Ways To Reduce Cart Abandonment

 It is seen that online shoppers add items to the virtual cart and then abandon it. There can be several reasons for the customers to leave the website before making the purchase, let's find out which are those reasons and how to reduce shopping cart abandonment and can cart abandonment be prevented?

What is Cart Abandonment?

In simple words, cart abandonment occurs during online purchasing when a customer selects the products and stores in the virtual cart of the app but discontinues the purchase and checks out of the process. The item that was selected and put into the cart but never purchased is now called the “abandoned”.

Based on a number of different eCommerce studies, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 68.81% with the most recent study showing 74.52% ( Source : Geckoboard).

What is the cart abandonment rate?

It is calculated by dividing the total number of completed purchases by the number of shopping carts made then subtract the result from 1 and then multiply by 100 for the abandonment rate.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate = [1 - [ completed purchases / shopping carts created ]] * 100 = (%)

What leads to cart abandonment?

1. Required sign up.

2. Complex checkout process- 21% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order in the past quarter solely due to a “too long/complicated checkout process”. (Source- Baymard)

3. Limited payment options.

4. Shipping costs.

5. Lack of payment option.

(Source: Baymard.com)

Unavoidable cart and checkout abandonments

1. Price comparison

2. Saving items for later

3. Exploring gift options

4. Window shopping

Ways To Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Avail Thumbnail Images of Products:

• Customers remember what they see and ought to buy the product. 

• The eye-pleasing thumbnails can assure the interest of the customer and combate shopping cart abandonment. 

• For example, when we visit a store to buy clothes, we tend to buy it because of the way it is displayed and the same goes for an eCommerce experience. 

Utilize Transaction Forms Effectively:

• It is estimated that almost 61% of consumers had not purchased something online because trust logos were missing, but also that more than 75% of consumers had chosen against making a purchase because they didn’t recognize the trust logos (Source: WordStream). 

• A customer is always particular in spending his hard-earned money. It is our responsibility to give them a sense of conviction. 

• Transaction forms with trust signals such as security logos in a prominent position can be used as an opportunity to build trust in the consumers. 

(Source: WordStream)

Avoid Complex Checkout Processes:

• It has been found that 1 out of 5 shoppers have abandoned a cart in the last quarter due to a “too long/complicated checkout process” (Source: Baymard Institute). 

• Avoid the lengthy checkout process and include a progress indicator on your checkout pages. 

• You will be able to track and show the customer where he is in the checkout process. 

• It gives the customer a sense of process being on the last step thus eliminating ambiguity and makes the process clearer and easier for customers to understand.

Points To Be Marked:

• The average large-sized e-commerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate though better checkout design.- Baymard Institute.

• If we look at the combined e-commerce sales of $738 billion in the US and EU, the potential for a 35.26% increase in conversion rate translates to $260 billion worth of lost orders which are recoverable solely through a better checkout flow & design- Baymard Institute.

The Interface Of The E-cart Should Be Easy To Navigate:

• Customers are always attracted towards a site that is easy to move on between different functionalities of the website including the checkout process. 

• The navigation between a shopping cart and an eCommerce store should be made easy to decrease the discord while making a purchase.

Closing Remarks

Eliminate the potential worry of the customers and yours to abandon the cart by providing them with an easy checkout process, transaction forms and making navigation between cart and store painless. These are some of the points which can be kept in mind to help reduce shopping cart abandonment and redeem the prospective customers that you might lose along the way.

Importance Of API Integrations In The Hospitality Sector

 It is time to renovate the hospitality sector by fusing its services with other significant sectors using proprietary or Open APIs to assist customers and organisations. Let us find out how APIs are becoming game changers in the hospitality sector and how is API technology transforming the hospitality industry? But before that let us find out some of the myths listed below.

Myths about not availing API integrations in the hospitality sector:

• Software manufacturers are not focused on the integration

• Technically Challenging

• Time Consuming

• High-priced

What is Integration in the hospitality industry?

