to Conversational Commerce

This ebook will set you up for conversational commerce success. You’ll learn why it’s the new competitive frontier for smart brands and you’ll get concrete guidance on how to build out your customer experience strategy to take advantage of it.

Human speech can be considered a kind of coding language, think of English, Mandarin, or Swahili. Until recently, computer programs spoke a different language -- HTML, C++, JavaScript, etc. With the rise of speech recognition and other advances, the ways in which humans and machines speak are starting to merge, meaning that you, as an ecommerce leader, can leverage the benefits of conversation with the cost savings of scaling with technology.

‘Conversational commerce’ has become a term for business being done using natural language, linked with technology to provide personalized help, context-aware recommendations, and concierge-like assistance for everything from shopping to traveling to scheduling. It’s ChatBots that help us complete transactions within Facebook Messenger. It’s Alexa giving us an update on when that pair of boots we ordered will ship. It’s meeting and engaging with customers on the platforms they use and love. And it’s where brands need to be.

Dan Miller, Lead Analyst and Founder of Opus Research, Inc., coined the term “conversational commerce” in 2013, but he and his team had started looking at technologies that supported phone-based commerce all the way back in 1985. “We were looking at how some combination of phones and computers were going to be able to answer our questions,” he said.

Miller knew back then that the technology was possible, but it wasn’t until the graphic processors grew, thanks in part to the gaming industry, that they were able to make those possibilities real.

The personalization they wanted for customers and the scalability they hoped for businesses has now become a reality. AI technologies can now recog-nize and understand language, and, because of vast cheap storage, the programs can look at huge data sets to parse meaning.

Platforms will continue to evolve and change, but the core concept, as stated by Dan Miller, remains the same, “The whole point of ‘Conversational Com-merce’ is to put customers in command of the de-vices they use and in charge of the relationships they have with their selected vendors. It starts with strong assertion of identity and authenticity and moves from there.”

Conversational Commerce Is The Future And The Present Chris Messina, who helped to popularize the term and is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber, de-clared “2016 will be the year of conversational com-merce.” What he predicted back in early 2015 has now become a reality -- leading brands are already

Conversational CommercePART 1

Conversational commerce is the new battleground for brands that want to excel at delivering industry-leading customer experiences. Within this ebook, we’ll show you why you can’t ignore it and we’ll walk you through the building blocks of a customer engagement strat-egy focused on leveraging conversational commerce to its biggest advantage.

capitalizing on these channels and leaving their competi-tors behind. What does that mean for your brand?When you master conversational commerce, you’ll deliver experiences that make your customers feel as if you hired a personal assistant to help each of them.“Not only do companies today need to exceed customer expectations, but they need to make it easy for the customer to do business with the company,” writes Forbes’ Blake Morgan. “Want a powerful customer ex-perience? Simply ask yourself how easy you can make life for your customers.”

Recognizing The Conversational Commerce Around YouIf you think conversational commerce is still a pinpoint on the retail horizon and that you and your organization will have plenty of time to prepare for it, you’re wrong. Enabling AI technology is already all around us, helping to make our daily lives and our interaction with brands easier.

Let’s say a potential partner emails you for a meeting next week. You respond and CC Clara, who takes it from there, setting up your meeting over a few emails with your partner, putting it on both your calendars, and even reminding you. You might not even have to tell your contact that Clara isn’t a person, but a bot. And she’s not the only one scheduling meetings - this kind of tech-nology is now commonly available and we may see bots working with other bots to book our calendars sooner than we expect.

Your 10-year anniversary is coming up, so you want to

Terms To Know

App fatigue: The decline of app popularity, especially

brand apps, caused by a backlash against too many

notifications, the saturated app market, and the need

for updates from both developers and customers. For-

rester Research reports that people spend over 80%

of their time on their phone is their 5 favourite apps

which tend to be social, messaging and media apps.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): An umbrella term for any

ability of computers to perform tasks that otherwise

require human mental capacity, for example speech

recognition, visual perception, language translation,

and decision-making.

Automatic Speech Recognition. (ASR): Computer

transcription of spoken language in real time.

Bot: Any software application that runs automated

tasks, called scripts, over the internet.

Chatbot: A software application that simulates a

conversation with a human.

ServiceBot: A brand-developed software application

that lives within a messaging or voice-activated chan-

nel and can provide product order status updates and

support customers in making returns and exchanges,

among other tasks.

Conversational User Interface (CUI): An intelligent

interface that allows for input either through voice or

text commands in a style similar to the way humans

communicate and provides contextual responses in the

same manner.

Machine learning: The ability of computer programs

and software to acquire new data and change behavior

without additional reprogramming.

Natural Language Processing: The interactions

between computers and human languages.

plan a quick getaway to celebrate. You text Taylor, and she recommends locations based on your budget and hotels based on reviews. She even offers to book your flight for you. You thank her, feeling a bit silly, because Taylor is also a bot.

On the way out the door, you realize you’re out of pens. You call over your shoulder, “Ok Google, order me some pens.” Your Google Home’s Assistant will do just that from one of over 50 Google Express retailers. “Got it, ordering pens from Walgreens,” Assistant replies. And without looking at a screen or touching anything, you’ve restocked your home office. Clara, Taylor, Alexa (and Google Assistant and Cortana) sound (mostly) like members of the next big girl group but, as Will Oremus writes in Slate, they and their ilk are actually harbingers of our new digital reality:

“Like card catalogs and AOL-style portals before it, Web search will begin to fade from prominence, and with it the dominance of browsers and search engines. Mobile apps as we know them—icons on a home screen that you tap to open—will start to do the same. In their place will rise an array of virtual assistants, bots, and soft-ware agents that act more and more like people: not only answering our queries, but acting as our proxies, accomplishing tasks for us, and asking questions of us in return,” he writes.

