s customer service chatbots to welcome guests and collect information to route them to the right customer service agent. Since social media is the place for quick answers, Quiq’s chatbots can also answer simple questions within Facebook Messenger.

Instagram Direct Messages

While businesses aren’t new to Instagram, Instagram only recently embraced business messaging. 90% of IG users are already following a company, and they often reach out to businesses on Instagram to resolve issues with existing or previous sales, according to Instagram. With Instagram’s API, you message your customers within the Quiq platform.

Many of the same best practices for Facebook and other social media platforms apply to Instagram direct messaging.

Be the trendy relative. Instagram is like Facebook’s cool cousin. It’s more visual, demographically younger, but has relatively the same features as its predecessor. Adapt your voice to fit. It’s still best to avoid “internet slang,” but insert emojis and youthful language where appropriate. IYKYK.
Take advantage of unique features. Instagram offers features that not all platforms have. You can send voice or video messages, drop a pin to a store or event location, and even create chat rooms when appropriate.
Have a Stories strategy. When users reply to Instagram stories, it goes directly into your inbox. It’s a great way to strike up conversations naturally with your customers or potential clients. Ask questions, add prompts, and don’t forget to ask customers to message you.

WhatsApp is another heavy hitter. With 2 billion active users worldwide, there’s a good chance your customers use it—and they wish you did, too.

Follow the guidelines. WhatsApp has strict guidelines as to what counts as spam and how you can use discount codes, promotions, or giveaways. Be sure to read through the guidelines before using WhatsApp for business purposes.
Get consent via an opt-in. Before you can start messaging users, you need both their phone number and an opt-in.
Create groups and broadcasts. WhatsApp gives you two options to reach out to multiple users at once. The first is a WhatsApp Group. It allows you to have exchange messages with up to 256 users. Conversation happens altogether in one big group.

The other is a WhatsApp Broadcast. Broadcasts only allow the broadcaster (you) to send a message to everyone. If other users reply, they’re routed to private messages.

Apple Messages for Business

Apple Messages for Business connects iOS and macOS users to your business in brand new ways. It takes no additional downloads from your customers and provides a holistic e-commerce shopping experience. Customers can find your business and start conversations from Safari, Maps, Search, Siri, or your website.

Support transactions with Apple Pay. Using Apple Messages for Business and Quiq, you can complete sales right within iOS native messaging. It’s secure, and customers likely feel more comfortable using a trusted payment provider.
Go beyond text messaging. Create a fully realized shopping experience. Pair Apple Messages for Business with Quiq to authenticate users, schedule appointments, and collect information.
Use Apple Message Suggest. Message Suggest automatically gives your customers the option to message your business with one tap. Use this feature to shift early conversations to messaging over more costly and time-consuming phone calls.

Take your messaging to the next level with Quiq

Managing multiple messaging channels—keeping track of notifications, ensuring smooth conversations, and providing customer satisfaction—can all be achieved using Quiq’s conversational platform.

Is Your Service Center Busy? Don’t Turn Off Messaging!

Posted on December 15, 2021September 22, 2023 Lauren Winder

Knee-jerk reactions happen. It gets busy. You see your agents struggling. And when your agents are overwhelmed, it’s natural to want to go back to what you know. So you turn all your agents to the phone while turning messaging off.

But this can make things ten times worse.

Instead of controlling the funnel of customer requests, you simply create a ticket backlog that frustrates your customers and further overwhelms your team.

Hear us out about why you should resist the urge to suspend messaging when you get busy.

Don’t turn off messaging. Here’s why.

1. Customers prefer it.

Globally, messaging has increased in popularity significantly in 2021. According to Zendesk’s 2021 CX Trends Report, in-app messaging popularity grew by 36%, SMS/text messaging by 75%, and social messaging by 110%.

While customers value human connection, younger generations don’t consider emotional connections and text communications mutually exclusive.

If your customers are used to messaging options, they’re likely to get frustrated when you take it away. The worst-case scenarios? They become unsatisfied, switch to a competitor, or take their complaint to social media.

2. Messaging is more efficient.

It might seem counterintuitive. Rather than focusing on a single call, agents are juggling multiple customer messages at the same time. But with the right tools and sufficient planning, messaging can be a lot more efficient.

With phone calls, agents can only serve one person at a time. They’re wholly tied down to one call. And they may or may not know how serious the problem is, the customer’s mood, or how long it’ll take to resolve their issue. It’s often a crapshoot.

But messaging gives agents the ability to serve six to eight requests, compared to one phone call. They can prioritize messages based on urgency, dollar amount, VIP and more. Plus, agents can chat with other customers while waiting for one to respond, maximizing their time.

3. Messaging is asynchronous.

Except for live chat, messaging doesn’t require an immediate response. It lands somewhere between phone conversations and email. Customers often send a message but rarely wait for a response. This gives customers a chance to go about their day while having their issues resolved or their questions answered.

Your customer service agents then have more flexibility in their responses. You can afford to slow down communications without upsetting the customer.

Yes, it’s good to answer customers as quickly as possible. But when it’s busy and your agents are overwhelmed, taking longer to respond to a text message is better than leaving them on hold for the same amount of time.

4. Integrate chatbots to alleviate urgency.

The biggest advantage messaging has over phone calls? Chatbots.

Salesforce reported that 66% of service professionals credit self-service for reducing call volumes—and that includes chatbots. There are many ways to integrate bots and AI into the customer support experience to reduce the burden on your agents.

Chatbots can act as your first line of defense, greeting customers and collecting information on their issues. During busy times, you can triage support issues. Customers with urgent problems can be helped first, while those with simpler problems can wait a little longer. For frequently asked questions, you can even write a script for your chatbots to respond and complete the ticket without involving your team at all.

Chatbots and agents can also work in tandem, tag-teaming a conversation when agents get overwhelmed. Chatbots can ask questions or provide scripted responses, and agents can jump in with the solution. Plus, agents can see the entire conversation with the chatbot, so the transition is seamless, and there are no redundant questions.

5. It’s just better customer service.

If you’re a Friends enthusiast, do you remember the episode “The One with the Screamer”? Stay with us. In short, Phoebe misses Joey’s play because she’s on hold for hours trying to claim a warranty that’s about to expire.

While that’s poor customer service taken to the extreme, it’s still very relatable. A Zendesk survey found that 56% of customers say that long hold/wait times are one of the most frustrating customer service experiences. No one wants to wait on hold for hours. And when your support agents are busy, that’s a possibility. Sending a message allows your customers to go on with their day while waiting for a response.

What doesn’t work with messaging

While integrating messaging into your customer service is a great strategy, it’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all your support problems without some help.

Here are some ways messaging can go seriously wrong.

1. You only use live messaging.

Live chat is a great way to engage with customers, but it’s not the most forgiving during busy times. Synchronous messaging (instant communication between you and your customer) requires both parties to be available and provide instant responses. It doesn’t adequately replace a phone call. When you’re busy, synchronous messaging can take up more of your agents’ time.

2. You’re using chatbots ineffectively.

Pairing chatbots with synchronous messaging lends to a lackluster customer service experience. Using simplistic chatbots in your web messaging often turns into hold messages (i.e., “Someone will be with you in 20 minutes”) or a glorified search bar (i.e., “What can I help you with?”).

Chatbot scripts and messaging trees are also vital to their success. Filling it with copy that lacks empathy, is too formal for your audience, or confuses them further will also create a bad experience.

3. You’re not adequately preparing your team.

According to Salesforce, 55% of agents say they need better training in order to do their job well. Messaging customers and handling issues over the phone are two different skill sets. There are many cues you can pick up on through someone’s voice to determine their state of mind. Your customer service team was likely trained to listen for these cues and respond accordingly.

But messaging is different. There are fewer ways to pick up on a customer’s mood and fewer ways to build a rapport. If your team isn’t prepped to respond quickly while expressing empathy, it can come off as detached or fake.

How to ensure messaging success

Don’t panic. When you see a busy season on the horizon, there are a few things you can do to set your customer support team up for messaging success.

1. It’s all about the prep work.

It’s not a good idea to plug your current customer service strategies into a messaging platform as is. You need a strategy that works across voice calls and messaging, so you can transition customers between them seamlessly.

2. Set up triage ahead of time.

Before the avalanche hits, decide how you’ll handle customer support questions. Who gets to go first when you can’t get to everyone right away? Will it be the most urgent problem? The VIP customers? Whoever has a problem that can be solved the quickest?

Then determine how you’ll assign issues to different service agents or even different departments. Lean into conversational AI and chatbots to help automate those decisions.

3. Reduce call volume with call-to-text.

Integrate call-to-text with your interactive voice response (IVR) system to give customers the option of transitioning to text instead of waiting on hold.

4. Ensure seamless integration across platforms.

It’s easy for customer communications to become fragmented. Silos can form between different messaging platforms, phone calls, and web chat. Find a communications platform that keeps track of customers across multiple channels so your agents have a complete history of the conversation before they jump in.

5. Create an escape plan.

Okay. Not an actual escape plan. But you should have a strategy in place to help get your customer service agents out of the hole—that doesn’t involve turning off your messaging entirely. Have some remote agents on call to take the overflow. Or try enlisting other team members to help out when your team is overwhelmed. Maybe even try turning off your phones and relying on messaging services until you catch up.

Whatever you do, set yourself up for success with better options than shutting down your customer service messaging and weathering the storm.

Master your messaging with Quiq

Don’t hit the panic button. Even if your team is under fire, resist the urge to go full phone. Instead of solving the problem, you may be creating several more.

What does it really take to reach customer service messaging success? A conversational platform that enhances your agents’ ability to deliver exceptional customer service. Prepare for the busy days ahead with Quiq.