Integration in the hospitality industry means various parts of a customer’s journey can connect to make a great experience. For example, The airline that a customer is travelling gets integrated with the cab service organizations to track the customer's location and picks him up without wasting time. It is used in well-known industries such as the hotel and travel industry.

What is an API and how do they work in the hotel industry?

An application programming interface (API) is a computing interface or method/way, for two pieces of software to communicate with each other. With its ability to provide various services all within a central hub, hotel API integration can modify the hospitality industry. In the hotel industry, it manages multiple bookings & enquiries across all packages collectively into a single inbox.

How is API technology transforming the hospitality industry?

Unifying enquiries:

• Gather your enquiries from booking engines, travel partner sites, web forms, emails, and calls with an enquiry management system and get rid of the practice of chasing multiple channels with a CRM for hotel management. 

Updates the enquiries:

• Existing guest enquiries get auto attached to a new guest account gets created for new enquiries.

Manages your leads:

• Keep a tab on the lead’s journey by setting up lead distribution for global locations on the CRM for hospitality management.

• It helps you set a custom workflow that enables you to receive leads based on region, lead type, budget, guest preferences, and other preferences based on prospect behaviour.

Notifies new leads:

• By automating emails and other preferred channels it lets you notify as soon as a new lead is generated. 

• Inquiries such as most enquired property are instantly notified and auto-assign leads to different teams and delight your customer instantly with the faster response time.

Keep Track of all the important events

• Events such as a room booking, a hotel browsing and chances of potential customers being converted are tracked using the software.

• Scheduling a booking and sending multiple emails and SMS to potential prospects and catching hold of every communication happening on multiple channels is seamless on this one dashboard.

Reasons why travel companies need travel API

Handle all queries on one dashboard:

• Smart Travel CRM & Booking Management Platform keeps the database of all the leads and emails received from them. It thus allows you to solve all types of queries without using the traditional method of opening multiple emails in the spreadsheets. 

Manages history of the customers:

• Whenever an existing customer sends you a support enquiry the CRM Dashboard automatically attaches this new enquiry to the customer’s account. 

• When you click on one customer name it gives you a history of solved tickets as well as tickets that are pending, packages purchased etc.

Automate key tasks:

• Automated email sequences can be made to respond to customer enquiries. The sales branch can also be automated wherein whenever a lead is generated it gets auto allocated to the respective branch. For example, if an enquiry comes in for a package in the USA then the lead gets auto allocated to the sales team in charge of packages for the USA.

Closing Remarks:

Bringing a new approach to integration in the hotel industry and the whole hospitality sector is the need of the hour. Kapture CRM provides the best Hotel Management Software System API and Smart Travel CRM & Booking Management Platform to facilitate your customers and give them the best experience and increase revenue. According to your requirement, integrate API in your organization to convert travellers into successful bookings and enhance your business in the hospitality sector.

Customer Support Automation For Small Businesses

 

When you start a business you are in a dilemma as to how to automate it. So, are you the one who is trying to find the ways in which you can upgrade the sales and marketing teams?  You want to know how you can enhance your conversion rate and bring more value to your business? How process automation can support small businesses? 

Well, this post will answer all your questions. Before going into the technicality of the topic let’s understand the basics.

What is Automation?

It is basically a technology by which a process or procedure is carried out with littlest human assistance. It increased the throughput or productivity of the work. One of the examples of automation is autonomous vehicles or self-driving cars.

Types of Automation

Business Process Automation (BPA)

• It is the technology-enabled automation of complex business processes, for example emails sent via email automation.  

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

• It is a type of BPA technology based on figurative software robots or on artificial intelligence.

• Example of RPA with AI is a ChatBot.

What is Automated Customer service?

Automated customer service is a process that makes use of an automated system such as chatbot or other artificial intelligence, help centre, ticketing management system, self-serve etc to provide uninterrupted service to the customers. The automated customer service reduces the human efforts and is cost-efficient.