Evolution Of Ecommerce: From Clicks To Chats

Buying and selling online began in earnest in the ‘90s. In 1995, the year Amazon and eBay both start-ed, the internet existed as 120,000 registered domain names. Over the next three years it grew to more than two million. Now, more than a billion websites are online.

Ecommerce has also expanded by leaps and bounds. In 2006, ecommerce accounted for approximately 3% of total US retail sales. So far this year, it’s approach-ing 10% and represents an almost 15% year-over-year increase compared to 2016.

While online shopping has become a bigger slice of the retail pie, the framework of ecommerce has largely remained the same for most of its history. The ways in which retailers served their customers, stayed in touch, and encouraged repeated sales primarily leaned on established promotional chan-nels like email and advertising. Even innovations such as mobile push notifications focused on aggressively “encouraging” a customer to pay attention to your brand vs. offering an elegant and seamless oppor-tunity for the customer to engage with you on their terms.

But in an era in of Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Slack and Uber, the old ways no longer work for us-ers who have become accustomed to being able to communicate with each other and the world at large in real-time, across devices, whenever and wherever they want. As customer behavior evolves, so do their expectations around B2C communications. Today’s retail shopper interacts with brands that use the plat-forms she relies on as fluidly as she does. Whether she thinks about it in such terms, she wants truly conversational commerce and despite the difficulties in creating a seamless interaction, it’s up to you to deliver it.

“You can no longer segment yourself to service prac-tices that only you are comfortable with,” says Amir Zonozi, Chief Strategy Officer of Social Influence at Zoomph, an engagement platform. “When a cus-tomer reaches out to you on Twitter, it needs to be solved on Twitter. When they reach out to you via email, it needs to be solved via email. Asking your customers to switch their preferred method of com-munication is taking your customer out of their com-fort zone and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.”

Customer Experience As The New Competitive Battleground

New digital technology has helped to push customer experience to center stage as a key differentiator be-tween leading and lagging brands. A great customer experience builds loyalty, while a poor one increas-ingly means you’ve lost that shopper’s business forev-er. While in 2006, 68% of customers with a bad expe-rience left a company for good, by 2016, that number had topped 80%. This new breed of customer is not inclined to offer second chances.

To customers today, convenience and saving time is what drives their expectations around customer experience is driven by convenience and time sav-ings, and they’re looking for the absolute best, which means it is personal, on-demand, always available and with instant results. Great customer experience takes investment, but the data shows that those investments pay off. A Customer Experience Im-pact (CEI) Report shows that 86% of consumers will even pay more for better customer experience. In an ecommerce landscape where repeat purchasers are the only ones that are cost effective to acquire, of-fers such as personalized service and 24/7 online chat can make the difference between a brand growing or atrophying.

The Power Shift Over the last 10 years, a huge shift has occurred in where customers get their information, how they get it, and what they’ve come to expect from companies that offer it. What does the customer is always right mean today? It means you’ve got to be faster, more personal, and easier to deal with than ever before. “In recent years we’ve seen customers’ expectations grow rapidly as they seek simple and instant 360-de-gree support,” says Mayur Anadkat, VP at Five9. “Customer expectations will only continue to evolve, forcing marketers to keep the customer experience as top priority.”

Every customer is now equipped with a mobile de-vice to engage with your digital properties, complain about or laud your company, and send and receive messages to your customer support team, 24/7.

The Rise of Customer Experience

PART 2

realms of a user’s rational, emotional, physical, and spiritual self. But customers know a bad experience when they feel it. 89% percent of consumers started doing business with a company after a poor experi-ence with a competitor.

“Customer experience is the next battlefield for brands,” says Brian Solis, Principal Analyst, Altimeter, “Those that get it right will not only create long-last-ing customer relationships but will also earn a signifi-cant competitive advantage over those that solely compete on product, price or promotion. On the other hand, companies that do not master the art of customer experience will lose relevance and market share over time.”

Beyond just not buying from your company, your customer is now more empowered than ever to encourage others not to buy from you. From Yelp, Facebook and Google reviews to blogs, shoppers have a plethora of channels on which to broadcast their brand preferences and their words have weight. Nielsen found that 83% of consumers trust recom-mendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising.

“Customer expectations are rising, customers are readily sharing their bad experiences publicly,” says Chuck Schaeffer, Vantive Media CEO. “Suppliers who do not deliver rewarding customer experiences are being called out publicly in forums and social net-works that reach thousands or millions of potential or existing customers and have a duration of months or years. If a company’s products are chastised by exist-ing customers, new prospects will clearly steer else-where and existing customers will take note, thereby increasing their likelihood of churn.”

Consumers are also getting smarter about filtering out unwanted intrusions on their time and attention. In 2015, ad blocking technology reached mass adop-tion with estimates as high as 140M people, or more than half of US consumers blocking ads.

“That means we need to stop shouting at customers and start listening to what they want and need right now,” says Charles Nicholls, SVP of Product Strategy and Marketing Solutions, SAP Hybris.

“The consumer buying cycle used to be about the simple act of trading goods and services with a neighbor,” says Andrew Howlett, Chief Digital Officer of Rain, a global digital marketing agency. “Now there are ever-increasing touchpoints where customers expect to be served and delighted. In-store, online, mobile, social, smart watches, smart televisions, connected devices, in the car, in the air, and many more are already available or coming quickly.” Indeed, it’s clear that the number of places customers interact with your brand is only increasing every year, as we see more connected devices in and out of the home.

