Conversational Commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud

All commerce involves an aspect of conversation, whether it be old-school physical sales via shop assistants helping a customer or online sales via users navigating through your website with your help. Yet technology is reimagining and reinventing exactly what role conversation has in the realm of commerce.

Conversational commerce covers a wide range of communicative tools used to support a customer’s sale; chatbots on websites, live support, online messaging apps, voice assistants, and an injection of artificial intelligence.

With the increase in usage of customer service across all channels from website to social media, and from the beginning of customer journeys towards the end, keeping in contact is vital for a sale’s survival.

And so implementing conversational commerce into your short- and long-term business strategy should have been implemented yesterday. The need is compounded by the fact that, during the coronavirus pandemic, 23% of consumers have increased the amount of online purchases they would have bought in store. 

One of the best platforms to build stronger conversations with customers is Demandware (now SFCC), which enables seamless conversations across email, SMS, and social media networks, so that customers can chat with an associate, receive recommendations, make purchases, and get updates on their orders.

Here are some steps that you can take to make better conversation using SFCC.

Cover all social bases

Ensure that you maximize your presence by engaging in all social media platforms that are relevant for your business — all of those spaces where your customers hang out. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. These are all prerequisites. But don’t avoid newer and younger social media like TikTok and Houseparty. 

Each social media platform offers different strategies to interact with customers. Platforms like Houseparty may allow live video calls to answer questions or confirming orders, whereas platforms like Facebook is a class space for messaging. When it comes to an order status, communicating updates over WhatsApp allows customers to reply in real time. Besides better communication, it’s also much cheaper than phone calls.

Automate service

Customers — in fact, no one! — enjoys being kept waiting on the phone, unless you’re a huge fan of classical music. Automate your customer service channels to solve the problems and issues fast and easy. Take advantage of Demandware (now SFCC) and its powerful artificial intelligence to set up automation. Optimize chatbots to cover the core questions of customers, such as “where is my order?”. And for the more complex inquiries, automation can help route each particular case to the right customer service agent, which will cut out unnecessary waiting time, as well as possible frustration with being told to speak to various departments or customer service agents.

Pre and post experience

In order to maximize customer experiences, personalization via automation provides agents with comprehensive insights into each customer, ensuring they’re able to provide quick and efficient help, from navigating the website to cancelling an order.

Having key insight into a customer’s previous purchases and browsed products, delivered by Salesforce’s AI, gives that boost to your customer service team to find out fast and accurate help, which can be provided across all digital channels as well as in store.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Demandware (now SFCC) development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.