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Answer the Call of a Better Buying Experience: 6 Voice Use Cases for E-commerce Success

This article was published on August 2, 2021

The buying experience is not what it used to be. What once happened in-store now unfolds anywhere in the world with a few taps of a device—powered by online marketplaces and retail platforms, with goods effortlessly arriving at the door.

illustration of a phone and shopping cart representing e-commerce

The buying experience is not what it used to be. What once happened in-store now unfolds anywhere in the world with a few taps of a device—powered by online marketplaces and retail platforms, with goods effortlessly arriving at the door.

E-commerce has conquered the consumer market with global sales expected to approach $5 trillion by 2021. So what’s fuelling this growth? The success of e-commerce is built on delivering the on-demand, seamless, and secure experience that consumers have grown to love, and now expect.

But with a new world of shopping comes a new set of challenges. If you’re a marketplace, online retailer, or solving for an end-to-end delivery experience, it’s critical to keep your customers—whether they be buyers, sellers, or both—connected across every step of the journey. 

 

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While customers today expect you to meet them on every communication channel, one channel essential to delivering the personalized and efficient experience customers demand is voice

From finding an item to connecting buyers and sellers safely and securely, resolving complex queries faster, or making deliveries on the first attempt—voice communications can be used in many innovative ways to enhance the experience, gain valuable insights, and strengthen your platform. 

Creating Conversations with Communications APIs

Consumer communication preferences are evolving fast. And in the buy anything, anywhere, and have it now world, businesses competing for global e-commerce dominance need the right tools to stay ahead. So how can they keep up? 

E-commerce innovators are turning to communications APIs to build frictionless and scalable customer interactions faster and more affordably. Communications APIs are flexible building blocks that can be used to easily add any engagement channel to your customer journey. 

Companies like Vinted, Aramex, and Zalora use Vonage APIs to create customized buying, selling, and delivery experiences with voice as well as SMS, messaging, and video chat. 

6 Voice Use Cases for a Winning Customer Experience Edge

Here, we take a closer look at how you can connect with your e-commerce customers using voice—from order right through to delivery. And while every business and customer journey is different, these are the top 6 voice use cases we’ve seen consistently help e-commerce businesses improve acquisition, enhance convenience, reduce delivery attempts and build trust:

Private Voice Communication

To ensure a smooth transaction, buyers and sellers need to be able to connect with each other by voice. But without controls, it’s too easy for them to connect or set up a transaction without you in the loop. Off-platform transactions not only put customer privacy at risk, but also cost you revenue. Businesses that connect buyers, sellers, or suppliers can now keep voice conversations private by masking real phone numbers with virtual numbers.

Call Tracking

Essential for e-commerce marketplaces and online retailers, call tracking is used to capture call metadata and produce valuable insights for platform growth. It works by assigning a unique virtual phone number to any ad or seller on a marketplace. Call metadata can then be used to optimize marketing campaigns and generate better leads that help attract more sellers to your platform. 

In-App Voice Calling

There can be critical moments when a purchase goes wrong, or a complex query needs a detailed solution. To avoid hold-ups or misunderstandings with back-and-forth emailing or messaging, a fast and seamless way for customers to connect is through voice calls directly from inside a web or mobile app.

Voice Bots

With programmable voice, e-commerce businesses can tap into virtually unlimited solutions for building differentiated and efficient customer experiences by easily integrating with third-party vendors, including artificially intelligent voice bots, in real-time.

Call Transcription

Recordings are helpful but time-consuming to analyze. With transcriptions, calls can be reviewed in a fraction of the time and analyzed for keywords so you can better understand your customers, train your agents, and perform quality assurance on buyer-seller interactions.

Voice-Based Critical Alerts

With so many potential breaking points in the e-commerce experience, there needs to be a way to reach customers when it matters. A ringing phone is hard to ignore, so using an automated voice call to deliver alerts—about a transaction or a change of delivery time—increases the chances of it being heard.

How E-commerce Companies Can Leverage Other Channels

Today, consumers expect to engage with the brands and platforms they buy from across an array of different channels—from SMS to WhatsApp and video chat. You can learn from our e-commerce customers about how other channels can be used alongside voice to create outstanding journeys—whether your goal is to provide seamless shopping experiences, connect buyers and sellers, or deliver goods efficiently around the world. 

SMS

How Carts Guru Uses Vonage SMS to Convert Abandoned Online Carts to Sales

Messages

How Aramex Scales a Seamless Global Last-Mile Delivery Experience with Vonage’s Messages API

Authentication

How Global Fashion Marketplace Vinted Fights Fraud with Vonage’s Verify API

 

 

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