As Mobile Devices become the Shoppers Channel of Choice, New Technologies Emerge to Provide Superior Customer Experience

Mobile device proliferation presents both challenges and opportunities for online brands. We’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in the way that consumers engage with brands and in the way customer preference and loyalty is influenced. Digital channels are now most often a consumer’s initial point of interaction and are creating new opportunities for brand engagement, but even modalities as modern as the web are inhibited by the constraints of mobile.

Live engagement tools allow brands to break-out beyond the standard UI constraints of mobile devices and provide personalized real-time assistance in ways that are proven to impact sales and service KPIs. Text chat was an effective first generation solution and demonstrated the value of live help. Live video assistance is the next generation solution built around today’s mobile consumer.

Text chat: The first generation of personalized online customer experience

Text chat was introduced for both ecommerce and online customer service to personalize, improve, and expedite interactions with the customer. Consumers liked text chat because they could get questions answered quickly; ecommerce and support providers liked it because it allowed them to interact with consumers while they were actively engaged with their products and services.

Text chat has been proven to provide lift for desktop ecommerce sessions, but has limited benefit in a mobile environment. Typing detailed questions can be cumbersome and the mobile form is not conducive to interactive chat and often prevents the customer from maintaining a simultaneous browsing and shopping experience.

Additionally, the concurrent nature of text chat support is less helpful with the immediate nature of mobile. Text chat agents typically support multiple engagements at the same time, leading to extended wait time between responses. While a customer can more easily multi-task on a desktop while waiting for a response, the situational dynamics of mobile use can result in less patience for this type of interrupted experience.

The next generation: designed for mobile

Live video assistance, which includes simultaneous voice, video, text and co-browsing with an agent on any mobile browser or application can deliver superior customer satisfaction and loyalty for the mobile customer.

Live video assistance unhooks the customer from the restrictive and cumbersome mobile UI while providing real-time, face to face assistance.  Agents provide personalized answers to questions, supported by the delivery of relevant content to the customer’s screen, and hands-on help completing forms or the checkout process. In the case of customers that are early in the shopping journey, live assistance can be vital to providing a quality experience that promotes brand loyalty, enables lead capture, defeats web-rooming practices, and maximizes the likelihood of downstream purchase.

These measurable benefits have been realized by businesses using live video assistance solutions:

• Improvements in conversion to sale from 10 to 30 percent in assisted sessions; though some clients have achieved as much as 10x increases in online conversion;
• 25-35 percent increases in average order value;
• Net Promoter Scores of 78 and above;
• Call resolution rates higher than traditional support channels.

To discover the role of live video assistance for mobile ecommerce, read the full article here.