Improving Customer Experience Using Conversational Commerce

What if talking to prospective customers and prospective customers can make you more money?

You know it’s true in your heart, but you’re probably like most brands: too busy putting out fire after fire. You “don’t have time for conversational commerce.”

And it’s true that there are varying degrees of importance, but I’m here to tell you that live chat, sales-oriented chat conversations with prospective customers, customer service chat, and, most importantly, customer development conversations are crucial to long-term growth.

Doing this wrong can cost you everything. Get it right, and you can win big. The stakes are high…

And an important note before we begin… Not only is it easy to get wrong, but at least 90% of Ecommerce stores (from a mystery shopper report of over 500 top merchants) are doing it wrong.

So, if you get it right, you’re in the early adopter category and will benefit from what I believe will be a “standard practice” within 10 years.

Here’s the event that goes through the practice of conversational commerce and how to apply it to your business in 2020.

To view the entire virtual summit, visit and subscribe to our YouTube Channel . (This is highly recommended for CEOs and managers who need to understand E-Commerce and technology.)

Thank you to our amazing sponsors:

Gorgias – The customer service helpdesk for Ecommerce.

ManyChat –  Automate & Combine Facebook Messenger and SMS to Grow Your Business

HelpFlow – Helping Ecommerce Stores Save Checkout Abandons with a 24/7 Live Chat Team

Omniconvert– Optimize your customer journey with data-driven decisions.

Make sure to check out our newly launched EcommerceTech Podcast, featuring information on the best of the best tools for Ecommerce marketing as well as book your forever free consultation with Derric Haynie, Chief Ecommerce Technologist, Ecommercetech.io, to learn about all the tools available for your Ecommerce store and which ones will work best for you.

Conversational Commerce for 2020

Session List:

• Selling With Conversational Commerce: The Unfair Advantage For Your Online Brand – Billy McClennan, Partner Manager, Gorgias
• Combining Messenger and SMS Marketing to Close More Sales – By Toby Awalt, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManyChat
• Maximize Conversions with a Strategic Approach to Live Chat – By Jon Tucker, CEO, HelpFlow.com
• Omnipresent Leadership – By Ty Givens, CEO, The Workforce Pro
• Three Power Strategies for Social Impact Success – By Ronny Sage, CEO, ShoppingGives
• Website Teardowns LIVE with Kurt Elster – By Kurt Elster, Senior Ecommerce Consultant, Ethercycle
• Tackling Abandoned Checkouts Before they Happen – By Ahmad Iqbal, Founder, HMS Commerce
• How to Nail Customer Value Optimization – By Valentin Radu, CEO and Founder, Omniconvert
• Panel: Conversational Commerce Tactics with H.V.M.N, Ethercycle & Gorgias

Selling With Conversational Commerce: The Unfair Advantage For Your Online Brand

A talk by Billy McClennan, Partner Manager, Gorgias‍

Overview:

Conversational Commerce is all about increasing conversions through 1:1 real-time interactions.

In this session, you’ll learn how to create engaging multi-channel messaging at scale, including chat campaigns that boost conversion rates and improve ROAS and how to measure the impact on your brand growth.

• Omni Channel Communication
• Live Chat transactions
• Social Media comment management

Key Take-Aways:

1. Providing automations for and streamlining your communication processes can create opportunities to drive more sales.

‍Summary:

Being able to chat with your customers right when they want to talk to you is crucial to your businesses success. Whether someone is looking for information on an order they have placed, or want to learn more about a product they want to buy, having someone available to speak with them will increase your revenue. In fact, 28% of pre-sale chats or SMS messages replied to in under 10 minutes will result in a conversion.

You can have multiple places where you speak with customers – from your email campaigns and SMS messages, to online messenger platforms or directly on your website – you can use these opportunities to converse and upsell with your customers.

Combining Messenger and SMS Marketing to Close More Sales

A talk by Toby Awalt, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManyChat

Overview:

• Why Chat Marketing should be a key part of your 2020 marketing strategy
• Recover lost sales with timely abandoned cart messages
• Importance of review and how to get more though channel marketing
• Being on the right channel at the right time – taking the convo from messenger to text and back

Key Take-Aways:

1. Combining messaging tools allows you to bring back customers/potential customers that got distracted somewhere along the way.
2. You can use chat marketing to get additional contact info (email, phone number, gender, etc.) that will help you engage with your customers.

Summary:

When it comes to Ecommerce, 64% of all traffic comes from a mobile device. There are currently over 5 billion SMS registered devices and even more people accessing social media and chat messages. Combining those channels to reach your customers will plug leaky holes in your funnel and bring back users over and over again.

Getting started might seem overwhelming, but just follow these basic steps to get started and you will be off and running in no time.

1. Plan the experience based on common objections and questions. Look at what your customers are most interested in knowing (product availability, price, discounts, etc.) and use that information to create your conversation flow.
2. Integrate your growth tools (web chats, Facebook ads, direct URLs, etc.) to get more subscribers (i.e., the number of people you can communicate with).
3. Engage with your customers – nurturing them down your sales funnel, sell them products/services they want, close the sale and ask for feedback/reviews/referrals.

