Crisis Management- Agility and rapid deployment of solutions

eCommerce Trend Watch: 4th edition

48 hrs rapid deployment configuration conversational platform messaging

 

 

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, iAdvize’s conversational platform has tracked nearly 15 million transactions and more than 21 million messages exchanged between brands and their customers. Analyzing this data allows us to create a Trend Watch, to better inform a company’s decision-makers. This week, the spotlight is on the agility that businesses need to demonstrate in order to react quickly and efficiently to the soaring online activity and new consumer habits.

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1. Adjusting your strategy quickly, to prepare for after the crisis

The evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic requires companies to react rapidly to counter its potentially devastating effects. As Accenture highlights in their recent report on responsive customer service in times of change*, “…COVID-19 is requiring that brands move at unprecedented speed to serve their customers with quality while caring for their employees with compassion". According to this consulting firm, the challenge for brands is threefold: To be readily available to clients in need of assistance, to show compassion in the displacement of their personnel, and to anticipate or manage remote workflow. Their advice: to turn to technology compatible with remote working which will eventually initiate a positive transformation within the business once the crisis has subsided. 
In these last two weeks, we have taken notice of the intense rate in which new strategies are being launched, decisions are being made and deployments are being performed by iAdvize clients. All of this in record time.
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2. The rapid evolution of conversational strategies observed on our platform

Between ever-increasing requests and intensifying online sales, COVID-19 is setting many challenges for brands. In order to respond, our clients are rapidly adjusting their conversational strategies, by deploying innovative solutions. The Objective: to ensure continuity in their service and to offer the best customer experience possible during this disconcerting time.
 
The Adjustment of targeting strategies
Pages visited, browsing time… close monitoring of one’s targeting strategy, the rule that triggers messaging assistance to its visitors, has become essential in the current climate. Whether it be assisting buyers or responding to their delivery complications in a proactive way, our clients have been adapting their approaches.
For the last 15 days of March, we have tracked 3 times more projects linked to targeting strategies than during the weeks preceding.
 
A significant acceleration in the adoption of bots
To treat the volume of requests and reoccurring questions linked to the coronavirus, a few of our clients decided to automate their responses via chatbot, which can “pull” the queries and redirect the questions linked to COVID-19 toward an information card or FAQ page. 
In the chart below you can see the evolution of the total number of bots deployed per week on the iAdvize platform. We have noted a 27% increase in the number of bots deployed on the platform between February 24th and April 6th, with a spike in the week of March 9th, 2020.
We are seeing a 56% increase in the number of clients deploying their first bot in February-March 2020 compared to the same period the year before.
COVID Graph Bot Creation Conversational Platform
ibbü experts are increasing in number
Experts from the ibbü community are passionate about their topics and are handpicked to advise visitors to company websites via messaging. Available on-demand, these freelance specialists are trained to help brands in assisting visitors, hence alleviating their load of online queries. 
A few of our clients have opted for this solution as a support during the crisis, as shown in the chart below with the evolution of the number of experts onboarded per week since the start of the pandemic. During the week of March 30th, we have registered 6 times the number of experts compared to a typical week in 2019.
COVID Graph ibbu expert creation Conversational Platform
The use of mobile applications is on the rise
This confinement has resulted in a significant increase in the use of the iAdvize mobile application, as some of our clients have asked their professional advisors to continue their activity remotely via our platform; on the desktop as much as the mobile application. For example, we have trained and redeployed 400 sales staff from one of Europe’s leading sports goods retailers on our platform. They now provide messaging support to the visitors of this retailer’s website.
As seen in the graph below, the number of active app users during the last 28 days was close to 4 times higher than during the preceding weeks.
COVID Graph number of users on iAdvize mobile app Conversational Platform
An asynchronous chat for seamless conversations 
iAdvize Messenger includes an asynchronous functionality, which gives the agent the possibility to respond later if no representative is available in real-time. The visitor can ask their question without having to wait. As soon as an agent has handled a query, the visitor receives an email with a link that leads them to the response in the conversation thread. Some of our clients have increased their usage with this function to optimize the agent occupation rate and handle a larger volume of conversations (3.6x for one of our clients in the children's fashion sector). 
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3. Use Case

Our conversational platform is a simple and rapid solution to deploy. In addition to supporting our partners with tailored strategies, our teams are mobilized to help our new clients adopt the iAdvize platform in record time.
 
Below is a video illustration from one of our most recent client cases:
 

 

In the Home Improvement sector, we were able to support a large company by redeploying their staff online, when they were obligated to close their doors. This company had to simultaneously follow up with customers who had already purchased items before the closure and also redeploy its commercial activity online. As the company does not have an e-commerce platform, they managed sales via three channels: by telephone, by email, and by messaging. It deployed and configured iAdvize for its website within 48 hours. This company transferred nearly a dozen of its sales support team to online assistance. While working from home, these specialists advise buyers on the site’s product pages via our platform, after having received 2 hours of express e-learning training. On March 30th, 5 days after having deployed the solution, the company was already recording close to 300 conversations in just one day.

Support plan
COVID-19 has shaken customer experience and the way brands communicate with their customers.
In the current context dominated by store closures and the massive adoption of remote-working, iAdvize enables you to maintain a reactive customer service, to optimise your response abilities at a large scale and to analyse your customers’ concerns.
The iAdvize support plan for businesses is here to help.
More information