Don’t be overwhelmed by the amount of messaging channels out there. Regardless of how your customers or prospects engage, Quiq manages it all within our multi-channel conversational engagement platform.

Get a Quiq demo today.

Dreading Customer Experience Snags Over the Holidays? You’re Not Alone.

Posted on December 1, 2021January 13, 2023 Lauren Winder

Your dread of poor customer experience is justified: The holidays are going to be tough on retailers this year. It’s already proving to be a mess of a season. Between supply shortages, delivery delays, and a smaller labor pool, holiday shopping can prove difficult this year.

And customers know it.

68% of shoppers are either very or somewhat concerned about poor service due to a lack of employees, according to the Salesforce Holiday Insights report. 78% are concerned about shipping delays and product availability, respectively.

Overall, there’s a lot to worry about this year. But you’re not alone.

On a positive note, holiday shopping has started earlier. Sales were up 18% year-over-year for the first two weeks of November, according to Salesforce. Black Friday sales aren’t breaking any records and actually suffered a small decline over last year. Adobe Analytics is reporting $8.9 billion in sales, which actually makes sense. It tracks with earlier spending as shoppers try to avoid stockouts and shipping delays.

Now to your big question: How do you ensure a stellar customer experience amidst these challenges? Let’s discuss that.

Customer loyalty matters more than ever

It seems like we say that a lot, doesn’t it?

Customer loyalty is a constant focus, but it becomes even more critical during times of change. As shoppers move toward e-commerce, they forge new loyalties. The brand interactions they have are with your customer support team instead of with sales team members. This poses both challenges and opportunities.

But the real problem this holiday season is that shoppers know what they want, and they don’t care who they get it from.

“39% of consumers who couldn’t get an out-of-stock item switched brands or products, and 32% switched retailers.”

According to a McKinsey study, 39% of consumers who couldn’t get an out-of-stock item switched brands or products, and 32% switched retailers. They’re not waiting for items to come back in stock.

Whether trying to keep the customers you have or attempting to capture new customers as they jump ship from other retailers, you have a short window to capture their loyalty.

How do you do that? Listen to your customers, communicate effectively, and empower your agents to go above and beyond whenever possible.

Infuse CX into every step of the customer journey

Since customers are more willing to switch retailers to get the items they want, your customer experience needs to be your number one priority.

We know you’re already slammed with holiday queries, but bringing your support team into every step of the customer journey is the best way to ensure a stellar customer experience.

Consider how to get ahead of customer problems before they get to your support team. Include holiday questions on your FAQ page and send out notifications when inventory or shipping snags occur.

When problems do arise, remember these short customer experience tips to solve problems quickly and earn back the trust of your customers.

Quick customer experience tips:

Be warm
Be prepared with quick answers
Ensure your customer feels listened to
Don’t come off as rote
Be transparent about problems
Solve issues in one support request

Get creative with staffing

According to Forbes, 68% of organizations saw a greater increase in customer service inquiries during the 2020 holiday season versus the 2019 holiday season. It would be no surprise to see even higher numbers this season.

And in customer service, immediacy is the name of the game. Customers want quick service and often expect some kind of reply 24/7. Yet many retailers are short-staffed.

While the labor pool is shallow, long wait times are the quickest way to frustrate your customers. To ensure your team isn’t completely overwhelmed, get creative with your staffing:

Top holiday staffing strategies

Lean into short-term staffing
Extend hours for employees who want them
Stagger shifts based on peak shopping hours
Pull in employees from other departments
Extend your labor pool with remote hires

The right infrastructure can make hiring short-term and remote employees a breeze. Messaging software makes it possible to onboard new hires quickly—even when they’re across the country. No need to ship desk phones or physical products. Just log in and go.

Embrace chatbots for improved customer service

We know it’s crunch time, but adding chatbots to your customer experience arsenal will do a lot to smooth out the snags. There’s a lot you can do with chatbots and AI to speed up your customer response time.

The first is to use chatbots as a routing method. Ask simple questions to gauge the type of customer issue. If you can direct the customer to another department or another self-service option, that’s a best-case scenario.

You can also get more advanced and prepare scripts for commonly asked questions. Consider it an FAQ page on steroids. You can answer slightly more complex queries, and customers get the feeling of personal service.

Here are some common holiday questions you can program a chatbot to answer:

Common questions for your chatbot

What’s the status of my order?
When’s the last day to order to ensure my package gets delivered by Christmas Eve?
What’s your return policy?
How much is shipping?
When will this item be back in stock?
How often do you get new products in?
I ordered the wrong size, what do I do?

Preparing scripts for simple answers like these once can save your team from handling hundreds of interactions—give them more time and you one less thing to worry about.

Streamline backend technology

The holidays are the worst time of year to fight against your technology. Customer service teams are handling loads of messages and calls from all different platforms, and switching between them is inefficient. And frankly annoying.

Consider a conversational platform that allows your customers to reach out using the preferred channel but still keeps the backend organized and efficient for your team.

Agents can bounce back and forth between messaging channels without losing track of conversations. Customers get to chat with your brand how they want, where they want, and your team gets to preserve the experience and deliver snag-free customer service.

Do away with dread and upgrade your customer experience

The holidays are a make-or-break moment for retailers. While you may be dreading the rush just as much as the customer, they’re looking to your customer support team to shine amidst the struggles.

Let your last major technology purchase of the year be one that can help you get through the holiday season with fewer customer experience snags and more sales

Power your customer service team with Quiq

Ensure your team communicates effectively over any messaging channel with Quiq. Our AI-enhanced conversational platform supports your customer service team with multiple messaging channels, chatbots, CRM integrations, and more.

How to Communicate with Customers Effectively

Posted on November 24, 2021April 26, 2023 Lauren Winder

When customer service is at its busiest, it might be time to get back to the basics: Your team’s ability to effectively communicate with customers.

Customer service teams are overwhelmed during this time of year, and shoppers are getting more frantic as the holidays grow closer. Unfortunately, this is when basic customer communication standards can go out the window.

What does customer communication entail? A lot more than you might think. From error messages and initiating returns with customer service to marketing emails and social media, it’s all a part of the customer experience.

But it’s essential to your customer service team. Continue reading to learn how to improve your teams’ customer communications.

Why is customer communication important?

Customer service often boils down to how you make a customer feel. Solving customer problems, listening to complaints, providing answers… it’s all worth more than the sum of its parts.

This customer experience often has a direct impact on sales. It affects loyalty, how likely customers are to recommend your brand and more.

According to a 2020 XM Institute report, emotion has the largest impact on loyalty behaviors (purchasing more, recommending, forgiving, and trusting). Respondents who gave a high emotion rating were 90% more likely to purchase more and recommend the company to others. 74% were also more likely to forgive the company after a bad experience.

Creating positive emotions has a high impact on customer retention, but negative emotions have the opposite effect. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends report, 50% of customers are likely to switch to a competitor after one bad experience. That number jumps to 80% after two.

Learning to communicate with customers effectively is a vital part of your business’s success.

Start with simple communication skills

In our effort to move quickly and stay up to date with the latest technology, we lose some basic customer service principles.

No matter how you interact with customers, there are a few simple tenets and strategies to follow.

1. Employ active listening techniques when you communicate with customers

Are you ever sharing a conversation with someone, and you can’t tell if they’re actually listening? Even if they are? That’s likely because they’re not showing you that they hear what you’re saying and are taking it in. This technique looks different over different channels but can be used no matter how you’re talking with customers.

In-person: Nod when appropriate. Smile or show concern based on the conversation, and make eye contact throughout the discussion.
Over the phone: When you can’t make gestures to show you’re listening, give the person on the other end auditory cues. Use phrases like “I understand,” or try repeating back what they just said.
Over messaging: This can be a little trickier with asynchronous messaging. Customers that employ messaging to resolve a problem often want it solved quickly without much conversation. In this scenario, the best way to show you’re listening is by responding quickly and addressing the problem head-on.

2. Mirror your customer’s communication style

A great way to connect quickly with your customer is with mirroring. This is another technique that works well in person but can also be used to connect with your customer through other channels. It relies on empathy and your ability to gauge how your customer wants to interact.

In-person: Rely on body language and facial expressions to tell you how your customer is feeling. Are they fidgety and in a hurry? Relaxed and looking for some small talk? Show your customer you understand them by taking their visual cues and using them to determine whether to give quick, to-the-point answers or spend time chatting about the weather. You can also mirror body language as a way to connect with your customer—just don’t go too overboard. You don’t want to make them feel uncomfortable.

Over the phone: Take your cues from the tone of their voice. If they’re leisurely answering your initial questions (and peppering in some jokes), but you try to rush them through the conversation, that’ll leave them feeling unsatisfied.
Over messaging: Are they writing formally or using shorthand and emojis? Try to match your tone to theirs. Find a balance between the brand communication style and your customers’ to make the strongest connection.

3. Show patience

Practicing patience is tough over the holidays. Everyone’s stressed. Lines are long. And there’s only a short time to get everything done. For your customer service representatives, this is when it’s often the most difficult and most important time of year for patience.

Whether customers are coming to you angry and upset or coming to you confused and in need of direction, it’s important to show understanding. Don’t interrupt, and wait until they’ve completed their thought before jumping in with the solution. Patience will help you solve your customers’ problems and win them over time and time again.

4. Practice conflict resolution

Many customer service teams undergo group conflict resolution training, and we certainly recommend it. Working with angry customers is tough on your team and can lead to burnout if not managed properly.

The best way to solve a conflict is to stay calm, validate your customer’s feelings and work toward a solution. This is an oversimplification, but practice helps. Your team will feel more prepared for when it happens, and they’ll know how you want them to handle it.

