Last Updated: November 2024
Sending ‘Thank you’ messages over chat or email or on social media, follow-up emails, replying to reviews, acknowledgment messages or emails, randomly spread tickets, returns process, etc are some of the constructive small tasks for every eCommerce business.
These small tasks eat up a huge amount of time cumulatively or even more when they are piled up. Clearing these backlogs is a great pain yet inevitable to keep your brand reputation intact.
Hence it is highly recommended that you focus on clearing these small tasks daily with little time spent on them.
And, how do you do that?
The answer is “Automation”.
Automation in eCommerce
Automation in eCommerce helps greatly in executing those insignificant repetitive tasks efficiently and growing faster Return on Investment (ROI) significantly.
Negate the manual work and embrace the available technology as much as you can, to be highly productive.
Global AI index 2022 report shows that 65% – 80% of global organizations have adopted AI solutions to reduce manual or repetitive tasks.
Benefits of eCommerce Automation
Adopting an eCommerce automation system in your business yields a number of benefits to your company’s overall growth.
1. Happy Employees
For decades, businesses all over the world used to do the entire business process manually. Hence human errors are a natural occurrence that affects profits and revenue though.
While we earlier saw that automation is a smart way to reduce manual or repetitive tasks, it is very helpful in avoiding such negligible errors.
Employee satisfaction survey shows that only 54% of US employees are happy with their workplace.
So when you automate repetitive tasks, your employees can concentrate on their major jobs and produce satisfactory results.
51% of agents who do not use AI spend more time on mundane tasks.
2. Store Optimization
Your eCommerce store website requires regular upgrades and maintenance of pages and policies. Manually creating FAQ pages, policy pages, images and media, notification pop-ups, abandoned cart management, etc is pretty tedious and time-consuming.
If you have a Shopify store, then you will find numerous integrated tools and softwares available on the platform to perform these tasks automatically and save loads and loads of your time.
3. Customer service Automation
Firstly, you have ensured that your own people are kept happy, then comes the next major part of every business’s success strategy. Keeping your customers happy.
Because 91% of customers will leave your brand if they are not happy with your service.
Consistent quality interaction with your customers is necessary. Having said that, we will now see what all the automation possibilities are available to improve your CSAT score and brand loyalty.
Organized tickets
Avoid toggling between windows and different tickets when handling customers, as they hate to be kept on a long wait or asked to repeat their issues. Irate customers mean very low CSAT or retention.
To avoid such a situation, use a smart helpdesk that brings the entire customer journey to one window. Your agents can view the whole customer history of orders, returns, complaints, etc.
Live Chat (Chatbot)
42% of US online buyers expect retailers to offer live online chats on their websites to help make their buying decisions.
Live chat is growing to be an easily preferred customer support channel by consumers. When customers visit your eCommerce store looking for a particular product or a service, they may sometimes need extra information beyond your site description.
Live Chat is the first point that customers approach. You don’t want to lose those 42% potential customers only because your eCommerce store lacks a Live chat tool. Get one data-driven AI chatbot software that can accelerate your conversations.
Follow-up
Updating your customers promptly on order status, tracking information, and return updates may not seem important in the big picture. But they do add up to the customer satisfaction score.
Automating these notifications using an AI-integrated tool that automatically detects the delays, intimates you, and allows customers to avail self-returns easily is a brilliant solution.
Team communication
Your customer service cannot be effective without proper communication across your teams and departments.
Using a well thought inter-teams connectivity tool like Saufter’s Slack integration, all your sales, marketing, customer support, and management teams can easily communicate and be cooperatively productive.
3. Marketing Automation
Adopting marketing automation for your eCommerce business benefits in streamlining the marketing strategy, providing the best customer experience, increasing leads, and minimizing manual tasks.
Marketing automation for e-commerce has improved lead generation by 80% and conversions by 77%.
It also improves productivity as less time is spent on menial tasks and more time on meaningful tasks. You can measure the leads and engagement with your audiences using automated marketing analytics tools and improve efficiency wherever required.
Social Media Marketing Automation
Social media marketing automation tools can help companies save 6+ hours per week by automating the marketing posts and ads. You can schedule the posts and the software automatically publishes them.
These tools also help you in managing your social media calendar very effectively. The in-built analytics give you in-depth reports for future strategies. You will find plenty of these social media marketing automation tools on any search engine.
Email Marketing Automation
According to Skynova’s survey, most small and mid-size companies incorporate social media and email automation in their marketing strategy.
Auto-triggered personalized email campaigns have yielded 75% of the email revenue for the businesses – DMA
We already brought to your notice that sending thank you emails, offer/discount intimation emails, follow-up emails, order updates, acknowledgment emails, knowledge-base emails, etc., are time-consuming yet unavoidable. The above-mentioned DMA survey also proves that when these menial tasks are automated, they give exciting results in ROI.
Integrate your email support with Saufter. With AI-drafted emails, make sure none of your customers’ emails remain unanswered and reduce your email traffic and workload at the same time.
Omnichannel marketing automation
90% increase in customer retention rate by using Omnichannel marketing automation instead of single channel marketing methods. Use an omnichannel helpdesk that seamlessly integrates with multiple channels (chat, email, customer support, social media, etc.) and also converts your customer support into an effective marketing pipeline.
UGC marketing
Pleasant online customer reviews lead to a higher purchase likelihood – Frontiersin.org
Customer reviews or User-generated content have a high psychological impact on customers’ online buying behavior. Positive customer reviews boost a brand’s credibility and trust in the brand’s quality.
Streamlining the customer feedback reviews into a new marketing pipeline will help boost your eCommerce revenue and influence more new customers.
Try Saufter which identifies your happy customers and automates the collection of Google reviews, Trustpilot reviews, and user-generated videos you can use for your social media content.
4. Reduce Costs
Apart from the capital investments required for your eCommerce business setup, you need to put in more for your marketing, finance management, fulfillment services, and training expenditure.
As we saw earlier in this article, you can use marketing automation softwares as opposed to traditional marketing methods, and save largely while reaping more profits.
If you own a small eCommerce store then approaching the auditing companies or firms for your finance management incurs a considerable amount of expenditure. Instead, make use of readily available finance management automation softwares in the market. Shopify too offers a good amount of smart integration tools for the same.
For example Quickbooks, Xero, etc.
Shipping and Fulfillment services are another block where you need to invest some extra money and manpower. Automated shipping and fulfillment solutions have come as breathers to growing eCommerce business owners.
Reduce labor time spent on printing labels, pasting, packing, shipping, and tracking jobs. You will find quite efficient apps and software for the same at affordable pricing too. Just integrate those tools and softwares with your eCommerce stores and witness seamless deliveries to your customers.
According to the Association for Talent Development, organizations spend an average of $1,252 per employee on training and development initiatives.
The above study shows us that training your employees incurs additional expenditure to your overall budget. The costs of training involve the total costs of resources, training materials, equipments, specialized hardware or software costs, video-conferencing costs, etc.
We can recommend an efficient helpdesk that helps you to automate your customer service agents’ training effortlessly. The software trains your agents based on the previous history of chats/tickets and tests them in simulation mode. It also generates their performance reports for your analysis.
Final Words
We are confident that, by now, you have thoroughly understood how to identify the menial tasks involved in your eCommerce business and how to negate the overly consumed time by adopting automation solutions.
In other words, simply integrate with an efficient helpdesk solution like Saufter which offers extensive automated solutions for excellent customer experience (CX) with your brand. Let them take care of all these head-breaking trivial tasks while you can sit back and enjoy reaping the benefits.