In today’s digital era, businesses face fierce competition in the rapidly evolving landscape of online commerce. To thrive and stay ahead of the curve, organizations need to maximize their online presence and optimize their ecommerce strategies. This is where ecommerce consulting plays a pivotal role. Ecommerce consulting provides businesses with the expertise, guidance, and strategies necessary to navigate the complexities of the online marketplace and drive sustainable growth. In this article, we will delve into the world of ecommerce consulting, exploring its significance, benefits, and how it can revolutionize businesses in the digital age.

Understanding Ecommerce Consulting

Ecommerce consulting refers to the process of collaborating with experienced professionals who specialize in the online retail space. These consultants possess extensive knowledge and expertise in various aspects of ecommerce, including website design, user experience, digital marketing, inventory management, logistics, and more. By leveraging their expertise, businesses can gain valuable insights, overcome challenges, and optimize their ecommerce operations.

The Role of an Ecommerce Consultant

An ecommerce consultant serves as a trusted advisor, working closely with businesses to understand their unique needs, goals, and pain points. They conduct in-depth assessments of the current ecommerce infrastructure, identify areas for improvement, and develop tailored strategies to enhance performance. Whether it’s launching a new online store, improving user experience, streamlining order fulfillment, or increasing conversion rates, an ecommerce consultant plays a vital role in driving positive change.

Key Benefits of Ecommerce Consulting

1. Expertise and Industry Insights: Ecommerce consultants bring a wealth of knowledge and experience, staying updated with the latest trends, strategies, and technologies. They offer valuable insights into market dynamics, consumer behavior, and industry best practices, enabling businesses to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition.
2. Customized Solutions: Every business has unique requirements and challenges. Ecommerce consultants develop customized solutions based on a thorough understanding of a company’s goals and target audience. They help businesses leverage their strengths, address weaknesses, and implement strategies tailored to their specific needs, leading to improved outcomes.
3. Enhanced User Experience: User experience plays a vital role in the success of an online store. Ecommerce consultants analyze customer journeys, identify pain points, and propose changes to optimize website navigation, product pages, and checkout processes. By enhancing user experience, businesses can increase customer satisfaction, reduce cart abandonment, and boost conversions.
4. Scalability and Growth: Ecommerce consultants assist businesses in creating scalable ecommerce infrastructures capable of handling growth and expansion. They optimize inventory management systems, suggest efficient fulfillment processes, and provide guidance on integrating new technologies. By aligning the ecommerce operations with the business’s growth goals, consultants pave the way for sustainable and scalable success.
5. Digital Marketing and Customer Acquisition: Ecommerce consultants have a deep understanding of digital marketing channels, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, and social media. They develop comprehensive marketing strategies to attract and retain customers, drive targeted traffic, and maximize conversions.

Conclusion

In the fiercely competitive world of online commerce, businesses must adapt and optimize their ecommerce strategies to succeed. Ecommerce consulting offers a wealth of benefits, from expert guidance and customized solutions to enhanced user experience and scalable growth. By leveraging the knowledge and expertise of ecommerce consultants, businesses can unlock their full potential, outperform competitors, and navigate the complexities of the online marketplace with confidence. Embracing ecommerce consulting is a powerful step towards unlocking success in the digital age.

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In Agile Scrum, on each day of a sprint, the team holds a daily scrum meetings called the “daily scrum”. A daily stand-up meeting is a short team meetings held in same location and same time each day.

The meeting is generally limited from 5 to 15 minutes. Ideally, daily stand-up is held in the morning, as it helps set the context for the coming day’s work.

Stand-up meeting, also referred as daily scrum or morning roll-call, is attended by all team members. Apart from the core team who daily works on the project , other stake holders like developer from related project, departmental VP are allowed to attend, but is there only to listen.

Hence, daily stand-up is an excellent way to share information and updates. It is an opportunity to fine tune daily priorities, know and understand what is being done by each team member and how they can collaborate to achieve the sprint goal.

The purpose of the meeting is for each team member to answer the following three questions:
1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any impediments in your way?

From the group one will start answering all three questions, then the next person, and so on.
These three details from each (active) person will help the team to gain excellent understanding of what work has been done and what is in TO-DO.

If any impediments are faced, the scrum manager facilities on helping the user to resolve the impediment. Sometime they are resolved in the stand-up meeting itself immediately.

And on a side note: If someone asks why it’s called a stand-up meeting, as said by Martin Fowler:
The whole team meets every day for a quick status update. We stand up to keep the meeting short.

Next upcoming post will be about How cross-border teams excel using Daily Scrum?

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software is a system to manage a company’s interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers’ history with the company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.

