Visiting an online storefront is like walking into a physical store when no one’s there.
Customer engagement vendor Moxie Software feels your pain. Today, the San Bruno, California-based company is offering help with a new digital engagement suite that is its equivalent of an attentive salesperson.
It’s “a concierge approach to digital engagement,” VP of engineering Brian Strauss told me, and it represents a new attention to ecommerce by Moxie.
A mobile user, for instance, might start a smartphone search for a tablet on Google, and then follow the link to a mobile site for a store that sells tablets. A chat window with a live agent welcomes the visitor and offers suggestions on where tablets can be found on the site, since the suite picks up the nature of the search.
At various points in the user’s visit, Moxie also offers opportunities to find “helpful info” or for the user to send a message to the site. The chat window might also return if it appears the user is lost. A similar experience, employing chat, knowledge base and emails or messaging, is available on desktop sites that employ the new Moxie suite.
Automated responses to user activity can be configured by an Engagement Mapper, with one configuration good for experiences on desktop, tablets and smartphones.
Moxie Software’s new digital engagement suite at work
Founded in 2006, the company has previously focused largely on providing chat, knowledge base and email services for customer service. Now, those channels — integrated and boosted by detection of what a user’s behavior means — are available as a service layer for online stores.
This kind of hand-holding has its pros and cons. It can help to market products a user might not otherwise consider, and it can offset the high abandonment rate of shopping carts by helping the user find the right item, or even, when possible, offering a discount.
On the other hand, the chat windows are staffed by live personnel, substantially increasing the cost of managing an online store. But, Strauss said, that added cost is worthwhile, since it leads to higher sales conversions. Moxie says that luxury brand Shinola experienced a 6.25 percent lift in conversion rate since implementing the new suite.
Moxie also points to a recent Forrester Research study that found 55 percent of US online adults will abandon an online purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to a question.
Other platforms similarly offer customer personalization and engagement to entice, guide and inform customers as they make their way through purchases.
But Moxie seeks to distinguish itself by its emphasis on a shopping guide, a friendly layer of helpfulness prepared to sense what you really want. For instance, the company said, its new service can detect if you’ve entered a discount code into a site and it doesn’t work and will offer to help.
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