This is a detailed guide on creating a seamless and personalized experience for your online shoppers with the MyAlice conversational tool stack, including WooCommerce chatbot, multichannel helpdesk, and more.
Say you go to a store to purchase a pair of shoes. You can't find the right size, but there is no one around to help you. How would you feel?
The truth is that you will always find someone to help you at a brick-and-mortar store. But can you say the same for online?
With digital experiences becoming the new normal, your customers expect personalization even from your online store and expect them fast. In fact, 75% of your online visitors will move to another store if they don't get a reply in 5 minutes.
It's crazy how we spend thousands of dollars on logos, websites, ads to win attention and loyalty. But when it comes to customer support, we leave our customers hanging on hold, sometimes for hours to respond or days to approve a refund.
Chris Messina coined this term —Conversational Commerce, in 2016. For the first time, messaging apps had crossed social networking in terms of usage. So, it only made sense for brands to shift where their customers are hanging out.
Conversational commerce dictates that your customers can chat with your store in real-time. They will treat your brand like a person and reach out to you on social messaging apps.
And when that happens, you need to deploy someone to ensure lighting fast service — either a human, a WooCommerce chatbot, or a combination of both.
Conversational Commerce in WooCommerce
So, here is how you integrate conversational commerce in your WooCommerce store in three steps.
1. Centralize Your Customer Communication
Marketing tells you to be where your customers are.
Flash News: Your customers are everywhere today.
So, naturally, a modern brand has no less than 5-6 social channels. The FOMO is real.
But the problem starts when the messages start flooding in from all your different channels. You start switching between your apps frantically. Your replies take time because you don't have customer information readily available at your fingertips.
Sometimes you will also need to jump back to your website to confirm product availability and check inventory.
With readily available order information on the screen, your agents can update, refund, or cancel orders on the go or resolve order-related tickets that make up 33% of your customer queries.
And be it Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, or WooCommerce live chat, you can search products in your WooCommerce inventory right from your inbox and share the results with your customers instantly.
Think we can solve your problem? Try MyAlice for a 14-day free trial.
2. Automate your Live Chat with WooCommerce Chatbot
At first glance, all your customer questions seem different. But you will soon realize that most of them are asking the same questions.
Where is my order?
Where is your store?
I want to place an order.
Is this product available?
Do you have a discount?
So, instead of wasting your resources on answering repetitive questions, a WooCommerce chatbot sounds like an ideal solution.
We have created our WooCommerce chatbot, keeping in mind the most common use cases. Here are a few that might interest you.
Use Case 1: Automate General Repetitive Queries
Currently, we allow custom NLP from Wit.ai. But soon, we will be launching our built-in NLP — Brain from MyAlice.
Installing the NLP will allow your WooCommerce chatbot to understand common e-commerce customer intents, such as store location, operating time, customer support, order placement, order status, product search, refund policy, return policy, etc.
You can also set custom keywords and connect different sequences to create and automate advanced user journeys.
Use Case 2: Automatic Order Creation Process
Currently, your customers need to switch to the website to find a product or place an order. Sometimes, the agents even collect user information manually to place an order.
With MyAlice, you can automate the entire order creation process —from product discovery to add to cart to view the cart to finally placing the order. Your customers can manage everything from the comfort of their inbox.
To make the process even more seamless, we are currently working on the multiple blocks that you can use to build your WooCommerce chatbot.
Product Discovery Block
Add to Cart Block
View Cart Block
Place an Order Block
These blocks will go live soon.
Giveaway Alert: We just launched on Product Hunt. So, sign up before this month ends, and get 3 months of free access to all our premium features.
Use Case 3: Track Customer Satisfaction Automatically
You can set rules to trigger a review prompt every time a ticket is resolved. Customers can rate their e-commerce support experience with one click. You can also redirect users to different sequences based on their positive or negative responses.
3. Optimize Your Support with E-Commerce Analytics
Conversations are invaluable data mines, but they are useless if you cannot extract useful information from them.
Now that you have centralized your tickets and automated your conversations, the next step is to optimize your support with insights gleaned from powerful analytics.
We offer two levels of data for WooCommerce users. The primary inbox data can be readily accessed by agents so that they have the essential customer information to resolve tickets efficiently.
Customer Information
Order History
Customer Summary
Product Interaction
Moreover, you will find even more advanced analytics, broadly categorized under four metrics under the Reports tab.
Customer Metrics: Traffic data across website and social chat.
Agent Metrics: Agent performance and sales conversion data.
CSAT Report: Customer satisfaction and review.
Connect WooCommerce with MyAlice
Go to Settings > Marketplace and install WooCommerce on MyAlice.
Paste your store WooCommerce store URL in the pop-up field.
Log in to your WooCommerce account and approve all the permissions.
At this point, you can create a live chat plugin on your website. This will activate a WooCommerce chatbot on your website. You can always modify and publish the chatbot flow in the Builder later.
Now, create a new channel or choose a previously connected channel.
Paste the plugin key in your WooCommerce Admin Panel.
Once you are done, go back to your MyAlice dashboard and check the plugin key. If you have followed along, congratulations on successfully integrating WooCommerce in MyAlice.
Now head over to your MyAlice dashboard and start implementing these WooCommerce tips now.
We are on a mission to make e-commerce more conversational. WooCommerce automation is just the beginning. Next month, we will be launching our Shopify integration.
We would like you to join our #conversationalcommerce movement. Sign up for a 14-day free trial and get started now.
Do you find yourself chasing down new customers because current customers aren't sticking around, and you need to keep your eCommerce business afloat? Is it a sustainable strategy to run your eCommerce business?