Customers expect more and it’s easier than ever for them to switch to a competitor if those expectations aren’t met. Innovative companies like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon and those that follow their lead are stepping in to give them what they want in exchange for busi-ness that could have gone to you.

Customer experience is the product of a customer’s interaction with your brand, from attraction to pur-chase to post-sale customer care across all touch-points. It can be difficult to measure because it’s more than the sum of its parts and it affects different

Buyers are more connected and have more knowl-edge and options than at any time in history. Vendors are a click away, so customers can get what they want in more places. Access to more brands delivering more and better online information about their prod-ucts, and verified by independent references within the buyers’ social circles, has decreased barriers to switching brands.

“The only sustainable competitive advantage is to know your customers better than your competitors and use that knowledge to deliver a consistent and rewarding CX that keeps customers wanting to come back for more,” says Schaeffer.

How to Stand Out from The Crowd And Keep Customers Happy

Gartner predicts that as soon as this year, as many as 89% of businesses will compete mainly on customer experience. What’s more, it is predicted that 50% of consumer product investments will be redirected to customer experience innovations.

“Customer Experience is the new marketing,” says Steve Cannon, President and CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA. “. . . Customer Experience better be at the top of your list when it comes to priorities in your organization.” “Building an unambiguous link between the custom-er experience and value requires patience and disci-pline to invest early in an analytic approach. It is easy

to skip this step for the sake of speed, but that is a mistake every time,” according to Joel Maynes and Alex Rawson, writing for McKinsey & Company. “When establishing a link to value is done well, it provides a clear view of what matters to customers, where to focus, and how to keep the customer expe-rience high on the list of strategic priorities.

Because their research has shown that customer jour-ney performance is significantly more strongly linked to economic outcomes than are touchpoints alone, they recommend focusing on the end-to-end cus-tomer journey, nurturing deeper customer relation-ships to strengthen a brand.

Research by Forrester found that “companies that deliver a better customer experience tend to retain more of their customers, get more incremental pur-chases from their customers, and attract more new customers through positive word of mouth.” This customer experience is mostly likely to drive revenue up when customers can easily switch business among many companies and customer experience leaders stand out from peers.

When it comes to retail, Forrester says that “the real CX/revenue growth winners will be sellers with strongly differentiated concepts that lure shoppers away from competitors with highly engaging experi-ences — think Birchbox, Ministry of Supply, Story, and The Trunk Club.”

“Hey Google, how do I perfect an omnichannel journey?”

“Sorry, I don’t know how to help with that yet.” Ok, so it’s not that easy . . . not yet, anyway.

But it’s worth the effort. According to Invesp, companies that design their customer journeys with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain, on average, 89% of their customers. Brands that op-erate with weak omnichannel customer engagement only retain 33%.

The consumer journey has gone from a straight shot to a Choose Your Own Adventure maze that happens any time, anywhere, on one of countless devices, channels, and social networks. It’s up to you to find the customer where they are and build a connection there.

To get consumers to fall in love with your brand today requires a new approach and the tech stack to support it. Consumers expect you to be where they are, when they are and with the appropriate tools for engagement. As Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce said, “AI will become a defining technol-ogy of the 21st century, just as the microprocessor was in the 20th century.”

Twists And Turns Along the Customer Journey Amazon Go: The grocery store without a

single employee is now real. The store uses

a mix of cameras, chips, and microphones

to track users and their activity.

Click to Brick: The idea that stores that

started online are starting to get into physi-

cal space. Brands participating in the trend

of adding an offline component to their

online retailing include Everlane, Bonobos,

and Birchbox.

Same-day Demand: Faster and cheaper

are the words of the day when it comes to

delivery expectations. Delivery logistic op-

tions such as Uber Rush ship to local lock-

ers or for pickup at local stores, which will

help get products ordered online to the

customer more quickly and less expensively

than ever.

Shopper-friendly Return Experience: While you might not be able to swing

free returns, your return experience should

be shopper-friendly, cheap, and fast. You

can expect more items bought online to

be returned to the store, with the help of

startups such as Happy Returns, which

creates a “return bar” at malls that

aggregates returns.

2017’s Tech-Guided Omnichannel Customer Journey

Conversational commerce is the animating principle behind successful omnichannel engagement. It helps your brand nurture a rich relationship with each cus-tomer, at every service touchpoint, by using real-time logistics, big data, machine-learning and AI to give your customers what they want, when they want it, on the channel of their choosing, on every step of their journey with your brand. As a result, customers feel known and valued by you, the company that antici-pates their wants and needs.

Channeling Your Customers

The last few years have seen a paradigm shift involv-ing a whole new class of retail channels. Customers are looking for an intelligent, personalized experience at every touchpoint, perhaps the most important shift in digital commerce.

Though it’s clear the landscape is changing, it’s hard to tell which road consumers will take. What’s most important is to be aware of today’s channels, the ones coming tomorrow and the technology that can help you scale to both and to reflect that in your cus-tomer experience strategy.

Laggard companies might be sticking their heads in the sand, clinging to their email lists, and hoping it all blows over. Average companies might know conver-sational commerce is important, but suffer paralysis by analysis with how to move forward. Innovative brands like Facebook, Amazon, Slack, Google, and Apple are leading the way to show the rest of them how it’s done.

Current conversational channels fall into two main categories: Messaging Apps and Voice Channels.