Employing these basic communication skills effectively during every customer interaction will go a long way in building brand loyalty and elevating the customer experience.

Get proactive with outbound communications

Many businesses think customer service involves waiting around until customers come to them with a problem. The problem with this type of reactive service? Customers are already facing an issue when they come to your team. They may be agitated, upset, disappointed, and filled with tons of other unpleasant emotions by the time they ask for help. Not only does this make your customers more difficult to communicate with, but it also creates a poor impression of your brand that can have long-lasting effects.

Instead, get proactive with your customer service by using outbound communications.

Getting in front of a customer service issue before it happens can be as straightforward or as complex as your business dictates.

Here are some examples of how you can solve a customer’s problem before it happens:

Software-as-a-service products can include helpful tips to direct customers on how to use the product.
E-commerce retailers can send an SMS message with a track-my-package link to reduce inbound “Where’s my order?” calls.
An online business can send out a notification for planned website maintenance.

And customers appreciate proactive service. 63% of surveyed US consumers have a more favorable view of brands that offer proactive customer service notifications, according to a 2019 Microsoft survey.

Communicating early and often with customers is a great way to get ahead of customer service issues and leave a lasting impression.

Empower your agents to communicate with customers

Since your customer service agents are at the frontline of customer communications, it’s important to empower them with everything they need to be successful when they communicate with customers.

Ensure easy access to product knowledge: In Microsoft’s 2019 survey, 35% of people stated that a service agent’s lack of knowledge was the most frustrating aspect of a poor customer service experience. Make sure your team knows your products, services, and policies inside-out so they can answer customers’ questions fully and resolve issues in one interaction.
Give them the right tools: The same Microsoft survey said 32% of customers stated having to repeat information was the most frustrating impact of a poor customer service experience. Integrate messaging tools into your current customer relationship management service to give your customer service team access to information. Agents will be able to access customer information quickly to solve problems faster, with fewer inconveniences to your customers.
Embrace their changing roles: The role of your customer service team is changing. The idea of a call center complete with a phone bank full of agents is outdated. Now, chatbots answer simple questions and route customer issues to the right agent.

Your support team now can spend more time solving complex customer issues and even engaging in pre-purchase support and upsells. It’s important to recognize this shift and set new expectations for this role now and in the future.

Build a culture of effective customer communication

What’s the most important thing to remember? No, it’s not that the customer is always right. It’s that the customer is always heard.

Your customer service team is the frontline of customer interactions with your brand. It’s vital that you set expectations and give your team the tools to meet them.

Power your customer service team with Quiq

Turning Chatbots Into Virtual Shopping Assistants

Posted on November 22, 2021April 14, 2023 Lauren Winder

Turning Chatbots Into Virtual Shopping Assistants

These days, brick-and-mortar retail is quickly giving way to online shopping. By 2022, eCommerce sales are projected to reach over $850 billion — and it doesn’t seem like the growth of online shopping will be slowing down beyond that. Many consumers have a preference for convenient shopping experiences — and what’s easier than shopping from the comfort of home? However, what hasn’t changed is the fact that shoppers want assistance if they have a problem or question. That’s where virtual shopping assistants shine.

Virtual shopping assistants are support bots that can directly support consumers as they browse. While being available around the clock, these assistants can answer questions, resolve problems, and provide suggestions to consumers, all from the convenience of a chat window.

In this guide, we’ll provide all the details on virtual shopping assistants, including the benefits to shoppers and retailers, how retailers are using chatbots as virtual shopping assistants, and how to get started with Quiq.

What Are Virtual Shopping Assistants?

A virtual shopping assistant is essentially a chatbot that converses directly with online consumers. These assistants work by using a combination of machine learning and language processing software to understand shopper queries and match them with appropriate solutions. As these assistants conduct more conversations, they learn more about consumers’ preferences and language patterns, making the bot more effective over time.

Digital shopping assistants are commonly installed on a store’s website. When a new visitor comes to the website, these assistants automatically greet the shopper through a chat window, offering assistance and notifying them of any current promotions. The potential consumer can then type responses into the chat window to ask questions or request recommendations, which the assistant will answer in a matter of seconds.

Why Do Consumers Like Virtual Shopping Assistants?

Virtual shopping assistants are quickly becoming a staple in the retail industry, especially with younger generations. There are many reasons for this preference, ranging from response time to personalized answers. As a result, 65% of American shoppers prefer self-service through tools like chatbots.

Here are a few specific reasons why consumers enjoy communicating with an online shopping assistant:

Quick responses: Digital shopping assistants provide instant answers to all questions a consumer may have. Chatbot assistants can pull information about orders and deliveries, provide recommendations, and even assist with common problems and complaints. If a shopper has a simple question, they won’t have to wait for a response to a customer support ticket, which can possibly deter them from making a purchase altogether.
Round-the-clock assistance: Virtual shopping assistants don’t have to work in a certain timeframe. These bots can provide information around the clock, no matter the time of day. Bots can also handle hundreds of inquiries at once, meaning consumers don’t need to wait for the next available agent to answer their questions. With a virtual assistant, consumers can get the answers they need when they need them.
Personalization: Chatbots can store information based on shoppers’ accounts, allowing for enhanced personalization. These virtual assistants can use data regarding a consumer’s past purchases and behaviors to make informed recommendations.
Faster experiences: Virtual assistants can quickly pull information to answer consumers’ questions, allowing consumers to make faster shopping decisions. Some chatbots even allow consumers to complete purchases from the chat window, making for a speedy shopping experience.

On top of these benefits, younger generations are more open to embracing new technologies like digital shopping assistants and are more excited to use platforms that integrate AI.

Benefits of Virtual Shopping Assistants for Retailers

In addition to benefitting consumers, digital shopping assistants can also give retailers an edge in the market. These platforms help retailers achieve advantages like cost savings and increased sales, so an investment in chatbots makes a real difference. Additionally, retailers that want to be on the cutting edge of eCommerce technology can expect to reach and develop relationships with consumers who enjoy those new features.

Some of the most significant benefits online shopping assistants offer retail businesses include:

Cost savings: Virtual assistants take the workload off live agents by automatically handling the majority of inquiries. Instead of hiring new members for an internal support team, retailers can implement a virtual shopping assistant that handles most questions and complaints. This concept reduces the number of live agents needed, allowing them to focus on the most complex problems and inquiries while the chatbot resolves questions.
Data collection: eCommerce chatbots can easily collect information about consumers and their preferences by saving their behaviors and purchases in a database. This information is invaluable to retailers, providing demographic and preference information that can be used to create powerful targeted marketing campaigns.
Improved consumer relationships: Virtual assistants provide 24/7 support and a personalized experience, which helps to create more positive experiences for shoppers. As a result, retailers have a chance to build relationships with shoppers, encouraging them to come back in the future.
Increased sales: Online shopping assistants can also help generate more sales through upselling and cross-selling, offering upgrades and related purchases at the check-out window. Additionally, online shopping assistants can send out reminders to consumers that have abandoned their carts, encouraging them to follow through with their purchase.
Competitive advantages: All of these benefits equate to an advantage over competitors, especially those that don’t use chatbots. If a shopper sees that a retailer has chatbot capabilities on their website, they’ll be more likely to stay on their website and make a purchase.

Due to the significant benefits of virtual shopping assistants for both retailers and consumers, it’s easy to see why these tools are quickly taking over the retail industry. eCommerce chatbots are expected to increase consumer retail spend to $142 billion by 2024, meaning more retailers will likely adopt chatbots over the next three years. With the continuing boom of eCommerce, retail businesses can use chatbots to meet consumer expectations going forward.

How to Use a Chatbot as a Virtual Shopping Assistant

With all the benefits of digital shopping assistants, many retailers are looking to implement their own within the next few years. While there are many advanced options available, eCommerce chatbots are still the most common type of virtual shopping assistant. These tools are popular due to their versatility and relative ease of implementation.

It’s key for retail leaders to understand how to use a chatbot as a virtual shopping assistant to ensure they maximize their effectiveness. These assistants have several capabilities. As a result, retailers may want to use them differently depending on their unique needs.

Some essential functions chatbots can fulfill to become virtual shopping assistants include:

Engage visitors: Chatbots are a great way to engage new visitors on a site without being intrusive. Shoppers can interact with the chatbot as much or as little as they want, but they’ll always have the option available to them. Retailers can also ensure every chatbot offers the same level and quality of information to consumers, whether that’s information about products and promotions or updates on orders.
Respond to questions: One of the most common ways to use chatbots as virtual shopping assistants is as an interactive FAQ page. Visitors can type in their questions, and the AI will determine the best response. This way, consumers don’t need to get frustrated while hunting down information — their virtual assistant can provide them learn more about products, shipping costs, refund policies, and store hours with a simple query.
Provide product recommendations: Virtual shopping assistants can also be programmed to provide product recommendations. Using data collected about a shopper’s immediate needs and past behavior and preferences, virtual shopping assistants can show one or more product options that would likely suit the consumer. This chatbot feature is a surefire way to enhance consumer experiences, as product recommendations both simplify and speed up the shopping process.
Order information: Every online shopper is excited after they place an order online, and are looking forward to getting confirmation and information about their order’s progress. While consumers often get this information via email, retailers can also set up online shopping assistants to provide this information when prompted. This way, consumers can easily track the progress of their order, get tracking information, and check in on updates.
Promotion and sale information: Virtual shopping assistants can also be used to offer deals and coupons to shoppers. Different coupons and promotions can be offered at different stages of the shopping experience, depending on the consumer in question. For example, first-time shoppers may see a welcome discount to encourage their first purchase, while repeat consumers may see seasonal offers and product-specific discounts based on their previous purchases. If a shopper abandons their cart, the assistant can even offer a discount as an incentive to complete the purchase.
Cart retrieval: Nearly 85% of online shoppers have abandoned a purchase. Virtual shopping assistants can help reduce the rate of cart abandonment by checking in on consumers and answering their questions. If a shopper abandons their cart, online shopping assistants can send reminders when the person revisits the site or social media page. The assistant can even be programmed to offer discounts to encourage consumers to complete their purchases. These types of messages are less likely to be ignored than emails, leading to a higher conversion rate.
Subscription management: Chatbots can also be programmed to help with subscription management for consumers with retail accounts. All shoppers need to do is provide their credentials, and a chatbot with this capability can look up their profile and find member benefits, coupons, and rewards. These chatbots can also be programmed to provide information about points systems, including how many points shoppers have, how many points they need for their next discount, and how many points they’ll earn from their current cart. Chatbots can also be programmed to assist with subscription management, helping shoppers increase or decrease their membership levels and subscription schedules.

