The use of a unified omnichannel conversational commerce solution will not only provide businesses with increased sales and traffic but also increase and expand customer engagements as well as in ensuring consistent customer experience journeys.
This was the observation of Lina Sherkawi (pic above), Chief Technology Officer of AiLedger at Wavelet Solutions Sdn. Bhd. (Wavelet), who said that the pandemic has revolutionised the trend of consumers’ shopping behaviours.
“Everyone has moved to online channels, and today’s customers expect to reach businesses anytime, anywhere, and using any channel. However, it’s not easy to organise and manage these conversations for businesses across multiple channels,” she added.
This is where UCC, or Wavelet Solutions’ Unified Conversational Commerce service, comes in.
UCC started in light of COVID-19, anticipating the need of various businesses to expand their online engagement by having a consolidated system that allows them to communicate with their clients across all the online channels they support.
“So omnichannel helps your brand to refine the messaging and target customers in a personalised and relevant way,” said Lina.
She shared her thoughts during an online Webinar organised by iPay88 entitled “Business Growth Opportunities with Unified Omnichannel Commerce” recently.
Hosted by Johnny Chong, Head of Innovative Partnership at iPay88 (pic), the Webinar also featured Tan Lee Hsiang, ISV (Independent Software Vendor) ASEAN Partner Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“In UCC, we have all communication in one place by integrating many chat channels together. Businesses can use UCC to handle conversational commerce and marketplace chat integration, as a data hub, and perform digital marketing,” explained Lina.
“Conversational commerce is the intersection between messaging apps and shopping. This refers to how businesses use messaging and chat applications e.g. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Web chat, and SMS to communicate with customers to enhance their commerce or shopping experience.
“UCC’s built-in shopping cart feature will help to increase and ease the process of conversational commerce. The UCC agent can create a shopping cart on behalf of the customer while chatting with the customer online. All the UCC agent needs is to send the payment link in the chat, and the customer can do the payment in his preferred chat application, which leads to more sales and order placement without having to visit the e-commerce website.”
Lina pointed out that UCC also has integrated marketplace chat channels like Lazada Chat and Shopee Chat.
By using these two marketplace integrations, businesses can engage with customers using chat as a support and order processing tool using these marketplace and ecommerce websites.
“Behind UCC is the data hub as its backbone. In the data hub, we have a lot of data that’s related to the customer; data about customers’ transaction history, purchases or orders, behaviour, and interests, so the business knows everything related to the customer.
“It also provides access to an issue tracker solution or ticketing system, which will help to escalate those activities that require further follow-up and assign them to a respective department in the business.
“The data hub also integrates and provides access to the product catalogue, whereby businesses may store information about their products in the form of images or other multimedia. All of this product information can easily be accessed by the UCC agent and shared with the customers using the chat applications.”
UCC is able to merge customers’ contact information across multiple messaging platforms and provide businesses with more information about their conversation history, so that they understand customers and their behaviour better.
“Then you can attend to the customer perfectly using this 360-degree view of the customer,” said Lina.
Lina also highlighted the fact that in addition to being a contact centre solution, UCC can convert contact centre into a profit centre.
“You can use the digital marketing tool, which is integrated directly with the UCC, to target your customers, create campaigns, create dynamic segmentation, and reach your customers proactively,” she said.
“This will result in generating more sales leads and help to increase your sales. This digital marketing also has access to the data hub, which makes it easy to generate dynamic segmentation based on your specified criteria, and hence you can reach the correct audience at the correct time.
“The digital marketing tool also is able to generate sales tracking reports after the campaign, so you can measure how effective the campaign was.”
UCC is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world’s leading cloud service providers.
The AWS Partner Network includes thousands of system integrators that specialise in AWS services and tens of thousands of independent software vendors. AWS has the largest and most dynamic community, with millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally.
Wavelet has been an AWS partner since 2012, and has recently been awarded as AWS ASEAN Software Partner of the Year. As AWS’ Tan explained, the award signified that Wavelet was the top performing software partner of the year in the ASEAN region.
“Wavelet was also recently awarded as AWS Retail Competency Partner. In AWS, we have different kinds of competency recognitions that we award to our partners and retail industries,” said Tan (pic).
“They need to carry innovative technology offerings as part of their solutions, and they must be able to demonstrate that they’re able to accelerate retail in a modern and innovative journey across all areas in the enterprise.
“Wavelet is able to offer strategy and deployment services to retailers, as well as other businesses, to help accelerate their digital transformation,” Tan added.