Messaging Apps

Mobile-native consumers are becoming more and more accustomed to communicating through messaging on channels such as Facebook Mes-senger, WhatsApp, Kik, and, in Asia, Wechat and Line. They’re not only using them to catch up with friends, but also to stay in touch with brands, shop, and watch content. These once-simple programs for sending text, image, clips, and GIFs are now full-blown interfaces with their own APIs, developers, and apps.

The four top chat apps now have a combined user base that dwarfs the combined user base of the top four social networks. Plus, users are likely to use them more often and for longer than most mobile apps.

Since April 2016, when Facebook opened up Facebook Messenger to allow brands to build bots to operate in the channel, over 33,000 bots have already been launched. Today, they can help with product info, order processing, delivery statuses and exchanges and returns. Tomorrow, they may be doling out fashion advice, reminding you to buy a gift for your brother-in-law’s birthday and carrying on complex conversations worthy of a fellow human.

Why brands are interested?

ChatBots as a sales channel

What can a Messenger ChatBot do?

* Facebook is the stickiest of sites Over 2B active monthly users.The average American spends upwards of 50 minutes/day on Facebook’s properties.

Able to accept payments natively within Messenger via Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Visa, MasterCard and American Express.

Facebook ads can link directly to a brand’s Messenger chatbot. A potential customer clicks the ad and Messenger launches.

ChatBots can send subscription-based and promotional messaging, but only if the user opts in.

* Messenger reaches the masses 1.2B active monthly users, up from 200M in 2014.Over 1B messages are already being sent every month between Facebook Messenger users and brands/brand pages.

Order you a pizza

Process a return or exchange

Offer Product Information

Book Your Next Flight or Hotel Stay

Resolve your parking ticket (or try to)

Help You Practice Your Spanish (or French)

In April 2016, Facebook announced it was opening up its Messenger channel for developers to create chatbots that could live within Messenger and interact directly with users.

It’s been a hit — 100,000 bots have been launched to date.

Spotlight: Facebook Messenger

Brands love Messenger ChatBots

Bots are big business

Facebook Messenger’s 33,000 ChatBots form a major piece of the $4B bot landscape.

Almost half of Millennials and Gen Xers have already interacted with ChatBots on a messaging app.

Annual global revenue from chatbot transactions on messaging apps is predicted to hit almost $20B.

and Pope Francis (no, really)

Voice Channels

As Donald Norman said in 1990, “The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job . . . I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.”

Getting the job done, whether it’s finding out the weather, checking the news, or learning about whales for school, can now be done with voice channels like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, and Siri, whose voice can be conjured from iPhones, Macs, and Apple TV. Even if we were lying on the couch with our eyes closed, we could order pizza, turn on lights, or pur-chase a plane ticket using these virtual assistants.

According to Tractica, these bot-powered assistants will soon be in our smartwatches, fitness trackers, PCs, smart home systems, and automobiles. The ac-tive consumer virtual assistant users will balloon from 390M today to 1.8B worldwide by the end of 2021.

“The consumer and enterprise use cases for virtual digital assistants are proliferating rapidly thanks to accelerated innovation and scalability of underlying technologies, such as natural language processing and artificial intelligence,” says principal analyst Mark Beccue. “Meanwhile, most of the world’s technology giants believe VDAs will be vital to their businesses in the future, and they are investing significant resourc-es to capture market share at this early stage.”

Alexa is Amazon’s intelligent voice-activated personal assistant. Most commonly associated with the Amazon Echo, a smart speaker, hundreds of companies, including Lenovo, Samsung and LG, are also launching products controlled by Alexa.

Spotlight: Amazon Alexa

She’s getting more popular

Everyone wants a piece of her

And smarter

(Almost) anything you can do, she can do better

* Amazon Echo sales doubled between 2015 and 2016 and Amazon Prime Day 2017 saw a seven-fold increase in Echo device sales over 2016 numbers. To date, consumers have bought over 9M of the Alexa-enabled devices.

The number of Alexa skills (tasks you can ask Alexa to perform) has soared from 1000 to 15,000 in only a year and shows no signs of slowing down.

Alexa Voice Service is a cloud-based service that provides APIs to interface with Alexa, which allows brands other than Amazon to incorporate the Alexa technology into their own products.

* 97% of Echo owners interact with Alexa daily.

Order An Uber or Lyft

Dim the lights

Activate your robot vacuum

Track your Amazon order

Get a pizza delivered

Provide an update on the weather or

traffic

Tell you a joke

Track your ecommerce purchase

Soon, you may be able to summon Alexa from a but-ton on your steering wheel.

Get ready to talk to her through your washing ma-chine.

Forget the remote, in the future you’ll ask Alexa to switch channels on your DVR.

Haven’t heard a peep from the baby? Check in on him with Alexa.

Alexa will also be in your fridge, setting a timer for that cheesecake you’re chilling or telling you how to convert ounces into cups.

What do we ask Alexa to do?

Set a timer 84.9%25.0%%

Play a song 82.4%34.0%

Read the news 66.0%17.0%

Control smart lights 45.9%31.0%

Add item to shopping list

45.3%10.0%

Connect to paid music service

40.9%17.2%

Tried at least once

Sources: Experian, Creative Strategies, Statistica

Repeatedly used

97% of Echo owners inter-act with Alexa daily

The 6 Costly Misunderstandings about ChatBots and Amazon Alexa

Retailers are facing a raft of chal-lenges this quarter. Amazon captur-ing more than half of total online retail growth, customers spending 88% of their time in only 5 apps, and customer acquisition costs skyrocketing. It’s understandable some are considering selling the farm, and others are quietly fading away. For those still in the fight, ChatBots and conversational com-merce channels are a hot topic of debate — it’s difficult to go a single day without stumbling on some kind of new report — and for good reason. But many are feeling con-cerned about some fundamentals of the platforms, and how they operate.