Many chatbot programs are available for retailers to explore, and they can customize them to fulfill one or more of these functions.

How to Get Started With Chatbot Implementation

Virtual shopping assistants are invaluable to online retailers and will be a necessary platform for forward-thinking retail businesses. However, each retailer is unique, so it’s essential to understand how to effectively implement eCommerce chatbots for each retail business’s needs.

Some of the key items to consider before pursuing a chatbot as a virtual shopping assistant include:

Functions: First, consider what core functions the chatbot needs to fulfill. Does the retailer have subscriptions or memberships that need to be managed? Is chat-window purchasing a feature that would benefit the retailer? Knowing the most important functions to enable will help inform a retailer’s choices when they start designing an online shopping assistant program.
Integrations: Think about the types of integrations the digital shopping assistant will need. What systems does it need to plug into? Does it need speech-to-text or text-to-speech capabilities down the road? Look for solutions that are flexible enough to take on new integrations as the retail business evolves.
Updates: Consider how frequently the chatbot will need to be updated. Does the retail business’s product line rotate regularly? Are there new promotions that will need to be added to the system? Look for systems that automatically update product information and can easily undergo manual updates. This way, retailers can communicate the most updated information to their consumers.
Start small: Retailers shouldn’t try to implement a robust chatbot system from day one. Instead, focus on the most important functions first, such as a customer support chatbot. From there, the retailer can add more functions over time, testing thoroughly as they go. As a result, they won’t waste time and effort implementing features they don’t need.

On top of these recommendations, retailers should be sure to work with an experienced chatbot provider. An expert provider will help with programming and implementing a virtual shopping assistant, making recommendations for functions and integrations and helping update platforms as the retailer grows.

Demo Quiq Today for Your Retail Business

Virtual shopping assistants are effective tools that help improve consumer experiences and generate sales, all while improving productivity and reducing the strain on retailers’ internal teams. With current generations increasingly favoring online shopping experiences and consumers warming up to AI chatbots, now is the perfect time for retailers to try shopping assistants for their unique needs. There are numerous ways to implement digital shopping assistants in retailers, and various platforms to choose from. If your retail business is looking for a comprehensive solution that can help you get started with chatbots, Quiq is here to help.

Quiq is a conversational customer engagement platform designed for the retail industry. The goal of Quiq is to help retailers deliver exceptional shopping experiences with every interaction, and our chatbot system does just that. The Quiq platform supports messaging across a range of channel types, including text, web chat, social chat, Apple Business Chat, and Google’s Business Messages. Retailers can use as few or as many channels as they need to communicate with consumers effectively.

With multiple chatbot options, rich messaging experiences, and various integration options, Quiq is here to help you build the best virtual shopping assistant for your retail business. Try Quiq for yourself by scheduling a live demo today.

7 Ways to Get Ahead of Holiday Customer Service Issues

Posted on November 16, 2021April 26, 2023 Lauren Winder

Do you hear that? The tingling of bells… The unpacking of thousands of twinkling lights… the entire retail industry taking a deep breath in anticipation of customer service issues…

While everyone is jumping for joy at the coming holiday season, you’re a little less enthused. You know that while it’s lucrative, it’s also extremely tough on your customer service team.

The holiday shopping season is basically here, but there’s still time to get ahead of the avalanche of customer service issues that await you.

40% of retail executives expect double-digit online growth.

Between pandemic pressures and logistical issues, this year might be tough. Even though brick-and-mortar stores will see more business than in 2020, shoppers continue to do most of their shopping online. 40% of retail executives expect double-digit online growth, according to Deloitte’s 2021 holiday retail survey.

This could put even greater stress on your customer service team. Now’s the time to come together and strategize the next few months with your team.

Keep reading for seven key tactics to get ahead of the holiday rush.

1. Start preparing now

So, the holiday shopping season has effectively started.

With inventory and shipping delays, shoppers are worried about getting their holiday gifts in time this year. According to Deloitte, 68% of shoppers plan to shop before Thanksgiving this year, compared to 61% in 2020.

Of those looking to start shopping earlier this year, 49% cite potential shipping issues, and 47% say stockout issues are responsible for their early-bird habits. With holiday shopping already underway (and the cash register already chiming), the support messages will be a-ringing

If you haven’t already seen an uptick in customer support issues, you’ll likely see it soon. This means you need to start preparing now. With just a few weeks before we’re deep into Christmas cheer, any strategies you plan to implement must be simple and work seamlessly into your existing workflow. Whether you need to scale up your team or invest in technology, you’re running out of time.

2. Strategize based on last year’s performance

It’s easy to get through a holiday season and never look back. You’re tired, your team is exhausted, and you have another year to plan for. But now’s the time to (quickly) pause and reflect.

Take another look at last year’s numbers. What can you learn from them?

Customer service KPIs

Revenue: Was last year a high-performing year for the business? Use this along with market indicators for 2021 to predict how busy the holiday season will be.
CSAT: How did your team perform last year? If you had high customer satisfaction scores, continue putting effort into your current strategies. If customer satisfaction dipped over the holidays, identify the contributing factors.
Wait times: How long did customers have to wait to connect with a customer service agent during your heaviest service windows? If your wait times suffered, see what processes you can put into place this year in order to save some time. Be upfront with your customers about their expected wait. You may need to hire more staff to cover the extra volume.
Popular platforms: Which platforms received the highest volume of customer support issues? Did you receive a lot of Facebook messages? Email questions? Prioritize resources and training for the types of communications with the most action.

Take a second to look at this information and see what insights you can extract from last year’s data. It’ll give you a great starting point to help you build your 2022 strategy.

3. Improve your knowledge base

Sure, not all customers will bother searching for the answer to their questions before reaching out to your overwhelmed customer service team. But some will. And some even prefer it over chatting with a team member.

Add seasonal information to your knowledge base to help answer frequent holiday-themed questions. Add articles on Black Friday, holiday shipping, your return policy, upcoming deals, holiday service hours, and any other questions you can get ahead of.

If you haven’t built out your knowledge base yet, a simple homepage banner and/or link in the footer can work in a pinch. Even if only 5% of customers view this information, that’s 5% fewer conversations your team must navigate.

4. Make your return policy easy to find

The holidays already inspire more returns, and online shopping just adds to the mix. While some online retailers like to hide their return policy as an (ill-advised) strategy, customers notice—and it might just turn them away.

More than a third (34%) of consumers surveyed by PowerReviews say that refund and return policies will have more impact on their holiday purchase decisions this year. Even more indicative of the current shopping landscape, 44% said return policies even influence which gifts they purchase.

So making your return policies easy to find and easy to navigate benefits your team two-fold: It can prevent customer service issues and potentially increase sales.

5. Provide holiday training

The holiday rush can get the best of even your most senior support staff. During a good year, customers are stressed and in a hurry to buy their gifts and refocus their energy on their families. And this year… It’s even more brutal.

Combine 18+ months of pandemic fatigue with the inventory shortages and delivery delays, and you get customers with a much shorter temper. And according to Deloitte’s survey, 21% of consumers hold retailers and sellers responsible for delays, which could make for some very aggressive conversations.

This is a great time to get the team together for a short refresher. Remind your team that they’re valuable, but also reinforce your customer sensitivity. Some patience and compassion will go a long way to elevate your customer experience.

6. Embrace automation

One of the best ways to support your team is with automation—and no, that’s not a dirty word.

You can use chatbots and AI in a variety of ways to reduce the burden on your team and increase customer satisfaction while maintaining a human connection your customers crave.

Here are some ways you can integrate automation into your holiday customer service strategy:

Answer simple FAQs
Route questions to the appropriate department
Suggest similar items to those in your customers’ carts
Estimate shipping times
Notify website visitors of specials, deals or delays
Tell customers when items they’ve viewed are back in stock
Gather customer feedback

There are endless ways you can integrate chatbots and other automation tools into your customer service tech stack. The goal is to simply solve issues at scale without burning out your support team.

7. Prep your social media team

It’s vital that you take a look at all your customer service channels before the big holiday rush begins—especially social media.

Sprout Social predicts an 18% increase in average social media messages in November and December this year. This includes Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, with the latter expecting the most significant holiday boost at 44%.

Enterprises see the biggest social media message jump over the holidays:

Small businesses: 15%
Mid-sized businesses: 12%
Enterprises: 23%

These numbers tell us you can’t forget to include social media in your holiday planning. Customers flock to social media for gift guides, influencer suggestions, and more, so it’s vital you meet them where they are and provide optimal customer service.

