In the mid aughts, companies like LivePerson and Bold Chat made a splash by demonstrating the power of making live sales or customer care representatives available to shoppers as they perused websites. Their founders had a hunch that lots of online sales were lost whenever consumers had questions about products but couldn’t get the answers they needed right away.
By 2009, live chat was ubiquitous on sites for the simple reason that real-time help did, in fact, close sales, up-sell orders and stem customer attrition. These companies looked forward to the day when invitations to chat with product specialists appeared in digital advertising. Imagine (the thinking went) a consumer who searches for laptops in Google sees an ad for BestBuy offering the real-time assistance of a PC specialist ready to “help you find the perfect laptop for your budget and needs.”
Lots of technical issues needed to be worked out to make that dream a reality. In the meantime, consumers moved more fully into the social media sphere, which, if you caught Facebook’s recent announcement about Facebook Messenger, just may turn out to be the right place to do it.
Facebook announced that clothier Everlane and flash site Zulily would soon use its Messenger as a customer service tool, sending receipts and shipping updates via the service. As Re/Code’s Jason Del Rey points out, Facebook also implied (via an image posted on its blog), that consumers can also use Messenger to add items “to an existing order that was originally placed on the retailer’s own site.”
Sounds like it’s a hop, skip and a jump for Messenger to serve as a go-between for brands looking to connect with shoppers, and consumers seeking personalized help with the utmost convenience.
Picture this scenario: a consumer sees an ad on Facebook for the perfect pair of skinny jeans for full-figured gals. Piqued but cautious, the reader shares the ad with her friends, asking if anyone wears the jeans and if they really fit as promised. A few minutes later (or maybe even the next day), she sees another ad from the jeans brand, this time with an invitation to chat with a personal shopper who will help her select the right style for her taste and body type. That conversation occurs within the Facebook Messenger pop-up.
And taking a cue from the live chat experience, the personal shopper on the brand’s side has access to selling scripts with proven efficacy, a list of great questions to ask, as well as images of similarly shaped consumers that let the agent keep the conversation going (which increases the likelihood of a conversion). Moreover, as in the live chat world, the agent uses these tools to chat with multiple consumers simultaneously, a requirement to ensure such endeavors generate enough sales to justify the labor costs.
If Del Rey is correct in deducing that consumers will some day be able to add additional items to their existing shopping carts, just think of what that will mean to CPG brands. Much of social media commerce for CPGs has been limited to shopping promotions and coupons (there aren’t too many consumers who’ll go online to purchase a single bottle of shampoo). But untold masses of consumers shop for CPG products on sites like Amazon, which offers free shipping to its Prime customers. One can easily imagine the day when real live brand representatives reach new consumers via Facebook ads, and help them add items to their existing Amazon orders.
The building blocks for social-media-as-shopping-platform are in place. As anyone in the digital ad tech space knows, the key component of this new world vision – the ability to identify and reach consumers who express interest in new products by sharing an ad – is a piece of cake thanks to programmatic marketing. And the brands have already nailed the real-time help part with their live chat implementations on their websites. Now Facebook has stepped in with an app, Facebook Messenger, to bridge it all together, which just may crack the code of social-media commerce.
Matt Feodoroff is vice-president, strategic sales, Buyer Cloud, Rubicon Project