Misunderstanding #1 If we build a bot, we have to hand over control of our branded Face-book channel to it. The TruthYou can retain control over your branded Facebook Messenger experience, and be very selective about the interactions you want a bot to handle. You may want to start with a ChatBot only handling returns and exchanges, or with your ChatBot only handling frequently asked questions.

It is up to you — there’s no need to ‘hand the keys’ over and have a ChatBot drive every interaction.

Misunderstanding #2

We can only have 1 ChatBot on our Facebook Messenger channel. The TruthWhile it is advisable to start with one ChatBot, in order to learn and test effectiveness, you can abso-lutely have more than 1 ChatBot running on your Messenger chan-nel. For example, you can run a ChatBot that handles FAQs and an-other ChatBot that handles returns and exchanges.

Deploying a ChatBot to Facebook now does not leave you stuck for the future, nor does it mean you need to build or find a ChatBot that handles a wide range of customer scenarios today.

The 6 Costly Misunderstandings about ChatBots and Amazon Alexa

Misunderstanding #3

Our new ChatBot needs to handle all the inquiries that a customer sends our way. The TruthYour new ChatBot does not have to handle all kinds of customer inqui-ries, and it also does not have to handle customers without human assistance.The ChatBots that work best are those which have very specifically defined skill sets, and which are built to be aware of their boundaries.

Facebook Messenger bots can live in harmony with human agents, and indeed with community man-agement platforms like Lithium or Sprinklr. ChatBots that are built well (or deployed through a platform

like Linc) have very clear boundar-ies on what they are capable of do-ing, and will hand off customers to real people if they see a customer’s message is not within their scope of skills.

For example, a customer asking ‘Can I return my blue shirt’ on Mes-senger will be handled by a Chat-Bot who has a returns-management skill set. The ChatBot can look up the customer’s order details, con-firm the correct item for return and prepare a shipping label for the customer, in real time and without human intervention. If a customer says ‘I’d like to change my billing details for my order’, a ChatBot that doesn’t cover these kinds of inqui-ries will hand the customer off to a human agent, who can help the customer as per usual.

Misunderstanding #4

We need to sell our products on Amazon in order to make use of the Alexa platform. The TruthThis is a common misconception, and is holding many retailers back from launching a customer service skill on Alexa. With over 10 million Echo devices in homes today, and another 25 million due to arrive this year, Alexa’s platform represents an emerging channel that consum-ers are adopting due to its conve-nience.

The reality of the Alexa platform is that there is absolutely no need to be selling products on Amazon’s marketplace in order to interact with your customers. More importantly, your customers can order directly from you through your branded Alexa skill, without your oproducts being available on Amazon’s mar-ketplace, and without your customer having Amazon Prime.

Misunderstanding #5

If we use Amazon Alexa, Amazon gets our customer data! The TruthIn a simple answer: Amazon does not get your customer or order data. While the Alexa platform is touted for its natural voice interactions, and intuitive AI, it is more helpful to think about a comparison with an IVR telephone system. The Alexa is more like a telephone handset, while the intelligence behind the conversation, including order details and customer details, are run on other systems and platforms, sepa-rate to Amazon’s infrastructure. In some cases, this may be built from the ground up, or a platform like Linc’s may be used to deliver both the AI intelligence, and the order lookup and handling processes.

Misunderstanding #6

That ChatBots today are an experi-mental channel, and there is no real ROI to be seen. The TruthIf you ask around, most folks today see conversational channels as an early-stage, experimental area to consider. But the reality of business is that a channel that falls into that category is pushed to the side, in the interests of addressing more

pressing needs and opportunities. Though some uses of ChatBots may be seen as branding experi-ments, or opportunistic grabs for media attention, there is a very real ROI to be had. Indeed, brands who have already deployed ChatBots for customer service are seeing instant cost reductions that re-turn well beyond their investment. Beyond immediate cost-savings, using intelligent exchanges, recom-mendations and upsells will deliver in-quarter additional revenue, and reduce return losses.

The Most Costly Assumption These misunderstanding may delay action, but there is an assumption that could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars — the assump-tion that it’s going to cost a consid-erable amount of time and money to even experiment with ChatBots, and that in order to take a first step with conversational channels you need a long term roadmap before taking action. The TruthThough it is wise to tread carefully with new customer-facing channels and technology, many leaders are shocked when they learn that there are already platforms available that can deploy a ChatBot and Alexa experience in less than 4 weeks.

Recommendations from analysts today are to start with a specific and narrow set of functionalities, in order to go live and start serv-ing customers with satisfying and valuable experiences. Linc’s plat-form has commerce-trained AI, is built specifically for retail customer scenarios and uses pre-built inte-grations and system-agnostic data connections to avoid the common hurdles and challenges retailers experience when they work on a customer service ChatBot. Linc has helped over a dozen retailers launch Messenger ChatBots and Alexa skills in the last 6 months, and we have provided guidance on best practices while delivering instant cost savings and additional incremental revenue.

Best Practices In Cus-tomer Engagement At Each Touchpoint

Crafting an experience that will keep customers coming back makes business sense. The cost of replacing a lost customer can range from five to 25 times the investment of keeping them. Studies by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, the people who brought you the net promoter score, found that upping your customer retention by just 5% can lead to increases in revenue from 25% to 95%.