Provide your social media team with training to assist customers.
Write a script for commonly asked questions and standard responses.
Share a routing map with them so they know which team member to send which issues to.
Create an elevation plan for when issues need to be taken up the ladder for resolution.
Assign customer service team members to manage your social media inbox.
Set up auto-responses that are tailored to frequently asked questions, such as “Where’s my package?” and “What’s the return policy?”

Since social media platforms are highly visible, it’s important to service these questions thoroughly and quickly to improve customer satisfaction.

Holiday shopping is already here

Your window for getting ahead of the customer service rush is quickly closing. With holiday shopping already starting, the pressure on your team is mounting.

When you work in e-commerce, it takes grit to get through the holiday season. With the shopping window getting longer and pressures getting higher, it’s going to be extra tough to solve customer service issues with a smile.

We hope these strategies help you put together a concrete plan so you and your team feel more prepared and more confident in tackling the rest of the year.

More than just streamlining work processes, don’t forget to take the time this season to show your team how much you appreciate them. Be sure to show your support throughout the holiday season.

Get ahead of customer service issues with Quiq

When you need help connecting with your customers across multiple messaging platforms, Quiq can help. Quickly get up and running for the holiday season, integrate with your CRMs, and build messaging trees to elevate your customer experience instantly.

Facebook Messenger for Business 101

Posted on November 11, 2021August 16, 2022 Lauren Winder

You’re connecting with your customers via email. Your customer support team is available by phone. And now you’ve heard you need to be on Facebook Messenger for business—but you’re left wondering: What is it, and how does it work?

We’ll break it down for you, along with some tips and tricks for getting the most out of the platform.

What is Facebook Messenger for business?

Messenger is Facebook’s app and platform for sending text, pictures, video, and link messages. Using Facebook Messenger for business allows your customers to message you directly (and vice versa) using your company page from the Messenger mobile app or the chat window via desktop.

There are several ways Facebook users can reach out to you using Messenger. They can:

Send a message from your company’s Facebook page
Search for your business’ username in the Messenger app
Engage with a click-to-messenger ad
Follow a messenger link
Follow a QR code

In order to mitigate spam, Facebook requires users to reach out to your page via Messenger first before you can send a message.

Why should you use Facebook Messenger?

Adding Messenger as a way for customers to communicate with your brand is just the next evolution of customer service. Here are four ways Facebook Messenger enhances your customer experience and improves your business.

1. Be more available to your customers.

Customers are more likely to engage with your brand in the same way they engage with family and friends. You’re available the moment they wish to connect with you, and in a platform they’re already using. You’re more top of mind, and it takes less effort to take quick action.

It’s as simple as being available where your customers are: Facebook. 64% of people across generations said they prefer messaging to a call or email, according to a Facebook IQ survey.

Customers expect customization and personalization from brands, and that’s expanded to when and how they communicate with you. Many shoppers today like the personal and informal service that messaging inspires. It allows them to get immediate responses from a brand without having to respond instantly themselves. They’re in control and can connect quickly but still at their leisure.

2. Give your customers a better experience.

The customer experience is super important, especially for e-commerce brands that have few opportunities to impress their base. When it comes to creating a good customer experience, Facebook Messenger for business hits multiple targets.

Messenger improves the chances of your company hitting three of the top four criteria customers say indicates a “good customer experience,” according to a Zendesk survey:

Resolve issues quickly (61%)
Support is available 24/7 (i.e., in real-time) (42%)
Support is available through my desired contact method (32%)

And the data proves that messaging produces results. It has a CSAT of 98%—the highest across channels, according to Zendesk.

3. Resolve customer issues faster.

Messenger provides the perfect opportunity for chatbot integration. You can provide quick information to your customers while easing the stress on your support team.

In our own survey of Quiq clients, 70–80% of inbound inquiries via Messenger are resolved with automation. Where’s-my-order inquiries have an even higher automation resolution rate at 86%.

When Facebook users first head to your page, you can have a welcome or get-started message waiting for them. Putting together a few pre-programmed responses will go a long way. Your customers get the quick answers they need, while your customer support team is free to spend more time providing high-value service.

4. Increase sales.

Yep, you read that right. Using Facebook Messenger can actually help you increase sales.

Sometimes it’s as simple as being available when your customers need you. 65% of people said they’d be more likely to shop with a business they can contact via chat, according to Facebook IQ.

And 69% of surveyed Facebook users who message businesses say it makes them feel more confident about the brand, according to a Facebook-commissioned survey.

Plus, you can tap into a variety of creative strategies to increase conversions and even sell to your customers with Messenger.

How to use Facebook Messenger.

If you’ve used Facebook in the last ten years, getting started with Messenger should be fairly simple. But we’ve provided some basics to get you started.

Make sure messaging for your business page is turned on. (It’s on by default.)
Create a username for your page so users can easily search for it in the Facebook Messenger app.
Tell users you’re active on Messenger by earning a “Very Responsive” badge. Keep your response times under 15 minutes and maintain at least a 90% response rate to see this appear on your page. (This should be very easy to do with the right bot integration.)

An important note for using Messenger: Facebook requires users to send the first message before you can chat with them, so it’s crucial you give them ample opportunities to make the first move.

Here are a few ways to encourage messaging:

Add the “Send Message” button to your page and your posts
Create a welcome message that will appear when users head to your Facebook Page.
Create click-to-messenger ads on Facebook. These ads will appear in your prospects’ feeds and encourage them to start a conversation with you.
Add your Messenger link or a QR code to various marketing materials when you want to start a conversation.

Once a customer messages you, you only have 24 hours to respond. After the 24 hours elapses, you can send one additional non promotional message before the conversation expires.

Facebook Messenger enables creative strategies to increase sales.

Like with all customer communication platforms, it’s important to have a solid strategy to provide top-tier customer service and capitalize on sales.

Adding organic conversations to your customer journey is a great way to build trust and brand loyalty.

Create a post advertising an attractive discount or fun quiz and instruct users to click on the “Send Message” button to receive the offer. Once they’ve initiated the message, you’re free to send additional promotional messages over the next 24 hours. (But avoid spamming!)
Personalize messages with information from the platform, including name, location, age, and other demographics.

Facebook’s robust advertising capabilities extend to Messenger for business. Any information you gathered during conversations with your target audience can be used to increase the efficacy of your Facebook ads.

Create a target audience using the conversations in Messenger. Start with users who have sent messages, and start refining the information you gained from those conversations. What type of apparel do they buy? What products did they show interest in? You can also use demographic information within Facebook to narrow down your audience even further.
Create a lookalike audience of the customers who have messaged you and target them with similar messaging.

Quiq: Your CX wingman.

We get it. Adding another messaging platform to your already-full customer experience seems daunting—but we have your back.

Quiq is the future of business-to-consumer messaging. Our leading conversational AI platform will help you connect with customers at scale.

Support customers directly in Messenger
Route messages between chatbots and live agents
Continue conversations across channels

See what you can do with Quiq.

Using Conversational Commerce as an Alternative to In-Store Shopping

Posted on November 9, 2021September 22, 2023 Lauren Winder

Conversational commerce isn’t just a catchy alliteration — it’s a trend taking the retail world by storm. Conversational commerce refers to transactions that take place between consumers and brands through digital conversations. These conversational commerce platforms can be powerful tools, especially in a market that’s increasingly moving away from in-store shopping.

In this article, we look at how to use conversational commerce to enhance online retail experiences. We’ll dive into the market trends regarding in-store and online shopping, the benefits and uses of commercial commerce for online shopping, and how conversational commerce works so retailers can enhance their consumers’ online retail experiences.

COVID-19’s Impact on Retail Businesses

Retail shopping has primarily relied on in-store experiences in the past. In brick-and-mortar locations, consumers can physically view items and get help from in-store employees. However, COVID-19 has quickly and dramatically changed the retail landscape. With stay-at-home orders and social distancing and sanitation guidelines, new shopping trends have emerged.

As the world has started to heal from the global pandemic, country-wide lockdowns have begun to ease up. However, in the aftermath of lockdown, consumer behaviors and priorities have shifted. People’s income, values, and exposure to alternative shopping methods have shifted their preferences significantly, powering numerous market trends since the beginning of the pandemic.

Some common changes in consumer behavior and preference include the following:

Focus on health and safety: While consumer concerns about health and safety are slowly decreasing, many consumers are still uncomfortable visiting public places, especially stores they visit less frequently. In fact, nearly 70% of consumers in markets where the pandemic is stabilizing are still concerned for the health of others.
Focus on digital experiences: The lockdowns that resulted from the pandemic created a surge of eCommerce, especially from new consumers who’d previously never used online shopping options. Now that more consumers are aware of their online shopping options and how to use them, consumers will likely continue using these services and push toward improved online experiences.
Increased convenience: Even before COVID-19, consumers were moving toward more convenient shopping experiences as a collective. The pandemic rapidly pushed this trend forward. As a result, many retailers had to quickly implement services focused on conveniences, such as online shopping options, curbside pickup options, and delivery services. Even as the world emerges from the pandemic, consumer preferences for convenience will likely push retailers to maintain or expand these services.

The challenge for retailers is that they need to leverage these trends and adjust their practices with changing consumer preferences. Conversational commerce is one way that retailers are working toward these adjustments.

The Benefits of Conversational Commerce For Shoppers

Conversational commerce has risen as a consumer and retailer favorite since the beginning of the pandemic. Conversational commerce works by using chatbots, brand specialists, and messaging platforms to enable conversations between consumers and a brand. These conversations often occur on messaging platforms like web chats, text messaging apps, Apple Business Chat, and even Facebook Messenger. Chatbots power many of these operations, which process messages from consumers to provide relevant responses, involving a live customer service representative if needed.

