5 Ways to deliver Amazon class customer experience

Delivering exceptional customer experience

If you want to deliver exceptional customer experiences, Amazon sets the bar. Last year it topped a poll of 181 brands for customer satisfaction in the UK. While in 2012 it stunned the US retail world when it claimed the top spot for customer service. Amazon is indeed a class act to follow. And with customers experience the new battleground for loyalty, replicating its features is a smart strategy. Thankfully, it's possible to deliver the experience of today's shopper demands without Jeff Bezos' billions. There are tools you can use at a relatively low cost that can boost customer satisfaction, increase retention and grow your profits. For tips on how to engage with your customers, have a look at our guide.

Here are five to add to your ecommerce toolkit to deliver Amazon class customer experiences:

Personalization

Amazon's personalized recommendations engine is key to its success. With the latest generation e-commerce platform, like Magento, you can deliver the same personalized experience. Magento has all the bells and whistles that make the Amazon experience so special and allow you to deliver customized pages to suit each individual customer.

Video chat

Face to face interaction can be a powerful way of imitating the human interaction of offline shopping. Skype and Google Hangouts aren't really designed for providing professional customer service. So try VideoDesk instead. VideoDesk allows teams to hold both text and video chats with multiple customers at once. What's more, it provides each user's browsing history so you can see exactly which pages they've visited and which products they might need advice on.

Social media monitoring

You can't rely on customers to contact you when something goes wrong. Too often it will be on social media that their complaints will be heard. Hootsuite is a popular tool that enables you to keep tabs on mentions of your brand on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and a host of other social media sites. You can then address complaints quickly and protect your reputation. You may even attract more customers by demonstrating your dedication to customer service.

Marketing automation

With a service like Silverpop, you can send a series of welcome messages, how to guides and purchase follow-ups all on autopilot. You can also track the ROI of every open, read and click-through so you can gauge the quality of your customer's experience in clear figures.

SMS notifications and self service

With an open rate of 98% and messages typically opened within 90 seconds, SMS has a response rate that makes email marketers blush. As the shopping experience becomes more mobile, SMS is the perfect channel for sending delivery date notifications, running promotions and even having one to one conversations with customer services. All of these five tools can give you the edge in delivering the exceptional customer experience today's buyer demands. SMS, in particular, is a powerful tool your competitors may not be taking advantage of. If you've yet to harness SMS, we have a guide that covers 101 ways you can use SMS. We've also created a white paper that explains how SMS can be used to solve five key e-commerce challenges and gain the edge in the battle for customer loyalty. Download your copy now.