“In our research and consulting on customer journeys, we’ve found that organizations able to skillfully manage the entire experience reap enor-mous rewards: enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction,” says the Harvard Business Review. “They also discover more-effective ways to collaborate across functions and levels, a process that delivers gains throughout the company.”

PART 3

Some outstanding industry examples that rely on conversational commerce to do this include:

Texting for towels: Radisson Blu’s virtual assistant, Edward, is at your service, from before you check in to 24/7 during your stay. If you need to ask the time for breakfast or request more towels be sent, Edward is there to serve, from the screen of your smart phone. Flight info on the go: KLM now offers all your flight information right there in Facebook Messen-ger. Flight updates, booking info, and even your boarding pass are available within the chat thread.

Everything in one app: WeChat, China’s dominant chatting app, lets its users run their lives by texting to hail a taxi, order food, and track fitness prog-ress.

According to [24]7, a whopping 86% of customers de-scribe outstanding customer service as having these three elements:

1. The company anticipates their needs.

2. The self-service is optimal.

3. They’re able to contact the company any way

they want.

Sounds like conversational commerce to us!

How can you reach customer nirvana at each touch-point? Start with the basics:

Offer helpful self-service content at every touchpoint. Anticipate the questions your custom-ers will have, and have help at the ready, for ex-ample in the form of a chatbot on Facebook Mes-

senger or links to FAQs. 90% of your customers are likely to go to the website before calling or email-ing, so FAQs and a knowledge base are important. FAQs should be detailed and clear, and written in your brand’s voice. Any chatbot should be able to resolve common inquiries in real-time, to help en-sure customers feel satisfied with their interaction.

Use proactive help in areas where customers get stuck. Be clear about what just happened, (“Item has been added to your cart!”), or what will happen now (“Your boots will arrive in two days.”).

Have a consistent personality to your brand. In today’s conversational commerce world, you want to be casual and personable, but also reflect your brand’s unique personality. Getting an email joking about a high-five for placing your order feels a lot more human than the robotic ORDER #53759384 HAS BEEN CONFIRMED message. Make sure you have a brand voice document so you avoid sound-ing like every other company.

Go for personalized, consistent interactions. Across all channels, your customer expects you to know who she is and how she’s spoken with you before. This is a huge challenge, but one that bot-assisted conversational commerce is quickly turn-ing into a reality. While no platform is perfect (yet), yours should be able to track previous engage-ments a customer has had with your brand across channels and personalize your communications with that customer with at least the basic details you have collected about them (name, birthdate).

Gather and use feedback: According to Esteban Kolsky, founder of thinkJar, a customer strategy

Designing A Customer Experience Strategy For Conversational Commerce

Plan For Omnichannel If your customer experience strategy doesn’t include conversational channels, you’re on the verge of trou-ble. Naturally, a few of these channels will emerge as the most likely to be used by your particular custom-ers, but meeting them at all points will allow for the kind of channel-hopping your customers are likely to do. For example, a customer at home can ask Alexa for her order status. While her dress is in transit, she might receive a delivery notification in Facebook Messenger. If she needs to return it once it arrives, she can hop back to dealing with Alexa again if she prefers.

consulting firm, 70% of companies that deliver best-in-class customer experience base it on cus-tomer feedback. The industry average is 50%, he says, and of the laggards, only 29% reflect feed-back in their processes. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, said, “To ensure that a service meets the needs of the customer (and not more than that) we use a process called ‘Working Backwards’ in which you start with your customer and work your way backwards until you get to the minimum set of technology requirements to satisfy what you try to achieve. The goal is to drive simplicity through a continuous, explicit customer focus.”

Don’t Forget The Data If conversational commerce is the new paradigm of customer experience, data is the engine that drives all those delightful interactions across touchpoints. Your customers are creating data every time they click, swipe, and like --it’s up to you to find it, ana-lyze it and use it to inform customer engagement. Nordstrom, for example, uses sensors and Wi-Fi to track who comes to the store, where in the store they shop, and how long they stay. They also incentivize their Nordstrom’s credit card and rewards program to gather data about their clients.

Target is also known for their data-collecting. The mega retailer assigns every customer a Guest ID number, which is linked to their credit card, name, or email address. This Guest ID number becomes a repository of info on a shopper’s past Target pur-chases and any demographic information the com-pany has collected about them and/or bought from a third-party source. Target’s data is so accurate and fine-grained that they were even able to determine a teenage shopper was pregnant (and send her the appropriate mailer filled with baby items) long before her father ever knew.

Collecting relevant data, analyzing it and using your learnings to inform which conversational channels make sense for your brand and what types of expe-riences your particular customers seek to have on them is the foundation of your conversational com-merce efforts.

Focus On The Highest-Value Activities Put your energy toward meaningful services that customers already care about. Look at service-oriented features, such as notification capability and on-demand service and support capabilities, to guide the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the “Checkout.”

The main benefit of service-oriented conversational channel offerings is the ability to organically drive usage into new channels. For example, a customer might place an order on your website and learn that she can subscribe to order status updates through Facebook Messenger. What she sees as taking ad-vantage of a perk will benefit you by encouraging her toward a channel where your chatbot can take over. ChatBots are best for organic conversation with com-mon use cases, but also provide a sense of person-alization and convenience for the shopper. Customer service should be your core use for this technology to start.

Don’t Just Focus on the Checkout.

Be Prepared For Bot-to-Human Handoffs The great thing about a conversation handled over text or Messenger is that the customer doesn’t have to know when they might be switching from a bot to a human. Bot design in the future will focus on what they can do, knowing what they can’t do, and design-ing a bridge to employee assistance that feels seam-less to the customer.