Conversational commerce platforms provide consumers with an on-demand shopping interface that enables them to engage with a live or virtual representative that can assist them with anything they need. This convenience presents shoppers with a wide range of benefits, including the following:

Enhanced customer support: Conversational commerce platforms give consumers access to a live or virtual assistant at any time, anywhere. The assistant can answer their questions, help them preview products, and even complete transactions using the digital channels consumers prefer, including text, live chat, and social media messaging platforms.
Faster resolution: Chatbots in conversational commerce platforms also help streamline the problem resolution process. Bots can answer the majority of common questions and route consumers to a live specialist if the problem is more complex. This process results in quick resolution times — many people use chatbots for quick problem resolution when they are concerned with their shopping experience.
Less research: Chatbots also help streamline the shopping experience for consumers. Instead of browsing page after page to find what they want, consumers can give a description of the product to a chatbot. The chatbot’s artificial intelligence then uses the description to find a product that best suits the consumers’ needs, which reduces the time they spend browsing for products, making the experience more pleasurable.
Greater personalization: One of the big trends among consumers today is a desire for personalization. Today, nearly 80% of consumers want more personalization from retailers to enhance their shopping experience. Conversational commerce helps with personalization by connecting consumers with support teams that offer specific product recommendations and offers.
More touchpoints: Conversational commerce gives consumers multiple points of communication to reach brands. Retailers can add chatbots and text messaging communication to email and phone calling methods, maximizing the touchpoints available for consumers. This way, consumers can talk with their retailers in the way they’re most comfortable.

These benefits have already significantly impacted the online retail world, especially when considering that more consumers want shopping experiences that offer messaging services for support. In this way, conversational commerce is incredibly helpful for shoppers.

The Benefits of Conversational Commerce for Retailers

In addition to benefitting consumers, conversational commerce helps retailers improve their eCommerce operations. Some of the most significant benefits retailers experience from implementing conversational commerce include:

Improved responsiveness: Conversational commerce presents an effective way to generate engagement with consumers. When retailers send in-app messages to consumers, they can get five times more opens than push notifications. As a result, consumers are more likely to respond to those messages.
Enhanced efficiency: Chatbots are also cost- and time-efficient compared to live chat options. Chatbots can handle the majority of questions quickly, respond to hundreds of consumer questions at once, and are running around the clock. This efficiency saves time and labor for the customer service team, allowing them to direct their efforts toward the most complex tasks and problems.
Enhanced consumer relationships: Because it’s available 24/7 and offers enhanced consumer experiences, conversational commerce helps create more positive user experiences. This feature generates goodwill between retailers and their consumers, making them more likely to be repeat buyers.
Streamlined selling: Chatbots can promote and upsell products based on consumer queries. For example, if a buyer is looking to buy a specific type of shirt, the chatbot can show the consumer potential accessories, pants, and jackets to create a complete outfit.
Reduced abandonment rates: Cart abandonment is a common problem for online retailers — consumers may be distracted and forget to check out, may not find an answer to a question they have about the product, or simply second-guess themselves. Commercial commerce helps reduce cart abandonment by offering responses to questions quickly, reaching out to consumers with unfinished orders, and checking in on consumers as they browse a website.
Abundant data: Commercial commerce platforms are also valuable sources of consumer data. Tracking behaviors, issues, and questions can help strengthen retailers’ ability to create powerful marketing campaigns and improve their online platforms.

With these numerous benefits to both consumers and retailers, it’s no wonder that conversational commerce is booming. The market size of conversational commerce platforms was estimated to be around $5.94 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow to $30.45 billion by 2027.

8 Ways Retailers Can Use Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce is a powerful way to address the changing priorities of consumers. The question is how to use conversational commerce from a practical perspective, which will be different for every retailer.

There are multiple ways retailers can use chatbots and automated conversations in their retail stores. Below are eight conversational commerce examples retailers can use to help improve various aspects of their stores:

1. Provide Fast Customer Service

One of the common ways retailers use conversational commerce is as a customer service program. Using this approach, retailers automate responses to consumer questions, which can include everything from product questions and sales to order problems. The system can also be set up to route the shopper to a live support specialist if their issue is more complex.

If retailers can provide quick access to reliable, helpful customer support, consumers will be more likely to make a purchase, as they won’t have to wait around for an answer to their question or concern.

2. Share Product Updates

Retailers can also use conversational commerce to share product updates with previous buyers. New models, software updates, and sales can all be shared via SMS or messaging services, keeping consumers informed about their options and encouraging them to buy or upgrade. This feature allows consumers to continue buying from the same retailer rather than seek out another store when they need a new product.

3. Communicate Current Promotions

Many consumers report that discounts affect their decision to complete an online purchase. Retailers can lean into this trend by using conversational commerce to communicate promotions. Send out text messages to consumers notifying them of sales and use a website chatbot to alert visitors when they arrive on the landing page. Retailers can even set it up so consumers at the checkout screen see a notification of applicable discounts when they start the checkout process.

4. Obtain Post-Survey Responses

Every retailer wants feedback from their consumers, especially if they’re looking to make a change. To ensure they get plenty of accurate responses, retailers can set up a conversational commerce platform to reach out to consumers and visitors for surveys. Retailers can send surveys for products after consumers have received them or set up a questionnaire on their website to ask consumers how they can improve.

5. Cross-Sell and Upsell

Upselling and cross-selling strategies help retailers earn more money by selling products to consumers at the checkout page. Retailers can set up a bot to suggest items commonly purchased with the products in a consumers’ cart or notify them of an upgrade option. Shops can also utilize messaging services to notify recent purchasers of accessories they may want for their new product.

6. Automate Cart Recovery

Abandoned carts are a common issue for retailers, but commercial commerce can help. In the event that a shopper abandons their cart, a retailer can set up their system to send out an automated message to the consumer. Retailers can also program commercial bots to offer a cart recovery option, so it’s even easier for the consumer to return to their potential purchase. Discounts can also be effective in this situation, so retailers may want to push discount offers to people who abandon their carts as an incentive to finish buying.

7. Offer Accurate Order Updates

Everyone knows the feeling of anticipation when they place an order. Stores can generate goodwill with their consumers by offering order updates to let them know when their order is processed and sent out. Delivery notifications are also a practical option. Retailers can set this feature up through text, messaging services, or email, so their consumers get the information they need using their preferred communication method.

8. Increase Customer Reviews

Reviews are a powerful marketing tool for consumers — 91% of younger consumers between the age of 18 to 34 rely on online reviews. Therefore, it’s essential to collect reviews for your products. Conversational commerce is a powerful way to automate reaching out for reviews. Set up automated messages after a shopper has received their product asking for quick reviews or surveys. Be sure to ask questions consumers can easily answer from a mobile phone, such as satisfaction ratings, photos of the product, shoutouts on social media, and short written or video reviews.

How to use conversational commerce depends highly on a retailer’s priorities and operations. Before crafting a solution, retailers should consider their store’s goals, identify opportunities for improvement, and look at their current contact options. Some conversational commerce methods will work better than others, so it’s essential for retailers to develop a solution that addresses their unique needs. Testing specific variables will ensure retailers get the most out of their conversational commerce solutions.

Now is the perfect time for retailers to enhance their online stores with conversational commerce. If you’re interested, Quiq is here to help you get started.

Explore Conversational Commerce for Retail With Quiq

Conversational commerce is an ideal way to address the changing needs of consumers in a post-pandemic world. But even beyond COVID-19, your retail business can benefit. This type of platform offers a personalized experience for consumers while improving productivity, supporting customer service, boosting retention, and increasing sales. There are many ways to implement conversational commerce in your retail store, and Quiq is here to help you every step of the way.

Quiq is a conversational consumer engagement platform that helps retailers deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our platform supports messaging across text messaging, web chat, social, Apple Business Chat, and Google’s Business Messages, so you can use as few or as many channels as you need to communicate with your consumer base. With easy integration, multiple bot options, and rich messaging experiences, Quiq has everything retailers need to incorporate conversational commerce into their stores.

Try Quiq for yourself today by scheduling a live demo.

How to Increase Sales While Managing the Holiday Rush

Posted on November 3, 2021September 22, 2023 Lauren Winder

Are you tired of hearing it yet? The holiday season is just around the corner. This year poses a lot of challenges, from broken supply chains to slow shipping to stressed-out customers. But among the overwhelming support requests is a golden opportunity to send sales skyrocketing. Continue reading to learn how to increase sales while managing your customer service this holiday season.

Expect a holly, jolly holiday for sales.

Last year’s holiday shopping was hard to predict. But according to the National Retail Foundation, sales jumped 8.3% from 2019, surprising everyone. And e-commerce sales grew even more, with a 23.9% increase, despite pandemic-related difficulties.

This year, the retail landscape is even more uncertain, but the future’s still bright. Deloitte predicts a 5% year-over-year increase in holiday spending. And 40% of surveyed retail executives expect double-digit online growth.

And with more digital sales also comes more customer support requests. From “where’s my order” to “which size is right for me,” there’s no doubt your agents will be swamped with incoming communications.

Now’s the time to prepare your support team for the influx of business and set them up for success. Here are some ways you can give your team what they need to manage the higher service volume and capitalize on those conversations to increase sales.

1. Get ahead of low inventory and slow shipping.

While shoppers are returning to stores, there’s no shortage of pandemic-related problems. And customers are aware of the looming challenges. 74% of shoppers are concerned about stockouts, according to the Deloitte survey.

Since shoppers know to expect delays, that’ll likely be a deciding factor for which retailer they choose to shop with. Who has a track record of delivering on time? Who is the best at predicting inventory shortages?

And since you as the retailer can anticipate these concerns, you have an opportunity to provide top-tier customer service and attract more customers to your site.

