In my last several posts I discussed the benefits of social revenue optimization, which involves unlocking business intelligence from e-commerce sites. As I mentioned, this model is predicated upon putting in place an infrastructure that fosters collaboration, expression, and sentiment sharing by shoppers. A central component of SRO is online expert assist, or the ability to provide real-time, interactive sales support for website visitors.
In the SRO world, expert assist is not your father’s impersonal text chat box. Instead, it uses all the audio, video, and analytics tools at the retailer’s disposal to provide a personalized service experience like a sales associate would in brick-and-mortar store, only better. Think of it as the new Mayday button on the Amazon Kindle Fire if it were backed with powerful business intelligence on each shopper’s sentiments towards products they have browsed.
With expert assist, a retailer can enable shoppers to initiate a live video support session at any time. The expert would have access to the shopper’s browsing history as well as information on his or her product sentiments. For example, which engagement rings have they tagged as liking or disliking? Why do they like these particular rings, is it price, color, style, or something else?
With this data at their disposal, expert assist professionals can provide targeted advice and recommendations. Since the collaborative infrastructure is already in place, the service expert can lead the browsing session to take the customer to products he or she may be interested in, circle details, etc. Just as a sales associate in a retail store might bring a customer several different items to try on while they are in a fitting room, expert assist personal can reach into the website to present the online shopper with product suggestions.
Personalized expert assist sessions help customers find what they want more quickly and build brand loyalty, while increasing revenue and reducing cancellations. In fact, in SRO deployments we have been involved with, expert assist has directly helped to:
- Increase average order value more than 4x
- Boost net revenue more than 10x compared to phone-based expert assist
- Decrease cancellations by 85 percent
The combination of real-time video collaboration and co-browsing is ushering a new dawn in online expert assist.
The combination of real-time video collaboration and co-browsing is ushering a new dawn in online expert assist. The human element and personalized touch that has never existed in e-commerce is now possible. With the addition of sentiment analytics, expert assist associates can definitively know a shoppers’ likes, dislikes, and buying criteria. As our SRO deployment data has shown, today’s expert assist technology is a powerful tool for customer engagement and closing sales.