It’s not just the customer that will be helped by the bot, but the employee. It will provide faster informa-tion and better analytics in real time, perhaps then parsing information to pass on to the consumer. The most important aspect of innovation is convenience for the shopper. They should never have to explain their request twice.

Start Simple and Grow to Brand Management You can start with bots as a single voice in the cho-rus of messages from your brand. The long term will have bots as representatives of your entire brand, managing relationships with your customers.

You can start conversational commerce, however, with just a single entry point. You can get your cus-tomers used to interacting with you on the same channels they use to chat with their friends. You can piggyback on the culture of quick and informal com-munication, but be ready to meet their expectations

for highly personal and meaningful re-sults. If your bot can’t meet that expec-tation, your customer could walk away disappointed or annoyed.

As the technology improves, and it is, even as we write this, you’ll be able to put more and more of your brand man-agement in the hands of the bots.

Authentication Giving your bot a way to confirm the customer’s identity is key to a truly intelligent com-munication that can leverage data from across your other channels. If this isn’t done right, your bot will see each customer as a stranger, negating the oppor-tunity to provide personalized service.

Focus On Concepts Rather Than Solutions Your customers might be on Kik today but head over to Facebook Messenger tomorrow. Focusing on the concepts of conversational commerce rather than today’s hottest medium will help you keep your sanity and provide an agile approach that can be applied to meet your customers wherever they migrate. Try not to get bogged down with the details of how to build for one particular channel, and look instead to use-cases.

Every interaction with your customer is important, and maximizing the effectiveness of touchpoints has been a valid business concern for some time. Re-search from McKinsey, however, highlights the blind spot in this kind of thinking -- true leading brands have moved from a touchpoints-focus to a focus on the holistic customer journey.

Customer journey thinking requires you to step into the shoes of your customers and see your brand from their perspective. Their experience is going to cut across the silos of your business.

“Until you think about that cross-cutting journey, those silos won’t think about what are they are doing that impacts the next person’s step or the next per-son’s step,” says McKinsey director Alex Singla.

The journey includes everything before, during, and after a customer’s interaction with your brand. For an online purchase, it includes marketing, shopping, sales, logistics through to post-sale customer care and re-engagement. It could be everything from

Turning Touchpoints

Into A Journey

Those that provide the customer with the best experience from start to finish along the journey can expect to enhance customer satisfaction, improve sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service cost, and strengthen employee satisfaction.

upgrading a product to purchasing and waiting for a sweater to arrive. It could be returning a defective prod-uct and expecting a refund. Journeys can be short and involve just a few channels, or weeks long and incorpo-rate switching from social media to email to phone to chat.

“In our research, we’ve discovered that organizations that fail to appreciate the context of these situations and manage the cross-functional, end-to-end experi-ences that shape the customer’s view of the business can prompt a downpour of negative consequences, from customer defection and dramatically higher call volumes to lost sales and lower employee morale,” McKinsey finds. “In contrast, those that provide the customer with the best experience from start to finish along the journey can expect to enhance customer satisfaction, improve sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service cost, and strengthen employee satisfaction.”

McKinsey offers six steps to looking at the holistic journey and designing for experience at that level.

1. Step out of your silo and look at your business from the viewpoint of a customer who wants you to solve a problem. 2. Try to imagine how the customer moves from inter-action to interaction.

3. Plan ahead for what the customer needs, expects, and wants during each stage of the journey.

4. Pinpoint what’s working and what’s not.

5. Know what needs to be fixed most and what would be nice to have fixed. 6.Look at the root issues of poor customer experience and redesign from there.

McKinsey

Kristin Lemkau CMO of JPMorgan Chase

You should be ready to make an investment in these steps. They can take a few months, but the research shows the effort will be worth it. It is worth noting, for obvious reasons, that a special project team may need to be formed around this initiative in order to achieve the insights necessary to improve the cus-tomer’s experience.

As the McKinsey report states, “Companies that ex-cel in delivering journeys tend to win in the market.”

Mapping Out A Personalized Experience You can expect an average of seven touches with your brand before your customer buys your product, and that doesn’t even count the ever-important customer care and re-engagement. Remember that your customer wants something from you at every step, and if you can help them get what they want in the short term, such as information, you can get what you want in the long term, such as loyal sales.

What you’re looking for, according to The Econo-mist, is a single, best version of customer truth as the basis for every touchpoint. “A single, best version of customer truth is derived from inputs such as demo-graphics, psychographics, clickstream or purchase behavior, customer’s devices or locations, the content they’re viewing, along with myriad other data points.” The goal is to harmonize these data into one view of what the customer wants at each touchpoint.

Jonathan Martin, CMO of Pure Storage, says, “Today, the primary task... is to deeply understand customer buying behaviour and intent; deeply understand

the context of where someone is in their decision journey; be able to predict what they’re most likely primed to do next; and be ready to influence them at the right moment.”

Marketing to customers has moved from the “Big Idea” of the creative concept to the “Big Capabili-ties” of personalizing and contextualizing messages to customers across platforms. Analytics and bots will play a huge role in turning vast data sets into action-able touchpoints that create a holistic journey.

As Kristin Lemkau, CMO of JPMorgan Chase says, “Achieving personalization at scale is the biggest and most important challenge for us to get right.”

Achieving personalization at scale is the biggest and most important challenge for us to get right.