It is vital for company to track their customers before and after they become actual customers. Any small detail missed or untracked can lead to failure in customer retention. A CRM System should be smart enough to inform company about the details and status of the customer and should be simple enough to be understandable at a glance. A CRM System should be able to take care of people and processes & having a good understanding of customer’s businesses are focused on.

A CRM System should be customer centric and focused on pipeline of stages of customers for business decision making. Many CRM systems are primarily focused on retention of customers, giving less rooms for conversion of leads to customers. But, the concept is changing rapidly. Now, CRMs are focused on managing leads as well. To increase retention of customer, it is important to have understanding of how the leads actually converted to customers. So, more and more CRM system are involved in full life cycle of any business customers.

The top 7 must have features of CRM System are

1. Contact Management
2. Lead Management
3. Transfer of contacts and leads.
4. Easy creation and assigning of task.
5. Manage Campaigns
6. Easy (at a glance) report to keep track of customers.
7. Campaign Analytics and Sales Analytics

Let’s dive on each features one by one.

1. Contact ManagementA CRM system must have feature to add current customers. Business can retarget these customers for add on/cross selling as well as to keep in touch. Segmenting the customer means having proper knowledge of the previous services customers are using.This is a vital piece of information on deciding whether to cross sell to customer or create a product that the customer is interested in.</>

   Even if business decide to introduce a new product/plan/scheme, previous customers are the primary customers. There is always opportunity to attract customers as they know business and are mostly satisfied with provided services.

2. Lead ManagementA CRM System should also be able to track users who are not yet customers. Prospects, as we call them, are the line of business. Until and unless you have prospects, it is hard to grow business. Even with lots of customers already enrolled or using the service, prospects define the direction businesses is heading to.A CRM System should be able to log the prospects and segment them according to their interest.Some prospects have high probability of conversion; some has low. But even prospects with low probability may be interesting prospects for future and/or different products and services because of crucial data record on the CRM System.

   So, a CRM should not discount any features regarding prospects.

   

3. Transfer of contacts and leadsIn any business, there will always be a team with multiple members handling customers. There will be frequent cases where a single person may not be able to server customer for all their needs.In such case, it is necessary to pass the customer to the responsible team member. Businesses find it hard to manage this scenario because of human nature. Any member will feel responsible to earn and retain their customer, but sometime, it is better for business if the customer is assigned to responsible personnel so that the customer gets the best customer experience.At the end of the day, everyone is working for business interest.A CRM system should make it easy to transfer contacts and leads to other team members. The responsible person should get a real time notification from CRM system, so that no customer is left unattended. An email or SMS system should be nice integration on CRM System.
4. Easy creation and assign of task.Yes, it is easier to assign a prospect or customer to another member. Business frequently face cases where other members needs to do some specific task for the customer. In such case, a CRM system should be able to identity the member and member should have descriptive remarks about the specific steps to be taken to customer’s needs. A detailed email sent on behalf of the member as well as at a glance task on dashboard is a must on CRM System.
5. Manage CampaignsMost CRM Systems tends for focus on customer retention and forget on the business part. It may not have been vital part of CRM system for now but it is utmost necessary to know the details on campaigns that attracted customers in the first place. It determines the expectation of the customer; the channels customers are using to purchase the service; and this information is used to determine on acquiring and retaining customer.
6. ReportingA simple MUST. Not only CRM System should be detailed reports on the life cycle of the prospect to customer, CRM System must have detailed stages or pipeline through which a prospect goes through to actually convert to a customer. CRM System should provide a detailed visual representation of the exact number of prospects, prospects on each stage and summary of how the performance of members regarding the constant customer follow up.

   

7. Campaign Analytics and Sales AnalyticsAnalytics is one part CRM System has to really strong on. CRM System should be able to provide in depth detailed report on each prospect, customer, campaign, tasks. These reports should be downloadable in most common formats such as PDF and Excel. Each report should contain detailed information on stage, pipeline, performance. Report may not be selective for prospects and customers only. Even reports regarding member of a team should be easily viewable and downloadable in any CRM System.

There are many other features that a CRM Software can integration such as notification system, mobile application and Document Management System. But the above features are a must on any CRM system; small or big. It is imperative for business to have a customized CRM according to their needs. In general, business use CRM System that boost their communication and collaboration process with regards with their clients.

Many customer purchase services from business and may forget about the business, but it is businesses’ responsibility to let customer feel the importance. And CRM System is a big part of this ecosystem.

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Lead management System is a set of methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele, generally operated through a variety of marketing campaigns or programs.

In every business, customers are the single most important entity. Whether you have an individual as a customer or a corporate customer, it is really important to treat them right. And in order to treat to them right, you need to have proper system on what the customer wants and what you offer, to earn their trust for your product.

