Last year’s eCommerce growth skyrocketed beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. 10 years of eCommerce growth boomed in just 90 days¹ - fuelled by over 2 billion of us digital buyers around the world². Accompanying this rapid pace of growth are changing consumer behaviours that are reinventing our purchase journey.  According to PWC, innovation that solves traditional pain points should be a major area of focus for businesses looking to keep up and convert customers into long time advocates³. In order to achieve this, getting the balance right between digitization and the traditional store format is crucial. Especially if you want to engage consumers who will experiment with new channels³. As a retailer, this creates a whole bunch of new challenges when it comes to winning and retaining customers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. So to win us over and keep us loyal, what is it about the customer experience that your business should be focusing on?

The agony of choice conundrum

When it comes to online shopping, we’re all too familiar with the tremendous effort required. Particularly when making a high consideration purchase – ie a new DSLR camera, a new smart TV, or a top-of-the-range pair of running shoes. Your average search may take hours of painful research on Google: scrolling through thousands of confusing listings consisting of many similar products, wading through unclear differentiation, and battling with generic filters. Then comes the hunt for reviews. Sometimes there is no clear level of expertise or context, leaving us more clueless than when we began. Which probably explains why the average amount of time between a Google product search and a purchase is 20 days⁴. Yep, you heard right. That’s nearly three weeks you’ll never get back. 

 Sometimes the pure agony of choice is just too much. And this is before we get to the point in our purchasing journey where we may need support, or heaven forbid, have product-related questions. There’s nothing worse than reaching the end of your research marathon, only to be greeted by limited and impersonal help. While chatbots may serve a purpose when it comes to basic queries, safe to say we’ve all hit that virtual brick wall when our queries go unanswered. Recent research reports that: 

37% of shoppers use chatbots to get a quick answer in an emergency, vs just 14% who use them for buying an expensive item⁵.

And when it comes to live chat, wait times and unavailability can be equally frustrating, with the average wait time for support requests being two minutes and 40 seconds⁶.

Ready to throw your mouse at the wall? We are.

AMAZD: reinventing the online shopping experience

Cue AMAZD. Born out of the simple need to solve shopper frustration and redefine the online customer buying journey, AMAZD delivers a faster, more enjoyable, and interactive way to connect with our favorite brands. By downloading the app onto mobile or desktop, customers get the same one-to-one guided support that they would in a physical storefront. That’s curated shopping advice. In a conversational storefront. With real humans. 

Whether through text, web chat, or video call, your customers can speak with a product expert from your company, ask questions, and get tailored recommendations. They can then confidently purchase the best product for them - all in one place – putting an end to the dreaded shopper’s remorse, forever wondering if you’ve bought the right product. It also means no more wasted hours of painful research. And limited and impersonal help becomes a thing of the past. Beautifully packaged in the form of a powerful conversational commerce platform, AMAZD is a smarter way to shop that offers direct contact and engaging conversation.

The business case: A no-brainer for savvy retailers

AMAZD is for forward-thinking businesses looking to increase direct online engagement, transactions, and customer loyalty. It could be that you want to advance your chat website functionality, or reap the multitude of conversational marketing benefits through live engagement. Whatever stage of the customer experience journey you’re at, being able to guide your customers and help them make better decisions enables you to create new lead channels and build long-term relationships beyond the purchase. Here’s how:

Superior conversation

Involving product experts in the virtual guided selling process helps drive conversions and ultimately - customer satisfaction. Entertain one channel in your customer journey from consideration to the transaction, and drive true customer loyalty without annoying media breaks to help drive conversion rates.

A highly curated experience 

Your customers are continuously on the hunt for the best experience. Shopping with an expert delivers a hyper-personalized and fun way for them to shop, with tailored product advice via one-to-one and one-to-many conversations. In doing so you can remove the worry of second-guessing whether the right purchasing decision has been made. Post-sale, your experts can keep the conversation going and drive clienteling. This enables you to establish long-term customer relationships packed with future shopping opportunities.

Direct customer contact 

Providing your customers with engaging feeds equipped with trigger points and the ability to schedule one-to-one virtual consultations enables them to connect with product experts, on the spot. Generate new leads by setting multiple AMAZD contact triggers across offline and online channels. And create unlimited up and cross-selling avenues by allowing your customers to easily access personalized support when they need it. 

In a world becoming increasingly more digital, human interaction is more important than ever. AMAZD fits perfectly into the eCommerce world of today as a strategic element for an unsurpassed customer experience, enabling businesses to reach more customers and freeing shoppers from the agony of choice conundrum. 

Ready to sell more Direct-to-Consumer with a conversational platform that drives customer retention and engagement? Get in touch with us today.

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