Common tactics/communication flows include:

One company utilizing this strategy has seen incredible results! They started with a Facebook Post, followed up in Messenger, then with an SMS that resulted in a live purchase. Within the comments, they offered a BOGO deal to gather a phone number and location, which enabled them to offer localized SMS promotions and attain long-term customers. This campaign resulted in:

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Maximize Conversions with a Strategic Approach to Live Chat

A talk by Jon Tucker, CEO, HelpFlow.com

Overview:

Most stores think of live chat as a customer service cost center, but it can be a massive conversion driver to recover a big chunk of checkout abandons and drive even more conversions earlier in the purchase flow.

Jon Tucker, CEO of HelpFlow.com, has helped 100s of Ecommerce stores drive conversions by providing 24/7 live chat teams at a fraction of the cost of running live chat in house (i.e. their 24/7 team can chat with your visitors).

In this talk, Jon will share the strategies HelpFlow has used to drive nearly $100M in live chat revenue for a wide range of stores:

• How to predict checkout abandons and engage directly in the checkout flow.
• How to integrate live chat into cart abandonment emails to supercharge results.
• How to identify highly engaged prospects prior to checkout, and convert them.

You’ll walk away with actionable insights you can implement quickly to maximize conversions with live chat.

Key Take-Aways:

1. Adding live chat to your website will increase conversions.
2. If you are working to scale your paid ads, live chat is an integral component that will increase your ROI.
3. There are multiple places on your website to add live chat that will help increase revenue.

Summary:

There are multiple points throughout the customer journey that a live chat feature would be useful for your business. Whether a customer is first starting out and has questions about purchasing your products, or they have already bought something and want information on their order, being able to talk with a live person provides the ease of access and personal touch necessary to encourage repeat purchases and retain customers for life. But where should you begin?

There are 3 places on your website to add live chat that will help increase your revenue:

1. Checkout: When customers reach this page, they are ready to buy! However, they can be easily distracted leading to the cart abandonments all stores despise. Adding live chat to the checkout page and reaching out based on certain actions/inactions (Example: customer being on the page for 2 minutes without completing the checkout, or having an average order value of $XX) can dramatically decrease abandonments and even give you the opportunity to upsell right there at checkout.
2. Category and Product Detail Pages: This is where you find high intent customers. Look at how long they have been browsing, or whether they have looked at multiple products. These activities tell you that they are highly interested and it is the perfect time to connect.
3. Email Flows: Get your customers moving from email to shopping with links to live chat in your abandoned cart sequences. “Click Here to chat with a team member”.

As you implement your live chat plans, make sure to avoid the following mistakes:

1. Pre-Chat Forms – DO NOT ask for information before engaging with a customer. This is a barrier that reduces engagement.
2. Response Time – You must respond to a chat in under 10 seconds.
3. Nights and Weekends – 40% of chat requests happen outside of “normal” business hours. Make sure you have someone available to respond in real time 24/7.

Omnipresent Leadership

A talk by Ty Givens, CEO, The Workforce Pro

Overview:

So often, I think we forget that leadership is about the people first. Happy people lead to happy customers, and in 20+ years in leading CX teams, I’ve learned happy people come from clear, concise and tangible communication. Let’s talk about how conversations (yes actual words) lead to informed team members, and more satisfied customers!

Key Take-Aways:

1. Happy employees create happy customers.
2. Allow your staff to use mistakes as an opportunity to improve. ‍

Summary:

When it comes to leading a customer service team, the most important thing to remember is that a happy team will create happy customers. Providing clear communications and using mistakes as an opportunity for learning will create a safe space for your employees to thrive, improving your relationship with your customers and reaping the benefits of all that comes with those positive relationships.

Omnipresent leadership will increase average order values, increase revenue and increase employee satisfaction.

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When leading your team, the most important things to remember are:

1. Connect them to the big picture.
2. Take their feedback and put it into action.
3. Set frequent touch bases for face to face time.
4. Let them be your customer advocate – listen and do something about it!
5. Make them true subject matter experts.

Three Power Strategies for Social Impact Success

A talk by Ronny Sage, CEO, ShoppingGives

Overview:

Do Good, While Doing Well, and Doing it Right: how to navigate Social Impact while growing your business during COVID19 and beyond.

Key Take-Aways:

1. Customers now more than ever care that the businesses they purchase from are giving back.
2. Integrating giving back campaigns into your business strategy will increase conversion rates, average order values and customer lifetime values.

Summary:

Current generations are more committed than ever to supporting brands that give back and support causes they care for. In fact, 78% of Americans believe companies must do more than just make money; they must positively impact society as well.

Defining your values as a company, as a group of individuals and then as a brand will help align you with like minded people, making it easier to build loyal customer relationships. Taking it one step further, once you know what your customers care about, you can create opportunities for them to give back through you, solidifying “doing good while doing well.” ‍

Not only does giving back improve your relationship with your customers, but it also provides actionable data and insights to help improve your conversion rates, average order values and customer lifetime values.