Building Your Conversational Commerce Tech Stack

Feel like a laggard yet? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. “A lot of big companies are sitting on this, I think that’s a big mistake,” says Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. “Some people think, ‘If we don’t have an expert, we shouldn’t even start.’ But every incremental step you can take to re-duce the amount of work that your company can do, you’re saving money.”

PART 4

Do You Go it Alone Or Outsource? This is a big decision, and a lot of money stands to be spent or saved, earned or lost. Do you go it alone, or do you hire help?

According to Dale Traxler of Practical eCommerce, one of the best reasons to outsource is the need for specialized skill. Unless you have the right skill set in-house and the resources with which to develop and deploy a complex, robust new platform, it may be best to outsource.

Ask yourself, how familiar your team is with:

Big data managementData scienceArtificial intelligenceAnalyticsContent ManagementSQL composition

. Considering the high stakes, technical difficulties, and the speed at which the landscape is shifting, outside help could be the smartest way to catch up to the conversational commerce leaders.

API developmentMachine learningSpring frameworksGit and GitflowServer-side Javascript and Node.jsFront-end HTML

No need for trainingSaaS model supportWorry-freeAgile, industry-leading solutionsFast to deploy pilot and iterate Low cost compared to building

Time and cost of trainingNeed for specialized skillsPotential to fall behindFighting for top talentExpensive team

Proprietary solutionCustomization to brandShared company culture

Communicating cultureHelping vendor understand your customers

Need to use platform that offers voice and ChatBot

Benefits

Outsourcing

In- House

Challenges

Are You Channel-Agnostic? It can be difficult to suss out what’s a fad and what’s a revolution. We hope we’ve convinced you that con-versational commerce is the revolution. As for the fad, well, that will come in the evolution of platforms your customers use. The principles are what matter most: speaking in a personal and conversational way to your customers, and scaling that conversation using tech-nology. What will change are the tools. That’s why a channel-agnostic approach is essential.

You want to be channel-agnostic because your cus-tomers are channel-agnostic. With the phenomenon known as the generation lap, young people will for-ever be hopping away from the channels that are adopted by their parents. You have to be ready to hop with them.

Remember that the key tenet of today’s retail environ-ment is that the customer is in control. They expect you to come to where they are, not the other way

With a channel-agnostic approach, you:

Give your customers control of how they come to you.

Assist your customers in the way they dictate.

Let them do business with you in the most convenient ways for them.

Strengthen it over time.

around. A true omnichannel approach is different from just a multiple channel approach; it incorporates an agile sensibility and readiness to add channels as needs.

Omnichannel goes beyond traditional media and store hours. In a world where your customer might be a mother up with her baby at 3 AM or a family that skips TV commercials with the click of a button, you have to be ready to capture your audience wherever they appear.

Sample Pilot Timeline A phased approach to allow for testing & learning

White-list Pilot Service is only exposed

to white-listed customers. For example, the white-listed customers can be

selected employees.

Phase I

Randomly SelectedShopper Pilot

Service is only exposed to a randomly selected

X% of shoppers.

Phase II

Full-Scale Shopper Pilot Service is exposed

to all shoppers.

Phase III

Long-Term Relationship

Phase IV

Are your ready for the future of

Ecommerce?It used to be that a company’s abilities to manage assets, such as factories and inventory, set them apart and made them successful. But with the digitization of our world, the focus of success has shifted to the battle for managing brands and customer experience. If you can connect with your customers and get them what they want, when they want it, you’ll be one of the leaders of 21st century commerce.

Help is out there to allow you to better compete, find your place in this new retail landscape and navigate the ways into your customer’s heart, mind, and wal-let. The promise of bots and virtual assistants holds

exciting opportunities to make your customer feel as though she is getting the personalized service of a small shop owner who’s known her for years, but with technology that’s scalable to the masses. Let your customers be your guide, talk with them when, how, and where they want and step into the new world of opportunity that conversational com-merce presents for your brand.

Thanks for reading

Our team hopes you found this Guide useful, and valuable. We’re passionate about improving the rela-tionship between consumers and the companies that serve them. We’d love to hear about your plans and ideas on how customer expectations are changing, and what newer channels mean for retail.

All the best.

Fang ChengCEO, Linc Inc.fang@letslinc.com

To chat about serving your customers with exceptional customer care automation, please call us at 805 245 0624 or email us at info@letslinc.com.

About Linc Linc’s customer care automation platform powers the digital experiences that strengthen the relation-ships between brands and shoppers, transforming one-time purchasers into lifetime customers. Brands, retailers and CPGs leverage Linc to provide their customers with exceptional tracking, FAQ, return and exchange experiences, and create new revenue chan-nels via personalized upsells, cross-sells, sampling and product re-ordering.

The platform ties together the emerging channels of Voice Assistants (Amazon Alexa, Google Home) and ChatBots (Facebook Messenger) with email, SMS and a web portal with a single customer profile to strengthen the customer care experience and in-crease engagement, customer satisfaction and reten-tion, reduce service and reverse logistics costs, and drive revenue.

Linc’s platform uses commerce-trained AI, machine learning and natural language understanding to re-solve customer support requests in real-time and provide personal recommendations, and is built with integrations to work with existing ecommerce, logis-tics, email marketing, social management and OMS platforms.

As the platform of choice for leading brands who want to build stronger relationships with their cus-tomers and accelerate their ecommerce growth with increased customer lifetime value, Linc has served tens of millions of shoppers, and has an expanding customer list that includes brands such as Carter’s, Vineyard Vines, Crocs, GoPro, Hugo Boss, Jockey, Vega and eBags. Learn more at www.letslinc.com.