Digitalisation has made it easier than ever to enter the global marketplace. Rather than immediately needing to set up shop in foreign markets, you can now cater to customers worldwide online and enjoy unprecedented access to global customers. When you step your business up from local to global, your brand is virtual for many of your new customers.

But going global comes with its share of challenges. An overreliance on tech sees the human touch lost in favour of automated emails, chatbots, self-service and other quick wins. These quick wins are not get-out-of-jail-free cards for neglecting to build human connections, and fail in the long term if they don’t help you build relationships with each online visitor. Maintaining the human touch in international service – from battling with language barriers to working around time zone differences – is no mean feat.

The human touch is the warm greeting you give to each customer. It’s the flexibility you show when you bend over backwards to help the customer, finding workarounds to tricky queries. It’s the personal touch that you put into your service.

We use emotion to work out whether we can trust a person or a business. Without trust, converting your online visitors is an uphill battle. Since 86% of customers confirm they’ll pay more for better service, it’s clear just how important the human touch can be in boosting your support efforts.

With struggles like this to contend with, how can you hope to offer consistently great service across continents? Used well, digitalisation may be able to help you with that, too.

1. Offer as many long-distance connection and communication options as possible

When you first scale up into the global marketplace, you may not have a physical store or office for your new customers to visit. You’ll rely solely on technology to digitalise your customer service and duplicate that coveted human touch.

While you might not be able to move in right away, you can establish a strong supporting presence on your website.

By making contact information detailed and easy to find, you demonstrate to customers that your business is open to them — even from the other side of the world.

The more channels you can offer for contacting you, the better.

Do more than just displaying a company address and telephone number. Have a social media account customers can reach out to, email addresses they can contact, comment sections on your site where relevant, and a live chat channel to demonstrate that you’re only a few clicks away from helping them out.

2. Overcome language barriers with online translation

While local businesses can be fairly confident that their customers and employees will be able to communicate in the same language, a global business has no such assurance. As you gain employees in new locations with local language capabilities this becomes less of an issue. But when you’re starting off you don’t always have this resource.

Language barriers can restrict the human touch in your service because customers won’t feel personally cared for if they cannot get support in their native language. Accommodating such differences is a personal touch that’s challenging when entering the global marketplace.

Using technology such as live chat software could help you with this. There are solutions that offer real-time chat translation, which lets your team speak in their own language, while customers speak in theirs.

You might also want to consider a multilingual or multi-regional website. A multilingual website offers content in more than one language, while a multi-regional site explicitly targets users in different countries. This helps you create a more fluent customer journey catered to each foreign market.

3. Difficulties caused by time zones

If language barriers weren’t causing enough of a headache, different time zones across the world complicate matters further. Your business is asleep while customers are awake and waiting on replies from your team. After all, support channels can’t help your team offer the human touch if no one is awake to answer.

Empower customers to help themselves. A staggering 90% of customers want to have a self-service option available.

A great way to provide awesome service, without fearing a lack of the human touch (it’s less expected), is by providing self-service options on your site.

You can also support your customers with a well-deployed chatbot. While chatbots can’t assist with every query, they can streamline self-service experiences by offering help navigating the site, or providing quick answers to simple questions. If trained to use your company’s tone of voice, chatbots can sprinkle cordial, consistent support into self-service options.

When it comes to technology, make sure you use it right

Ultimately, it’s important to remember when going global that people often want to deal with people. The technology you use should reflect this, by providing an interface for human support. When you use digitalisation to help you go global, it doesn’t mean engineering your employees out of your customer service.

Part of a great customer experience is meeting customers where they are. That doesn’t mean you need to get on a plane and visit your new global customers. The technology you use to connect with your customers can and must be used to bring the human touch of your team members to every global customer – be they next door or on the other side of the world.

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E is for Effortless

It’s no secret that the relationship between brands and consumers is undergoing some dramatic transformations. A positive feedback loop between technological advances and consumer expectations is shaping the business world, and will continue to do so in 2017.

What do I mean by positive feedback loop? Well, consider the changing attitudes consumers have about shopping today, compared to 20 years ago; those attitudes didn’t just appear out of the ether. Most of us got our first taste of online shopping in the late 1990s or early 2000s, in its precursory form. Early e-commerce retailers, like Amazon, that made strides to improve and expand that experience attracted more customers, who almost immediately began to take those improvements for granted and look for the next big thing.

After two decades of this tug and pull between e-commerce technology and consumer expectations, we have reached a point where, for the first time in history, mobile web traffic exceeds desktop traffic. Most consumers own multiple devices, most of which are mobile, and more than half of consumers in the U.S. prefer online shopping to traditional brick-and-mortar shopping. Among Millennials, those born roughly between 1984 and 2000, that number jumps to 67%.