But, customer do not come directly to buy from business. They know what they want and they gather information on who can provide the best service in a cost efficient manner. This is where customer contact business to learn the product or services provided so that they can make an informed decision. And this is where business identifies their potential customers.

Inquiries gained by businesses from potential customers are termed as “leads”. Businesses all know about MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQL (Sales Qualified Leads), they have a definite plan and structure to convert leads to customers, but it is really important to digitize the process.

Lead management system is a software (either SaaS based or personal), where business enter all their lead information to track lead activities until they made a purchase from the business.

For e.g. there will be stages — where a lead actually converts to a customer. The stages may be “Contact made”, “Contact received”, “Features and benefits explained”, “Deals offered”, “Deals accepted” and “Deal finalized/closed”. All these stages defines how well the products/services offered by business are received by the potential customers. These are business indicators.

If leads disappears as soon as Features and Benefits explained, then lead did not find the products offered, good enough or competitive enough that is worth chasing. This indicated business actually may have to provide more or may be offer more benefits from their products to leads.

If leads disappears as soon as Deals are offered, then the product did met their requirement and expectation, but the deal was not tempting enough. If this happens a lot,it is an indicator — either customer do not find the deal tempting even though the product met their demand or the customer is getting better deals elsewhere.

Each and every stages have their own indications. This helps the business make informed decision on the process of converting their MQL & SQL to customers. Every lead is valuable since they are costly to acquire. It is really important to have system in place so that you have valuable information of your leads. There is what a lead management system does.

A lead management system should also be able to determine which channels are more effective in generating leads. Businesses are spending more and more on offline and online media to promote their services, & are getting more and more leads. But some channels to generate leads with higher proportion of conversion are more efficient in terms of cost and time than other channels. Determining those channels are crucial for business to determine their next business. It is of utmost important to focus time and money on those channels.

A lead management system also tracks the effectiveness of your own employee. Every business has a dedicated team assigned to convert leads to customers. If every information of leads are digitized, it is easier for business to assign leads to employee who are better suited to serve specific leads, especially in case of business offering multiple products. A lead management system is used to determine who is best suited to serve specific leads so that the conversion rate is higher. A lead management also provides easier reminder feature so that you are well aware of the best time to contact your lead. The most important things is to be aware of best possible time to contact lead with the best possible deals, for higher proportion of lead conversion to customer.

And the most important feature, REPORTING. Business cannot make informed decision unless they are well informed. So, a lead management system should easily generate and record all the leads, stages, channels or campaigns that are generating leads with higher conversion rate and various information. Getting these reports on hand provides business to make decision on their next marketing campaigns, efficiency of their employees, easier reminder facility and sales pipe lining.

In short, the single most important entity of business — customer information, is never neglected if business are using lead management system. So, lead management system is one of the most important piece of business architecture.

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“Business lead generation is the process of identifying new prospects, then utilizing a variety of tactics to turn those leads into new sales opportunities.”

After working on development of an ecommerce site, we always came across the same question — What is the best strategy to get more and more customers? Since this was a new entry in the space of already packed ecommerce sites, we went for online branding as much as possible. We went through paid Facebook Ads, Google Ads, gave ads on print media and even went offline by distributing flyers and stuff. We even experimented with bots. We started getting traffic to our website.

Thats’ Awesome. We got amazing number of likes on our Facebook page too.

People were visiting our site; registering on our site and purchasing stuffs on our site. Everything worked according to plan.

But then again, we needed more. So, the paid marketing continued; the offline marketing (flyers, and print ads) got discontinued. Purchase was steady. Since most of our users came from facebook, they visited our site and looked at the product. Some purchased the product and some left without looking for other products. That alarmed us.

Yes, the transaction was steady and everything. But that was not our sole focus. We wanted people to look at our other products. We offered great discount and free shipping, but failed to gather enough attention from the users. The users were pretty focused on gathering the information on other product for which they came to visit our site. Our site visit was good, but the bounce rate was worse.

We needed to do something to gather the attention.

We needed to tell them — Hey, do you know we DO NOT charge anything on shipping.

We needed to tell them — Do you know, there is 45% OFF on cosmetic items.

We knew popup was a great solution to gather people’s attention. But we did not want to show popup as soon as user visits our site. So, we thought, lets show popup when the users are about to leave the site. We knew lots of people were using these opt in popups for newsletter signups. We thought, lets refine that. Lets show our offers in optin popup but lets customize the message.

Enter a new and simple way of effective lead generation.

What we did was very simple. In fact, so simple that at first it almost felt that we are not thinking anything at all.

We created an opt-in kind of popup. But instead of asking user to signup to get newsletter delivered in their email, we asked them to preorder certain items.

Just leave your email address and save 45% on cosmetics items. 