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Website Teardowns LIVE with Kurt Elster

A talk by Kurt Elster, Senior Ecommerce Consultant, Ethercycle

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Overview:

Reviewing websites live for quick conversion rate optimization examination and teardown by the legendary Kurt Elster.

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Key Take-Aways:

1. Make your website as user friendly as possible. Purchasing from your store should be EASY!
2. Always be working on optimizing your store – just make sure you only do one thing at a time.

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Summary:

With so many businesses moving towards Ecommerce, it is more important than ever to have a well functioning, optimized website. Here are some things you can do to improve your website:

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1. Focus on optimizing one thing at a time. Every four weeks, look to move the needle on your weakest metric.
2. Provide social proof! Customer reviews are the best form of advertising.
3. Create customer profiles that allow people to login and see their past orders.
4. If you have a “buy now” button, make sure it links the customer directly to the cart with the product ready to buy. They shouldn’t have to add it to cart once they are ready to purchase.
5. Make sure your link to the cart is labeled “Your Cart” and not “Shopping Cart”. The more personalized, the better.
6. Use welcome messages to answer crucial questions. Example: How fast shipping is happening during COVID-19.
7. Add product reviews below the products description. Again, social proof is your friend!
8. Make sure all of your important information is “above the scroll”. Make it E-A-S-Y!
9. Consider using an upsell app at checkout to increase AOV.
10. Always use a secure payment processor and when asking customers to proceed with payment, make sure it says “Secure Payment.

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Tackling Abandoned Checkouts Before they Happen

A talk by Ahmad Iqbal, Founder, HMS Commerce

Overview:

• The state of abandoned carts in our industry
• Pitfalls of over-reliance on marketing automation
• A guide for supplementing traditional re-marketing with 1-on-1 conversation

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Key Take-Aways:

1. Never underestimate the value of one-on-one conversations with your customers.

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Summary:

Cart abandonment is a major issue for online retailers. Knowing why your customers decide to leave without completing their purchase can help you to overcome those barriers and increase revenue.

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There are 11 main types of customer segments, including:

1. Champion
2. Loyal Customers
3. Promising
4. New Customers
5. Abandoned Checkouts
6. Warm Leads
7. Cold Leads
8. Needs Attention
9. Shouldn’t Lose
10. Sleepers
11. Lost

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Segmenting your customers and understanding where they fall allows you to create custom communications for their specific needs. Whether they are excellent customers who champion your products and deserve praise, or have abandoned their cart and need a little encouragement to move forward, figuring out where they fall is a data point that can make a dramatic difference for your business.

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How to Nail Customer Value Optimization

A talk by Valentin Radu, CEO and Founder, Omniconvert

Overview:

• What is Customer Value?
• Why is Customer Value monitoring a key differentiator in terms of growth for Ecommerce shops?
• How can you apply the CVO (Customer Value Optimization) strategy to your business?

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Key Take-Aways:

1. There are only 3 ways to grow a business.
2. Valuing your customers based on their actions helps you better understand where your sales are coming from and can help to increase your repeat business.

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Summary:

According to Jay Abraham, there are three ways to grow a business:

1. Increase the number of customers.
2. Increase the average transaction (order value) per customer.
3. Get each customer to buy from you more often.

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Grouping customers based on these ideas and creating “customer values” will help you to grow your business. In order to create a customer value, you have to change the way you define success and make “customer lifetime values” a company-wide measurement of success. Everyone can contribute to making great customers! Consider using the flowchart below as an example for creating your company’s customer value optimization strategy.

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Using qualitative research you can determine what your ideal customer looks like and use that information to improve your targeting.

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Panel: Conversational Commerce Tactics with H.V.M.N, Ethercycle & Gorgias

A session by Philippe Roireau, Kurt Elster, and Taylor Manischalchi, Head of Customer Success, H.V.M.N

Overview:

• Word of Mouth Marketing
• Live Chat
• Customer Service Helpdesk

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Key Take-Aways:

1. Identifying your brand voice is crucial to the success of your business.
2. The better you understand how your customers like to be communicated with, the deeper connection you will have.
3. Make sure you are communicating with your customers on the platforms where they want to communicate with you.

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Summary:

Whether you are communicating across email, social media, SMS, etc., every opportunity to speak with your customer should be used as a chance to improve relationships and increase revenue. One thing that is crucial to this is defining your company’s voice. Treat your company voice like a person. What kind of personality do they have? How do they sound? How would they talk to your customers? Once you have defined your voice, use it every time you talk to a customer. Your customers should always feel like they are talking with a friend and have a personalized experience with your brand.

The other thing to remember with conversational commerce is to always be testing! Look at what kind of communications get a response out of your users. Do they like emojis, or pictures? Are they active in reaching out or commenting? Do they prefer to speak with you on live chat or through Facebook? Knowing your customers and communicating with them where, when and in the manner that they want to be communicated through will differentiate your brand from others.

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