So, what does this mean for e-commerce in the near-term? Although we are still early in the year, at least 10 clear trends have already emerged in this sector for 2017.

From personalized shopping experiences to drone delivery, e-commerce is radically changing the way we think about the shopping experience at a breakneck pace.

At the same time the competition is growing faster than the market. This means that you must consider the 10 emerging trends outlined in this 3 part article series, to remain competitive with your e-commerce business.

The following chart shows the growth of e-commerce sales worldwide since 2014, and projections up to 2020. According to Statista  in 2015, sales climbed to $US 1.55 trillion, with a growth projection in e-retail revenue of $3.4 trillion in 2019.

1. Amazon Dash Buttons

Amazon introduced two new e-commerce services for the first time early in 2016: Amazon Dash buttons and the Amazon Dash Replenishment service. Amazon Dash Buttons are Wi-Fi connected devices that connects directly to Amazon Prime members’ accounts and can reorder favourite products activated by a single touch. Users can purchase a physical Dash button for their frequently ordered products or use virtual Dash Buttons on their mobile devices. .

Amazon Dash Replenishment is a service for all IoT connected home appliances. This application can automatically place a customer’s order when it senses a product is nearing depletion. Charges will be automatically applied to the user’s card and ship fast, and for free.

The Dash Replenishment button is a part of Amazon’s great vision for forecasting their customers’ and automating the buying process. Look for other e-commerce companies to follow Amazon’s lead in this area.

2. Expanding mobile payment methods

Just like debit card technology has all but made writing checks an anachronism, new advances in mobile payment technology will soon make wallets a thing of the past.

The magic of contactless payments using nothing but your smartphone is catching on in a big way, and mobile payments are on the rise.

Several businesses that were early adopters of this technology have already seen significant revenue increases as a result.

But these payments will no longer be limited to the world of smartphones. Rather than reaching into a pocket to pull out a phone and pay, more streamlined and wearable devices are ready to pick up the baton. Smart watches, smart rings and similar accessories will continue to gain popularity this year, making this method of payment even easier.

Being equipped to handle mobile payments will be a major advantage for brick-and-mortar businesses in 2017, as consumers opt to replace their traditional wallet with a mobile equivalent. Our lives are increasingly being shifted onto our mobile devices, and e-commerce as a whole is beginning to adopt a mantra of “mobile first” as opposed to “optimized for mobile”.

The world’s largest mobile phone companies have launched their electronic purses, including Google Wallet, Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay. Google Wallet and Apple Pay reported that the number of users is increasing by one million per week..

This chart shows mobile payment income in 2015 was $US 450 million and is forecast to double by the year 2019.

3. Chatbots: artificial intelligence at your service

People often complain about the frustrating experience of using an automated telephone customer service system. But what if the customer service experience could be both automated and positive? Major advances in artificial intelligence are leading to the development of chatbots so effective that some consumers actually prefer them to real human interactions.

The most obvious benefits of using chatbots and AI for an e-commerce business are that bots can be accessed by your customers 24/7, and they don’t need to be paid a salary. But there are even more advantages that can be extrapolated from what we know about the effects of live chat services on websites. For example, customers who use the live chat on an e-commerce website spend 5-30% more on average than those who don’t, and the likelihood of making a sales conversation after chat increases 5-10x.

E-commerce stores aren’t limited to their own websites, either.

Increasingly, brands are meeting their younger customers where they are already spending most of their time: social media.

E-commerce chatbots can be integrated in chat apps like Kik and Facebook Messenger, creating what has been coined“conversational commerce”.

This social media integration trend has already transformed the way business is done in China, where 65% of online shoppers report that they shop using their mobile device at least once per month. Some have gone so far as to rebrand e-commerce as “m-commerce”, highlighting the critical role mobile technology plays in this evolving sector.

Microsoft, Facebook and Google, use ChatBot technology.   Companies are also taking advantage of the Facebook Messenger Bot, such as fast food chains Pizza Hut and Burger King. Other businesses are adopting similar systems such as the Slack platform, and Taco Bell for introduced their TacoBot to order food using this technology.

Microsoft believes that the bots could expand their functions beyond text bots, also interacting with users through video and holograms in the near future.

The digital revolution is changing every aspect of our lives, so it’s no surprise that it has its fingers in the world of e-commerce.

Whatever the trends may be this year, or next year, there seems to be an inevitable destination: the merging of the digital and physical realms, giving consumers the best of both worlds.

Stay tuned for part 2 and part 3 to see what else is in store for e-commerce this year.

The post The future is here! 10 ways e-commerce will continue to revolutionize retail in 2017 (Part 1) appeared first on Trade Ready.