{"id":57,"date":"2019-03-20T07:01:14","date_gmt":"2019-03-20T14:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hengreamaze.wordpress.com\/2019\/03\/20\/how-to-understand-conversational-commerce-and-adopt-it-for-your-brand\/"},"modified":"2023-09-01T00:07:32","modified_gmt":"2023-09-01T07:07:32","slug":"how-to-understand-conversational-commerce-and-adopt-it-for-your-brand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reamaze.com\/blog\/how-to-understand-conversational-commerce-and-adopt-it-for-your-brand\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Understand Conversational Commerce and Adopt it for Your Brand."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image Credit: Google via https:\/\/about.zination.com\/<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If someone were to ask you to name the first eCommerce company that existed, what name comes to mind? Probably eBay or Amazon? And you\u2019d be right. 1995 is often touted as the<\/em> defining year for modern eCommerce. Both Amazon and eBay launched publicly in 1995 and, unsurprisingly, both are household names today.<\/p>\n

Over the past two decades, evolutions in hardware, software, and the internet in general have seen major milestones contributing to fundamental shifts in consumer behavior. PayPal forever changed the way people pay online in 1998. Apple changed the digital purchasing experience and the music industry as a whole with iTunes in 2003. The shift to mobile experiences started with the iPhone in 2007. Facebook unveiled their ads business in 2007. Businesses start to adopt messaging and chatbot technology in as early as 2011. The list goes on.<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credit: Google
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With each major shift in technology, eCommerce was there to reap the benefits, allowing global sales from online shopping to grow from $25 billion in 2000 to over $1 trillion in 2012, $2.3 trillion in 2017, and is projected to grow to $4.88 trillion by 2021. (Statista<\/a>)<\/p>\n

As large as the pie is and will become, the growth of eCommerce will still, undoubtedly, produce its share of winners and losers. Just last year, the Harvard Business Review claimed that \u201cNo industry is failing faster than retail\u201d. Despite these types of overly generalized claims, data seems to show that retail is doing just fine. It\u2019s simply the landscape that is changing.<\/p>\n


\nWhat\u2019s at\u00a0Stake?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

If you Google \u201cthe future of eCommerce\u201d, expect to find about 2,000 articles claiming to know what the promised land looks like. The simple fact of the matter is that \u201cthe future of eCommerce\u201d is not a binary alternative between shopping brick-and-mortar or shopping online. One thing is for sure though; brands (both retail and eCommerce) fall flat if they fail to understand that modern shopping is not purely about the transaction.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the core concept that thriving, modern brands understand is \u201cchoice\u201d. DNVBs (or Digitally Native Vertical Brands) have embraced this fundamental shift in the landscaped because a) they were born in the always-online, mobile-first, and connected commerce age and b) they understand that experiences matter more than price, placement (location), and price.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe brands that are winning are the ones that understand and own the fundamental interplay between experiential and transactional. It\u2019ll always depend on how you navigate the interplay between offline and online worlds, how you\u200a\u2014\u200athe brand\u200a\u2014\u200ainterlock customers and products\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aFab Dolan, Head of Marketing at Google\u00a0Canada<\/em><\/p>\n

Think back to the age of when software was sold on discs vs how cloud computing and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) disrupted that landscape, the same parallels can be drawn for modern commerce. DNVBs like Purple with their infamous \u201cegg test\u201d commercials on YouTube, Stance with their online to offline influence in major league sports, and MVMT with their purpose driven stories that evoke the deepest emotions about watches, there\u2019s no debate that the DTC (Direct-to-Consumer) model is leading the way in defining the modern customer experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credit: MVMT
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By owning and growing their brand equity and purpose, these vertical brands are also owning and growing their customer relationships, and therefore augmenting the entire shopping experience for products that can cost just $20 dollars (Stance socks) to earmarked products that can cost thousands of dollars (Purple mattresses).<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credit: Stance
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Digitally Native Experiences<\/strong><\/h2>\n

If there\u2019s one experience that DNVBs has mastered over the years, it\u2019s their ability to connect with consumers. One of the hypothetical byproducts of choice is that customers can be anywhere. But this is also one of the biggest misconceptions about modern commerce. Customers are not everywhere. They exist in a spectrum of the brand\u2019s ability to reach customers.<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credit: Shopify.com<\/span><\/em><\/em><\/figure>\n

The image above represents two typical schools of thought around shaping the marketing and sales funnel. A multi-channel approach (left) leaves brands with too much focus and not enough control. An omni-channel approach (right) leaves brands with too much control and not enough focus. Without a holistic, experience-first mindset, brands end up relying purely on technology to deliver bits and pieces of an \u201cexperience\u201d that does not exemplify enough value in the customer journey. Remind yourself of some recent eCommerce experiences:<\/p>\n

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  1. You read a piece of great content by a particular brand but what tangible actions<\/em> did that result in?<\/li>\n
  2. You were browsing Facebook and ran across a great ad for a product you\u2019re interested in but how did that ad help<\/em> you make a purchase?<\/li>\n
  3. You were on a digital storefront and browsed around for perhaps hours contemplating whether or not to purchase but how did that brand help you understand<\/em> the value?<\/li>\n
  4. You ran across that same product on an Instagram story (probably retargeting) but how did that help you make a decision<\/em>?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Ever since the dawn of eCommerce, the question has always been \u201chow do we close the browser-to-buyer divide?\u201d With all the tech out there for increasing brand awareness through written\/audio\/visual content, retargeting, AR\/VR shopping, ads, advanced checkout tactics such as in-cart up-sells and loyalty rewards, etc, how do you connect all the dots?<\/p>\n


    \nThe Unifying Experience is Conversational<\/strong><\/h2>\n

    An important skill young brands need to learn is how to decouple<\/em> social commerce from conversational commerce. For the past decade or so, establishing a presence on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and other publicly accessible platform was enough to claim you cared about the \u201ccustomer experience\u201d because you are publicly available for conversations. And being able to connect a social post to a checkout used to be enough to say your brand is an expert on social commerce. Direct social commerce is at best a hypothesis and certainly does not qualify alone as conversational commerce.<\/p>\n

    Another important skill young brands need to learn is how to couple<\/em> customer service with customer experience. Lots of online brands fail because they see customer service as a cost center. It\u2019s simply something they \u201cneed\u201d to do in order to get by and so customers don\u2019t get pissed off. If they had a choice, they wouldn\u2019t do it. Delivering good-enough customer service through live chat on mobile devices and your storefront is no longer enough to claim you handle customer conversations well. Customer service needs to define and connect the experience because it\u2019s a revenue and opportunity goldmine. When you\u2019re able to have better conversations with customers, you generate happier customers. And when you have happy customers, you make more sales.<\/p>\n

    If that was too much to unravel, understand this: simply existing online through a variety of channels and marketing through them won\u2019t cut it anymore. And simply offering great customer service also won\u2019t cut it anymore.<\/p>\n


    \nSo what makes commerce conversational?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

    Conversational Commerce is a relatively new concept, first coined by Uber\u2019s Chris Messina in 2015. It describes the relationship between modern eCommerce brands\u2019 ability to generate more sales using better customer experiences and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and even Instagram. More recently, conversational commerce has evolved even more to include voice recognition technology like Amazon Alexa and NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI technology used in chatbots.<\/p>\n

    The ultimate goal of conversational commerce is to meet the demands of the customer and allow them to purchase (with intelligent assistance) more easily through a variety of channels. These messaging apps and bots can also help answer questions, search through inventory, check order status, and augment human interactions with high degrees of efficiency.<\/p>\n

    The shift to conversational commerce is already here and destined for another evolution. Here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n