Cross-border e-commerce continues to be hot, and many platform sellers have turned to independent websites. However, all the "big sellers" on independent websites encounter the same problem: processing a large number of repeated information from users every day, and "improving customer order conversion rate" and "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" have become the primary concerns.
On October 21, the Amazon Refined Operations Summit came to a successful conclusion. Karl, the founder of SaleSmartly, shared with everyone how to provide good after-sales service and increase user experience on multiple channels such as independent websites, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Email through explanations in different scenarios . He provided solutions for merchants to improve user stickiness and solved the problem of customer retention.
Although the summit has ended for more than two months, the following passage may give you some food for thought. Here is the full content:
" I called you, do you dare to answer? "
As a cross-border e-commerce seller, can you imagine that this is what your customers really want to say to you?
Why would customers say this to you when they come to your site?
Because we tell our customers: Please contact us by email and we will reply you within 24 hours.
Or this: Please submit your contact information and questions in the form and we will reply you by email.
As a customer, I was attracted by your advertisement and came to your website. Under what circumstances do I need to contact you? It must be when I have questions . If I need to contact you by email or leave you a message, I have a very low confidence in getting a reply. If it is not a very necessary purchase behavior, I will choose to jump out of the website.
Therefore, many novice sellers will have this question: My website clearly has traffic coming in, but why is there no order conversion?
At this time, you need to ask yourself: Have you tried using real-time chat tools to quickly answer customers’ questions and promote order conversions?
Generally there are three factors: product, price, and user experience .
Will customers be satisfied because of the good quality of the product? Of course they will. But will they be moved by the good quality of the product? Of course not.
Some people may say: That’s not right, my product quality is very good, even my competitors’ are not as good as mine!
In fact, if your product quality is not good enough, customers may not even be interested in learning about it. So the conclusion is: customers will be satisfied with the product, but they will not be moved!
Will customers be satisfied with the price? If the price is reasonable, customers will be satisfied if they think it is worth it.
However, customers will not be moved by price either!
If the price is too high, customers will think it is a huge profit and that the high price does not bring high value. If the price is too low, we may not be able to guarantee the quality of the product, which will hurt customers. Customers may also be afraid to buy the product because the price is too low, and they are worried that there may be some problems.
Therefore, a reasonable price can only satisfy customers but will not impress them.
Let’s look at the service again. As long as we do well enough, customers will not only be satisfied with the good service, but will even be moved!
We have encountered this situation many times: in the process of helping customers solve problems, due to the high-quality service, the customers actually expressed their desire to give us red envelopes to express their gratitude.
Adobe's research report also shows that "more than half (58%) of people will stop making a purchase decision because a brand cannot provide a service experience of corresponding value."
Next, let’s take a look at the channels through which customers can contact us when doing cross-border e-commerce.
The conventional ones are Email, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram in Europe and the United States, Line in Southeast Asia, and Telegram in the CIS region.
As the cost of Facebook's traffic and conversion ads becomes increasingly high, some sellers have begun using Messenger ads for promotion. When customers become interested in the ads, they contact the sellers through Facebook Messenger.
If sellers are placing a large number of Messenger ads on their homepages, seller friends can use the SaleSmartly intelligent customer service tool to communicate with customers efficiently and complete transactions.
Some seller friends may worry that they don’t have a customer service team, so how can they handle customer inquiries?
SaleSmartly cross-border e-commerce intelligent customer service tool has taken this into consideration for you. In fact, what you need is a [no coding] intelligent question-answering robot . Because most of the questions that customers want to know are repetitive, we can summarize these repetitive questions and achieve intelligent replies without manual operation .
We can randomly send different welcome messages when new visitors open the customer service button, or we can send different statements at different time periods.
According to statistics, there are four main categories of common problems that customers encounter when visiting our site:
1) Shipping costs, 2) Logistics tracking, 3) Return policy, 4) Order related
For these four major categories of questions, we will split them into several small detailed questions, configure the corresponding answers, and then we can implement the question-and-answer robot in the online store.
In addition, SaleSmartly also supports configuring FAQ questions and answers to achieve intelligent replies based on natural language recognition.
Compared with manual customer service, chatbots have the following three advantages:
1) Faster response: chatbots can respond faster without waiting in line due to the large number of customer inquiries. Chatbots can increase response time by an average of 3 times.
2) Chatbots increase customer support satisfaction by 24% by reducing customer wait time
3) Use chatbots to answer repetitive simple questions, allowing team members to focus on higher priority work and VIP customer service
So, can customers really accept the services of chatbots?
Let's look at an example: When ATMs were introduced in the late 1960s, banks were not sure whether consumers would accept a machine instead of a bank teller. Now we prefer to deposit and withdraw cash through ATMs, and then happily wait in line for manual service to handle more complex transactions, such as loans. In the future, your independent website, your homepage, and chatbots will help you solve some of the repetitive customer consultation problems, while manual services will solve more advanced and complex customer problems.
Compared to other marketing methods such as Messenger, Email, etc., WhatsApp marketing is the most popular marketing channel.
Open rate | Click-through rate | |
18%-22.15% | 2.6%-3.43% | |
messenger | 80% | |
98% | 45%-60% |
Let’s look at some market data for WhatsApp:
1) As of 2022, WhatsApp has 2 billion active users worldwide
2) According to data from December 2020, the number of messages sent on WhatsApp exceeds 100 billion per day
3) WhatsApp is popular among middle-aged and young users
4) As of 2022, 50 million companies around the world are using WhatsApp
5) Customers’ favorite interactions with businesses on WhatsApp include: tracking orders, event notifications, promotions, and customer service
It can be seen that WhatsApp marketing has become an indispensable part of the marketing matrix.
Currently, SaleSmartly has officially launched the WhatsApp number rental business, providing WhatsApp services to sellers through the WhatsApp Business API.
Using WhatsApp for marketing and customer service can provide customers with a better experience and also lead to better conversion results for the site.
To sum up: improving customer experience through real-time chat, using SaleSmartly chatbot to improve response speed and customer satisfaction, and using WhatsApp marketing to improve conversion effects are worthy of sellers’ attention!
As a PwC survey report states: Provide customers with an excellent experience, and they will buy more, be more loyal to the brand, and be willing to share their purchase experience with friends. This is also the goal that every company is striving for!
Experience is everything! Just Do It!