What’ll it take to appease customers and increase sales? Full transparency. Be as upfront with your customers as possible with up-to-date inventory, proactive shipping notifications, and quick service should unexpected delays occur.

Not only will proactive communication alleviate the strain on your customer service team, but it’ll leave customers feeling taken care of during a stressful time—making them more likely to shop with you in the future.

2. Tighten up customer service response times.

We probably don’t have to tell you response times matter. A customer call shouldn’t be put on hold for too long, an email needs a quick reply, and a text message requires almost an immediate response.

It’s just good customer service. It’s even the most critical factor customers use for determining what “good service” even means. A 2020 Zendesk survey reported that 61% of customers say quickly resolving their issue makes for a good customer experience.

Just how fast of a response do customers expect?

	Less than 5 minutes	Less than 1 hour	More than 1 hour
Phone	51%	34%	15%
Chat	28%	55%	17%
Text messaging	8%	44%	48%
Social media	7%	42%	51%
Email	6%	37%	57%

*Percentages are estimates

The scary part is that it only takes one bad experience for roughly half to switch to a competitor. This means tightening up your response times is vital to retail success.

3. Offer multiple ways for customers to contact you.

How many ways can your customers contact you?

Looking back at the Zendesk report, 32% of customers said a good experience offers support through their preferred communication method. Yet, less than 30% of companies provide self-service, live chat, social messaging, in-app messaging, bots or peer-to-peer communities.

This is a golden opportunity to stand out from the competition and offer communication channels that your customers prefer.

While some retailers might be concerned that more communication channels will lead to a more complex contact center, a multi-channel engagement platform will help your team stay on top of conversations no matter where they occur. You can provide your customers with the multiple conversation channels they crave while simplifying management on the back end.

When you give your customers options, they’re often more likely to engage and continue shopping with you.

4. Enhance your team with chatbots.

Give your customer service team what they need most: TIME. The influx of sales goes hand in hand with an increase in customer service requests. If your team spends most of their time answering questions, they can’t provide the proactive service that makes customers want to come back for more.

Instead, bolster your team with chatbots. Use them to welcome customers and route requests to the correct department, ask for customer feedback, and more.

Switching seamlessly back and forth between chatbots and humans will manage your agents’ time while also giving your customers a complete experience.

5. Streamline omnichannel support.

Offering multiple communications channels is vital for excellent customer service, but the real magic comes when you use it in your sales process, too.

Deloitte predicts that 62% of shopping will be online this holiday season, while 33% will be in-store. This is actually a slight increase in in-store shopping over last year as shoppers begin to feel more comfortable in public spaces.

With customers spending more time in stores, they’ll be looking to embrace an omnichannel experience once again. 70% expect companies to collaborate on their behalf, according to the same Zendesk survey, which is often made more difficult with additional communications channels.

Streamlining omnichannel support does two things:

It saves your customer service team time since they have access to previous conversations, purchases, etc.
And it can help customers make a purchasing decision and increase sales.

6. Accept payments right from messaging platforms.

Turn your busy customer contact center into a source of income. While agents answer questions and provide top-tier support, let them capitalize on a great customer experience by completing the sale right in a single messaging platform.

Integrating message-based payments into your messaging platforms is a great way to turn your already-busy contact center into a solid sales strategy. Help customers decide between sizes or answer product questions and then convert the sale right then and there.

Not only will it show customers your team goes above and beyond for their convenience, but it will also help reduce abandoned shopping carts and increase sales.

Pair these tips with Quiq to increase your holiday sales.

Surviving the holidays in the retail world is always a balancing act. You need to provide excellent customer service amid the influx of last-minute shoppers and stressed-out customers. But you still need to focus on increasing sales and capitalize on the season.

Quiq is a conversational platform that helps you:

Connect with your customers on whichever platform they prefer, all from one streamlined interface.
Integrate communications with your CRM of choice, including Oracle, Zendesk, Salesforce, and more.
Use context-aware AI to increase conversion rates, shorten wait times, and increase your average order value.

To learn how you can unlock the power of conversations and help increase sales during the holiday season, schedule a Quiq demo today.

Modernizing Customer Experience with Order Management Automation

Posted on October 22, 2021January 13, 2023 Lauren Winder

eCommerce businesses are continuing to experience rapid growth in online orders in 2021. As a result, customer service teams have become overburdened with a rising volume in “where is my order?” (WISMO) queries and other order-related inquiries. At the same time, consumers have also grown increasingly frustrated with long wait times and the inconvenience of using traditional channels, like phone support, that have proven to fail in meeting shoppers’ expectations for immediate answers to simple, order-related questions.

To solve for both of these operational and customer experience oriented challenges, eCommerce brands must turn to automated, self-service solutions that successfully contain order-related inquiries while providing instantaneous order updates through the messaging and conversational channels that today’s customers prefer.

Here are some of the most popular examples of automated experiences that today’s leading eCommerce brands leverage to provide instantaneous WISMO responses:

Automated Experience for Single Order Lookups

Automated, single-order lookups enable customers to immediately get order status information on their latest purchase through conversational channels like web chat, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and more in just 3 easy steps.

Customers simply need to start a conversation through their messaging channel of choice, enter their email to verify their account, and select “View Order”.

Through an integration with popular shipping APIs like EasyPost, conversational automation solutions can instantly provide consumers with their most recent order status.

Proactive, Automated Order Status Updates

Today’s leading eCommerce brands also leverage proactive order notifications through conversational channels to keep their customers informed on the status of their order as it progresses towards their doorstep.

In the example above, a customer opts in to automated Facebook Messenger order status notifications from their initial order confirmation email. After opting in, the customer is sent a series of push notifications through Facebook Messenger that informs them of each change in their order status.

Seamless Transitions to Customer Service Platforms

Of course, while conversational automation is highly effective at successfully containing the vast majority of order-related inquiries, not every inbound issue can be resolved through self-service channels. For the remaining inquiries that are too complex to be solved through self-service channels, automated experiences must also be able to sync with popular Customer Service Platforms like Zendesk, Oracle, and more to provide seamless transitions to live agents.

By connecting with popular CSPs, automated experiences can greatly drive agent efficiency by verifying account information before inbound tickets reach the agent and by supplying them summaries and key details from customers’ interactions with the conversational AI.

The Benefit of Providing Automated WISMO Responses

By providing customers with the option to get fast, self-service responses to WISMO inquiries, eCommerce brands like TechStyle Fashion Group have been able to successfully contain over 85% of inbound, order-related inquiries while simultaneously driving 95% customer satisfaction.

Is your brand experiencing an overwhelming volume of WISMO inquiries? Contact us today to learn how we can work with your customer service team to deploy a highly-intelligent automation solution in a matter of weeks.

5 Examples of Omnichannel Strategies That Will Boost Your Holiday Sales

Posted on October 20, 2021April 1, 2024 The Quiq Team

This year, holiday shopping will be more digital than ever before. As consumers continue their shift to online channels and major retailers cancel in-person Black Friday sales, brands must quickly adapt through new omnichannel tactics that capitalize on surges in online traffic. Here are five strategies for doing just that.

5 Examples of Top Retailers with Brilliant Omni-Channel Strategies For Holidays

1. The Gift Recommendation Engine – Guided Selling

Digging through endless product listings, looking for the perfect gift, is a tedious and challenging process for holiday shoppers.

However, AI-powered assistants, used by leading brands like Nike Jordan and Lane Bryant, make it easy and frictionless for shoppers to find the precise gift for their recipient.

Deployed on your web site, in apps, or social channels like Facebook Messenger or SMS, these intelligent automated agents can quickly interact with users and recommend some great options:

Earlier this year, one of our customers, an Iconic jewelry brand did just that leading up to another gift-heavy holiday: Valentine’s Day. In previous seasonal campaigns using Facebook Messenger, the retailer’s social managers and sales associates were swamped with the need to respond to customers’ inquiries.

To address this, the retailer deployed an AI-powered conversational shopping feature on Messenger that made personalized gift recommendations at scale. They quickly found that consumers were 4X more likely to make a purchase when they receive such guided sales assistance, compared to those who are unassisted.

By clicking on a social ad, shoppers were seamlessly guided to Facebook Messenger and offered a brief interactive quiz with gift recommendations based on who the gift recipient was, the gender and the price range, selected from a group of products chosen by the retailer for those profiles. The AI-powered assistants also handled free text queries, and customers could shop for products online at the retailer’s site or find the nearest physical store.

We’ve all had that experience when shopping for a friend, where you discover a product or item that you’d prefer to be on the receiving end of rather than giving. To address this, the iconic retailer also provided shoppers the option to send their friends and family links and images of on Messenger gifts that they want for themselves, accompanied by a small note: “Hint hint…This is at the top of my wish list.”

The results: Half of the quiz takers received a gift recommendation, leading to a 28x return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).

And, because AI-powered assistants love to work all the time, they also helped relieve customer service by efficiently handlings FAQs.

2. Gift FAQ & Customer Service Engine

Gifts purchased over the holidays are wrapped not only in ribbons and pretty paper but are enveloped in countless questions about sizes, style options, and prices. The season of joy is also the season of customer service, a stressful time for brands to handle the massive volume of inquiries.

In fact, 54% of customer service requests are taking place outside regular business hours. A vast number of those requests are happening on messaging platforms since those are channels that consumers already use.

That’s where conversational AI comes in this holiday season. Intelligent chatbots work diligently and accurately day and night, providing a front line for all queries from customers and passing on some queries to human agents only when they get too complex. This allows your team to focus on driving sales and new purchases instead of an endless queue of customer service inquiries.

