Flex Boost: Four Contact Center Strategies for Conversational Commerce from Perficient

Flex Boost: Four Contact Center Strategies for Conversational Commerce from Perficient

Most of us are still adjusting to the new reality of social distancing and ‘shelter-in-place’. Surveys show that even when these orders are lifted, many of us are unwilling or unable to go back to “normal” life until a vaccine is widely effective. Consumer preferences have dramatically shifted during this time, and one of the big shifts has been towards conversational commerce. It’s been a macro-trend for a long time but the current crisis has accelerated it because customers aren’t able to shop in the same way, they generally prefer messaging over voice and contact centers have been dramatically impacted.

Yet there are significant challenges for a business to switch from transactions to conversational commerce. Humans naturally retain relationships through conversations. I talked to my Mom last week, I should give her a call. My friend had a rough week at work, we should chat over lunch Zoom.

Businesses worldwide are storing more data about their customers than ever before. However, they still find it hard to actuate that in conversations with customers. When I call a retailer, why do they not have my past purchases in front of them, so they know my size and style preferences? Why don’t they have the things I’ve been looking at in the app pre-populated on the agents screen?

We’ve ended up with low expectations.

A Fortune 100 company has found that maintaining context in a customer relationship drives significant sales uplift in conversational commerce.

To achieve this, they turned to Perficient, a leading Solution Integrator to build the technology that underpins this initiative with Twilio Flex. We recently talked to Michael Greenlee, Director, Professional Services, Cloud Contact Center at Perficient to understand best practices they have developed working with some of the world’s largest brands.

Single Customer Purchase Intent Interface

The most important thing you can do to help the customer in conversational commerce is to present all relevant customer purchasing data in one interface, in the context of the conversation. Not just what they’ve bought on your website but what they’ve browsed. Same for your app, what has the customer been looking at? What have they purchased in-store? What is in stock for their size? What colors do they like? What fit have they purchased? And so on.

This is the gold mine for customer preferences, and the more you can leverage it to present purchase options to the customer, the higher your sales are going to be.

Channel Selection

Meeting the customer on their channel of choice drives revenue. You can’t just have phone, email and webchat if the customer prefers SMS, WhatsApp or in-app chat. Wherever the customer wants to communicate with you, you should be there. And those messages need to come into a single system because you can’t have a single view of the customer if those conversations are in 16 different systems.

This isn’t possible to build in any other contact center software today and Flex’s unique programmability model empowers customers to build exactly what they need.

Measure Success

The best way to measure conversational commerce is the outcome, revenue. Because when you move to conversational commerce, it’ll break all your existing contact center metrics. For example, when does a conversation start and stop? Pivot to a long-running conversation model where you measure interactions over time instead of existing single interaction measures like agent handle time or next-issue-avoidance.

Unlike traditional contact centers, the customer’s conversation doesn’t end, so much as get paused until the customer wants to communicate again. This is the desired behaviour.

Get Customers Quick Answers

Giving customers quick, accurate answers is critical to building trust in the channel and the agents. To do that you have to build an efficient skills-based routing system, such as past history with an agent, proximity, language, etc. From there, if the agent doesn’t have the exact skill the customer needs, efficiently handing them off is essential. During this handoff it is critical the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves and the new agent understands the history of the customer at a glance which is now possible because of the complete visibility.

Tailored conversations require tailored solutions. Even if there was out of the box software available, it will give you generic experiences and generic results. No two businesses are the same and tailoring technology to each customer is critical.

Now with partners like Perficient, every company has access to the skills and resources to build tailored solutions with Twilio Flex.