We hear you saying no because it actually isn't. It's time you need to focus on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
In this competitive narrative, you can't really go far by keeping on investing in getting NEW customers rather than keeping your OLD customers. What you really need to concentrate on is maximizing your revenue from your present customers. And this is where customer lifetime value comes into play.
According to Tim Cameron Kitchen- CEO of Exposure Ninja, "In order to increase your customer lifetime value, you need to pull two levers. One, increase the number of purchases. And two, increase the purchase value of each customer. And of course, a good business will have a combination of both of these levers."
We want your business to have high customer LTV. So we noted down a series of pointers that you could follow to increase your customer lifetime value and higher profits. Before we dive into the strategies, let's start with the basics.
What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?
According to Omniconvert, "customer lifetime value (CLV) shows how much revenue a business can expect from one customer compared to how long the company predicts that customer will stay."
Customer lifetime value is an important metric for eCommerce brands to measure the average accumulating total of their purchase for some time.
Lifetime value helps you determine if your business will scale the ROI from marketing. It also helps you evaluate the retention strategy depending on how low or high your LTV is.
How To Increase Customer Lifetime Value
You can increase your customer lifetime value by either increasing your Average Order Value or Average Purchase Frequency. An increase in either of these metrics will rise Customer Lifetime Value. Apart from that, let's take a look at the other ways to increase CLV.
— Improve Your Customer Support
Treating your customer right is the core to increasing customer lifetime value. According to Tim Han, an international speaker and author from success insider - "treating your customers like family is the key to recurring customers."
Now we're not telling you to turn a blind eye to their red flags and keep on supporting them. But we definitely recommend you to go a bit above to give them special treatments. In fact, according to research from PWC, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. So enhancing your customer support is an absolute must.
A solid customer support strategy includes attention to the customer pre, mid and post-sale. Your customer support should cater to your customer at every stage of their buying journey. A great way to make sure your customer's queries are always answered in no time is by using an AI-powered chatbot. Having a live chat available can turn a customer question into a sale or complaint into a resolution. We recommend you check out MyAlice as their chatbot can actually automate your entire selling process from start to finish. And the best part is, MyAlice is completely free to sign up!
You need to make sure your customers are returning again and again for the delightful experience you provide.
— Send out occasional gifts
Who doesn't like free stuff? Especially when it comes as a surprise from a place you shopped from. We find ourselves leaning towards shops that offer great discounts or free goodies in most cases. And that's because this is a psychological trick that all of us fall for.
Lippincott's creative consultancy provided a scientific and psychological-based study called the "Happiness Halo" - proving exactly that. In the "Happiness Halo," the author stresses, "Appeal to customers' reason and they're yours for a day. Appeal to customer's emotions, and they're yours for a lifetime."
And nothing is more solid than sending gifts to appeal to your customer's emotions. It shows them that you care about them more than just a means of getting some sales.
We're not telling you to send out gifts 365 days a year to every customer for every purchase. But rather, identify your loyal set of customers and potentially loyal customers, and then send out occasional gifts to show them you care.
— Nudge Your Customers into Subscriptions
One of the most popular ways (that works) of increasing the number of purchases of your customers is by bumping them into subscriptions. They're one of the new trends of e-commerce. And they can be lucrative enough that we even see big names like GoPro getting into the subscription realm they previously didn't opt for.
You can nudge them into a subscription by displaying a subscription-biased pricing option of your product.
This basically means you will show the pricing option of a one-time purchase on one side. And on another, the pricing option is based on subscription. However, you need to show your customers how the subscription pricing will be more effective and profitable.
This will incentivize them to opt for the subscription rather than going for a one-time purchase.
Another way of getting your customers into subscriptions is by showing the subscription as the default purchase method. And if customers want to go for a one-time purchase, they need to click on that purchase method.
You can do to level up the subscription game by giving them an option to allow your customers to customize the time frame and the amount of product for the subscription. This way, they will not have too much stock of the product based on their lifestyle. And they are less likely to cancel the subscription altogether.
— Integrate Add-ons and Upsells
Another great way to increase the average order value of your customers is by adding add-ons and upsells. Big names like GoDaddy GoPro have been using this pricing strategy for years now, which has helped them generate more sales.
Everything that you throw at your customers before and after purchasing the products is for one thing - increasing the order value.
And therefore, there's an increase in customer LTV. Some of your add-ons and upsells features may seem annoying to your customers. But it's a genius idea for your business.
Since you are competing in a very competitive and price-sensitive space, If you want to maximize your customer acquisition, you need to maximize the value of every customer you get through the door.
By doing so, you can save the money that you would have otherwise spent on getting new customers. So you can now invest it in other business activities. Like - marketing. Which will help you build market share without increasing the price of their core product.
— Introduce Premium Versions
Introducing a line of premium versions of the same product can incentivize your customers to opt for better options. But, you need to make sure you can present it in a manner that demonstrates why the premium versions are better than the regular ones.
That way, customers who always want the best of everything are more likely to opt for the premium purchase. The pricing of the premium product will also be higher than the regular, which may be a problem for some of your customers. In such a case, you can introduce split pay for that.
Now split pay is absolutely everywhere and another massive trend of e-commerce over the last few years. One of the biggest players in the split pay market -Klarna, claims to increase the average order value by up to 58%.
Split pay will help you get more sales for your premium products and end up increasing the average order value for your customers.
Drawing Conclusion: Loyalty Brings Revenue
The right customer lifetime value model can boost your company's growth and progress in many ways. It puts more money in your business's wallet by lowering customer acquisition costs and saving money on marketing and sales activities.
Delivering a great deal of value, understanding the customers being in their shoes, prioritizing customer service are what they need to come back to you again and again.