How to automate customer service?

There are a number of automation tools that can be added to your efficient CRM Software to automate your customer service. Some of the automation tools and technologies are:

Chatbot

It is a software application  prepared with the help of Machine Learning to lay out a conversation in the natural language via text or text-to-speech between the humans and the machines to give automated answers. It is an omnichannel that means you can communicate with your customers through various channels such as Whatsapp, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram and many more.

Self-Service

Set up a self-help section that lets customers specify their problem and place a service request thus providing your customers the option to find quick solutions for issues and your customers need not wait for too long for an answer.

Ticket Management System

A unique omnichannel dashboard that receives tickets from multiple channels and solves the problem of enterprises having to manage a large number of support tickets.

Mobile CRM

It is a system that performs some functions similar to its desktop counterpart but provides many additional benefits for the field workforce.

Business	In presence of Mobile CRM	In absence of Mobile CRM
Productivity	65% of firms have achieved their targets.	22% of firms have achieved their targets.

                               

Statistic of CRM-Customer service software market 

1. Current CRM market size is $120 billion. (Source: FinancesOnline)

2. CRM software is expected to outstretch more than $80 billion in revenues by 2025. (Source: SuperOffice)

3.  81% of users are now accessing CRM software from multiple devices. (Source: SuperOffice)

4. CRM systems overtook the database management systems (DBMSs) by revenue in late 2017 (Source: Gartner)

5. 54% of B2B marketers say they feel “empowered to collaborate” with their sales teams (Source: Hubspot)

6. 32% of CRM users belong to the service industry, followed by IT at 13% and manufacturing companies also at 13% (Source: SelectHub)

How customer service automation can help your business?

Uninterrupted Customer Support Service

• Have you thought about what happens when you are not in the office and you might be receiving queries from the customers? And you will be able to reply to customers only when you go back to the office the next day. Well, with automated business crm this will not be the issue. 

• Automatically allocate chat queries to available executives so that every customer is attended to in a timely manner. 

• The chatbots or the virtual assistance will be working in place of you and win customers confidence by replying in time.

Get notified instantly 

• Get notified instantaneously via email notifications whenever a chat request is made to you. 

• Make your conversation smoother with the customer by attaching images, videos, or files when needed.

Know your customer well

• Chatbot technology helps you understand the customer’s needs even without talking on the call with them. 

• It will allow you to not to miss any chance of helping the customer. 

Respond Quickly

• When the customers ask certain questions about the service offered from your business then quick responses are reached to the customers as the responses are automated. 

• You can also schedule automated calls and meetings.

Boost Agent Performance 

• Keep a watch on the executive’s activity from log-in time until log-out. 

• Elevate the live chat dashboard to get a snapshot of chats being handled by on-duty executives.

• Executives can also maintain productivity by tracking break durations during shifts.

Enhance Team Productivity

• When most of your time is spent in replying to the repetitive queries of the customers then it surely decreases the productivity of the team. 

• Chatbots handle such queries and you can time to deal with some other important concerns then.

Amplify the Customer Retention and Acquisition

• The higher the customer retention the higher is the satisfaction of helping the customers promptly. 

• Customer retention implies that the customer will continue his interest in your services. 

• And the customer acquisition will be achieved by defining personas or sample customers who can be the potential customers using the analytics from Machine Learning.

Automated Lead Generation

• You can have a close watch on your sales funnel by leveraging your CRM with Machine Learning that is the chatbot. 

• Automated forms would help you know if that is your potential customer. 

Chat Analytics & Reports

• Transform your live chat support by keeping a track on relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). 

• Generate detailed reports to assess chat traffic, missed chats, first response time, average turnaround time, customer ratings, and more. Measuring performance using data can give you a better  understanding of customers.