3. Digital Holiday Coupons

One of the best traits of intelligent chatbots is that they never get tired of pointing out the great holiday offers you have. This means that brands can reinvent promotions.

Regional grocery chain H-E-B did just that with their conversational AI. The grocery reinvented discount coupons by delivering them to more than 13 million customers weekly, personalized to the declared shopping needs of the recipients.

Automated notifications let customers browse the deals through button clicks or free text requests, even when they were standing in the store. The open rate for the notifications: 77%. Percentage of opened deals that were saved by users: 70%.

4. Convert Holiday Enthusiasm into Sales

Facebook is a platform designed for engagement and, during the holiday season, that engagement kicks into high gear with shoppers expressing their excitement through post-likes and comments.

This holiday season, Facebook is also offering a nice new gift for marketers. Facebook Messenger is expanding its capabilities to allow marketers to privately message shoppers who have left positive comments on their brands’ posts.

All of those shoppers commenting “this looks awesome!”, “I’ve got to get this for my sister!” can easily be turned from mere commentators into new customers. Combined with conversational AI, this opens up a whole new channel to convert positive comments into sales at scale. See this experience below:

Contact our conversational experts to learn more about this experience.

5. Turn the Holiday Rush into Real Consumer Insights

The rush of consumers during the holidays is like a large polling sample that can provide tons of answers — if brands can only figure out the questions.

A rush of customers looking for this season’s hot gift item, for instance, could answer a number of questions that help uncover and define your target customer persona.

But the trick is efficiently capturing holiday shoppers’ information, at scale, and quickly turning it into insights.

Take California wine and spirits brand E. & J. Gallo Winery. To engage shoppers of their new Rosé product line, they developed “Rosé Your Way” AI-powered experience, which was introduced to consumers via targeted ads on Facebook Messenger, Facebook Newsfeeds, and Instagram.

The digital assistants guided consumers through a series of questions to recommend the ideal Gallo Rosé, followed by personalized content that included the best recipes to go with the recommended wine, and finished with a customer satisfaction survey.

The results: 90% of the 25,000 engaged consumers completed the Rosé recommender. Gallo was able to determine the most popular Rosé flavor preferences, drinking styles, and occasions. When follow-up push notifications were sent based on those preferences, 60% of the messages were opened.

Unwrapping It All

With some planning – and the use of intelligent, automated, always-on conversational helpers – brands can soar through the holiday season by building a dedicated fan base attracted to personalized recommendations, customized deals, and prompt customer service attention.

And, when the rush is over, the brand can quickly assess what worked, what didn’t, and what was missing.

Ready to boost your sales and drive higher performance this holiday? See which strategy is the best fit for your organization. Learn more.

Three Ways Conversational AI Can Boost Your Customer Service During the Holidays

Posted on October 18, 2021January 13, 2023 Lauren Winder

With the holidays quickly approaching, eCommerce brands are bracing for an unprecedented volume of online orders. With this influx of sales, however, brands can also expect a massive influx of unmanageable customer service inquiries.

In recent posts, we’ve talked about how conversational AI can help boost revenue during the holidays.

But, as we approach the year’s end, there are three big reasons why AI-powered agents can prove critical to your customer service during the holiday season.

1. Order Personalization

Automated customer service can not only handle a large volume of inquiries, but it can do so with a level of personalization that would be difficult for human agents to accommodate at scale.

Integrated with backend order systems, Quiq’s Conversational AI can immediately pull up the details shoppers are looking for when contacting customer service, such as when the order will arrive. As wonderful as the holiday season is, it’s a stressful time for consumers as well as for brands, and this kind of frictionless order info, at any time of day or night, can make the experience a pleasant one.

Shoppers are also more likely to engage with personalized customer service responses. Our team at Quiq has found that consumers respond to personalized engagement with a clickthrough rate that is almost three times higher than otherwise.

2. Instant Reminders of the Season’s Hottest Products

It wouldn’t be a real holiday season unless some item was the star – the product that everyone wants, but that sells out too quickly.

Intelligent automation helps brands handle and manage this surge in demand. They can minimize the effort to find out if this year’s hot product is still available while providing the immediate option to subscribe to notifications about future product availability leading up to the holidays.

Automated agents can also intelligently steer the demand toward similar or complementary products that are in stock, as an addition to, or a substitute for, that hot item.

Through these finely tuned efforts, automated agents can help keep consumers favorably engaged with your brand, turning the experience into a rewarding one even if the product they initially were searching for was out of stock.

3. Proactively Addressing Holiday Friction

Like any relationship, customer relationships require steady maintenance and the ability to respond instantly if needed.

Automated agents can help support that kind of consumer-wrangling, such as through the recently available ability to send messages to users on Facebook Messenger right from the comments about your brand’s posts on a Facebook page.

These public comments, of course, are often occasions when customers ask questions or vent their frustrations, so they’re not always flattering. A quick response automatically sent through messaging can defuse an adverse situation and demonstrate to others that your brand is responsive, proactive, and ready to improve their shopping experience.

Conversational AI Makes Sense for the Holidays

AI-powered automated agents make sense for customer service – especially during the holidays when there is a surge of inquiries, orders, and complaints. These agents help brands maintain constant, 24-hour contact with customers and would-be customers over their preferred communication channels. Especially for younger consumers, those channels involve texting or messaging.

Intelligent automation can handle many of the mundane inquiries, handing off the communication to live agents for the more complex ones. They also provide a steady stream of high-level personalization, offer detailed analytics to showcase what responses worked best and provide a more difficult target for fraudsters than do human agents.

During the holiday season, brands must bring their varsity team to the field. AI-powered chatbots from Quiq know how to run the right plays, again and again, at any time of day or night. Learn more from our conversational consultants.

6 Ways to Drive More eCommerce Sales This Holiday Season

Posted on October 14, 2021August 16, 2022 Lauren Winder

This year, holiday shopping will shift to eCommerce like never before. Once again, eCommerce sales are projected to grow this holiday season as consumers continue to transition to cyber-week sales.

To capitalize on this season’s unprecedented spike in online traffic and digital purchase behavior, top eCommerce brands are turning to automated shopping assistants that act as key revenue drivers and provide the sort of highly personalized assistance shoppers would traditionally receive from an in-store experience.

Deploying highly intelligent, automated shopping assistants during peak seasons has proven to increase sales conversion rates as high as 4X.

Here are 6 of the most common ways that leading eCommerce brands leverage automated assistants to drive more revenue during the holidays.

1. Proactive Product Suggestions

Highly-intelligent, automated assistants are capable of identifying shoppers with high purchase intent and proactively engaging them with upsell opportunities that increase Average Order Value (AOV). For example, when online shoppers add new products to their cart, automated onsite assistants can initiate a conversation and suggest additional products that are frequently purchased along with the items recently added to the cart.

Through such highly-personalized engagements, in a conversational format, eCommerce brands can lift AOV while providing convenient suggestions that support their customers’ journeys.

2. Guided Gift Recommendations

For shoppers unsure of the right gift or product to buy this season, automated shopping assistants can provide personalized suggestions that guide shoppers to the perfect holiday present. Automated onsite shopping assistants can deliver unique gift suggestions through a series of quick questions that touch on the shopper’s price range as well as the gift recipient’s gender, age, and preferences.

Automated gift recommendations have been proven to drive 4x higher sales conversion rates across shoppers who engage in guided sales assistance when compared to unassisted shoppers.

3. Simplify Repeat Purchases

eCommerce brands can also leverage onsite assistants to make the repeat purchase process as seamless and straightforward as possible. By developing persistent profiles based on each shopper’s personalized data and repeat site visits, intelligent shopping assistants can proactively initiate new conversations with returning customers looking to make a repeat purchase.

By leveraging personalization data to identify and engage repeat customers, eCommerce brands can significantly reduce friction and provide a premium shopping experience for their VIP and returning customers with high purchase intent.

4. Reengage Cart Abandons

As holiday shoppers contemplate a variety of different offers and products, it’s inevitable for some online purchase processes and shopping carts to be abandoned. By leveraging conversational re-engagements, however, high-intent shoppers can be reminded of products waiting in their carts and be offered special discounts that nudge them into returning and completing their purchase.

By leveraging conversational automation to re-engage abandoned carts, eCommerce brands have been able to effectively recover up to 20% of incomplete purchases with reminders, promotions, and other automated messages.

5. Automate Responses to FAQs

Leading up to the holidays, shoppers have no shortage of questions and concerns related to online shopping, with “will my order arrive on time?” being one of the most frequent. By providing shoppers with automated, 24/7 support that can instantly answer some of their most frequently asked questions, brands can reduce online shopping friction and common barriers to purchase.

Additionally, by leveraging conversational automation to resolve frequently asked questions in a way that is entirely self-service, customer service agents that would traditionally be required to answer these questions can focus on sales-oriented initiatives during the peak holiday season instead.

6. Convert Sales Receipts into Ongoing Channel for Commerce & Care

Lastly, after a purchase is completed, brands can leverage automated shopping assistants to send digital receipts to customers through conversational channels. By doing so, eCommerce brands can convert traditional receipts into a new avenue for ongoing care and commerce.

This post-purchase conversational connection gives shoppers access to an automated channel for order management or to even purchase additional, related products.

Reinventing Online Shopping for the Holiday’s Most Digital Season Ever

The 2020 holiday season will be eCommerce’s most significant moment to date. More than half of US shoppers have indicated that they will not return to shop with a brand following a poor customer experience, so it is vital for CX and eCommerce leaders to deliver the best possible experience during the season’s rush of new online shoppers.

Interested in deploying an enterprise onsite shopping assistant for your brand? Contact us today to learn how you can deploy a bespoke solution for your website and other conversational channels in a matter of weeks.