Before the dawn of the Covid-19 outbreak, Maybelline's in-store shopping accounted for approximately 85% of purchases. However, with the onset of Covid-19, roughly 30 percent of the beauty industry went out of business.
The market players were compelled to redefine their digital experience to bring in new customers and retain the existing ones. Maybelline New York in Myanmar was no exception.
The Company: Maybelline New York Myanmar
Maybelline has had a strong marketing position in the beauty industry for decades. Since its inception in New York, the brand has catered to cosmetics enthusiasts worldwide.
However, sales heavily depend on conversations and engagement with customers in this industry. Customers like to have face-to-face interactions with salespeople. They ask many questions about the product — shades, variations, components. Their purchase decisions largely depend on the store's personalized responses.
Given the realities of COVID, the company now must engage its customers from the comfort of their own homes. Hence, the Maybelline Myanmar team decided to capitalize on the growing popularity of social commerce and launch a Facebook Messenger chatbot.
The Challenge: Strengthening the brand's online presence
The key challenge was to enhance the brand's online presence to build resilience during and after Covid-19. There were other secondary issues as well.
1. Offsetting the Decline in In-store Sales: With outlets closing down during lockdowns, Maybelline Myanmar experienced a dip in sales and revenue, too, like many other beauty brands.
2. Creating Opportunities for Conversations: Customer engagement is a daunting task. Retaining customers' attention in the beauty industry requires a thorough understanding of their likes and dislikes. Maybelline Myanmar sought a solution that would keep customers engaged by —
- Delivering instant solutions to their queries.
- Showcasing products in a clickable format
- Providing personalized product recommendations.
3. 24/7 Online Presence: Customers want more. They want store representatives to be available 24/7. But ensuring so is practically impossible. So, Maybelline Myanmar wished to implement a Messenger chatbot solution to speed up response time and facilitate immediate purchases.
4. Natural Language Processing: 70% of the population in Myanmar speaks and chats in their language. Sure, there were a lot of chatbot solutions in the market, but rarely does one have the NLP capacity to support the Burmese language.
The Solution: Automated Customer Support on Facebook Messenger
This was when Maybelline Myanmar adopted MyAlice. By connecting their channels on MyAlice, Maybelline could now reply to conversations from all social media and update their orders from one single dashboard.
MyAlice chatbot helped the support team handle 24/7 customer queries by automating repetitive questions and fostering more engaging conversations in the Burmese language.
To top it all off, MyAlice's data inventory platform and detailed consumer reports enabled Maybelline to provide customized in-chat shopping experiences. This, in turn, has paved the way for increased sales via upselling and cross-selling.
Drop a message on Maybelline Myanmar's Messenger to get an in-chat shopping experience with MyAlice conversational solution.
The Outcome
With the help of MyAlice, Maybelline Myanmar gained detailed insights into their sales and customers, backed up by quantifiable performance metrics. A year after the chatbot was deployed, the company received approximately 4,800 orders via Messenger only. Web traffic shot up to 5,000, implying favorable customer engagement.