Cost-Effective

• Empowering your business with chatbot technology is going to benefit you when it comes to the employee headcount. 

• You do not have to hire extra employees when your work is automated.

Closing Remarks

There are a number of CRMs available in the market to assist the customers. But the best CRM for small business is the one that provides customer’s satisfaction. The different technologies mentioned above are the best way to take advantage of business automation. 

Everything you need to know about customer journey mapping

 Customer Journey Map has gained popularity with the rising need of crystallizing the points where customers get stuck or frustrated on their path to purchase and beyond. Let’s quickly dive into what is customer journey mapping and why is it important?

What is a Customer Journey Map?

It is what it says on the tin: It is a visual representation depicting the stages customers go through when interacting with your company, its website, its services/products etc. The customer journey can be shown via infographics, illustrations, diagrams and using other forms.

                                   

What is the purpose of a customer journey map?

Nowadays customers expect the companies to find their choices and recommend them when they are searched for. They want to begin their search from where they left it off yesterday. They do not want to answer already answered queries. The crux of the matter is that a customer journey map lets you understand the pain points of the customers. 

It helps you know the customer’s end-to-end experience with your company and services/products. It answers the following questions:

• Touchpoints, customers come into contact with your brand.

• How customers feel along the way.

• Which products are their priority?

• Their likes and dislikes about the services.

• What are they planning to buy next?

                                        

How to Create an effective customer journey map?

                     

Get into customer’s shoes:

• Make customers’ profiles to perceive how they behave and why they do what they do. The behaviour of customers changes at every stage of buying a product so study their behaviour as to what makes them buy a product and what makes them quit the search.

• Who are the new customers and who are the old ones. Who has been searching for a long time and thinking to buy a product and the one who is new and going to buy the product real soon. The whole process of making the profile is called building the personas.

Know what your customer wants to achieve:

• Using the built personas, find out the goals of the customers and note the changes made as the process unfolds. 

• Make note of the activities of the customers right from the login, browsing, searching for products, comparing products, and more. These activities will help you recognize the touchpoints of your customers. 

There are different phases to study the customer:

1. Goal

2. Awareness

3. Research

4. Choice Reduction

5. Purchase

   

Ways to understand customers’ goals:

1. Survey/interview various customer groups

2. Get user feedback

3. Read up on customer support emails/transcripts

4. Pick out customer questions in each phase

5. Avail yourself of customer analytics tools to gather information

Spot the customer’s touchpoints:

• A “touchpoint” means any time a customer comes into contact with your brand either offline/online, through marketing, in person, or over the phone. 

• Touchpoints could be good or bad. For example, poor tasting food can pollute the whole experience of the restaurant. 

• You will have all sorts of touchpoints recorded with you. It does not let you miss out on any opportunities to listen to your customers and make improvements that will keep them happy.

Trace the customer’s roadblocks:

• Make use of all your data to find out the pain points in the customer journey. Look into the points where the customers are facing trouble and where they are going fine with your customer support tool. 

• To improve your service, reach out to the customers and interview them about their experiences with your company. 

• Inscribe the pain points on your customer journey map and give better customer service.

Resolve the blockades:

• Every organization wishes to push its customers down the funnel, and bring them one step closer to converting. 

• One of the ways to bring more conversion is to clear the touchpoints of the customers. Focus on the repeated complaints and fix them to reach the goal of better conversion.

Grow and develop your customer map:

• Considering the fact that the customers keep changing and evolving significant changes made to your product/service should be updated to your existing customer map.

• Keep a time period to check the document and make changes without missing out. 

Apply your journey map to your business:

• Use the insightful customer journey map to make meaningful business changes. 

Ending Remarks

Use the comprehensive customer journey map to stay on top of your game. Ensure that you are planning based on out-of-date assumptions. The tool makes it easy to understand how users interact with your site, where they get stuck, and how to improve trouble spots. Improve the customer journey using customer mapping and lift more than just the bottom line.