You know what happened next? People were sending their email address. Even people who were on our site for just one product. They became curious. Just because of the popup message, people began to search for the cosmetic items; to find if they need anything and is on offer. Our bounce rate decreased and our leads increased.

So much that our bounce rate decreased from 68% to 25%. We started getting ~4 new leads per day and it is increasing everyday. Mission accomplished. We were happy.

Now, we needed a system to manage the leads. We are getting emails and phone number of leads, but we needed to put those data somewhere turn them to information. So, we built an entire lead management system. We fed these information on our system.

All our captured leads, their status, their information and even their interest.

Our team was able to track the users, be in touch regularly via call and email and re-market our products. Now, how the sales is closed? depended on us. Previously, we could only watch helplessly. Previously, we knew users are visiting our site but leaving, but now, at least we have the data of user who are genuinely in interested in purchasing from our site and may be a little hesitant and needs a little bit of convincing.

I am not saying it worked wonders. I am not saying our transaction increased 100%. All I am saying — By implementing such a simple thing, we captured leads, however small it was. And we turned those leads to Happy Customers.

Want to know more on how our lead system works in detail? I can be easily reached at sajat.shrestha@convergetree.com.

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Today is the millennial generation. People like to try out before they want to buy something. People like to be informed and want to make informed decisions. It is natural that people want to connect to business to get more information.

But, time is also a major constrain on this system. People want to ask, but do they really want to visit a business personally, just for answer? May be not. The hassle of traffic and pollution may not be ideal situation for someone to visit a business branch. Yes, telephone calls are cheap. But does an automatic IVR system — which ask people to enter some number before hanging up, really gives the personal feel that a telephone is supposed to do???

Welcome Social Media. Internet access is widely available and rates are decreasing. Plus FB already has a customer base of more than 1 Billion. FB Messenger app alone has monthly active users base of 1.2 billion on April 2017. Tell what you may, we do check facebook almost everyday. It might be for accessing news, entertainment, connecting with friends or asking some business houses if they provide some facility.

Last time i checked in to a business house, i was stuck in traffic for around 1/2 hour, spent 10 minutes in line for customer service — just to ask : do i get charged if i changed my pin number?? I know — you must be thinking, why on earth would you not use telephone? I did — 12 times..Each time i was asked to input 0 to get in touch with customer service and after waiting for 2 minutes each time, i got disconnected. And when i tried to connect to the bank via FB, you know what happened? That organization had disabled customer messages via FB.

I was like — whoa!!!!Why would someone disable FB messaging. May be they got lots of consumer messaging and do not have enough staff to respond to those consumers. But, disabling a means for consumers to reach you also means you are disabling a means to reach the consumers. I totally agree, business may not have enough HR to be online 24×7, but we do have a workaround for that. Don’t we?

Enter messaging bots.

We, people working on IT, are supposed to automate jobs that are too repetitive or labor intensive, aren’t we? We have created amazing IT platforms for business — eCommerce, Survey System , On-the-go banking. Businesses provide so many facilities to grow but rely on 20 people handling customer service department. The ratio just doesn’t seem right. Business want millions of consumers to be associated with us, but are not willing to be responsive.

This is where a chatbot or a messaging bot comes in play. Setup once, run anywhere is the core concept on messaging bots. Create a bot, feed data to the system and let the built-in NLP and AI take care of consumers. And you know what, once a system is ready, it can be deployed on any medium — website, or any messaging platforms.

Yes, on surface, developing a bot sounds expensive. But lets look at the benefits here. How many people are engaged in customer service, answering the same question, on day to day basis? What about their pay, bonus, insurance, emotions, raise? Not to mention the real estate cost associated with that?

Bots are machines. They will answer and work tirelessly. They don’t care about how much money make, they only care about how much questions can they answer, or how much customer satisfaction they garnered. I understand that bots may not be able to add all the personal touch people might, you know what, there are ways where bots and people share common goal of customer satisfaction. & that is the blog post for another day.

This article featured originally at Medium on 26 Feb, 2018

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After leading a company which specialized on development of websites and mobile application for more than 9 years, i am fascinated with the idea of intertwining technology and business. For so long, we were able to create great mobile application and website, from selling airline tickets to online TV streaming and news applications.

But one area that i was really wanted to overcome was customer service. Too many times have i got stuck in an automated IVR system when i dialed customer service for support. I know, prices for telephone calls are dropping rapidly but that doesn’t mean i have to get to get stuck for 2 minute just to dial 9 at the end to reach customer service.

& Boy Oh Boy! Do i have to explain my problem..How, when, where, are you sure?Sorry, can you repeat that again??…These questions gives you a nightmares sometime.

Surely there must an alternative way, right?? Facebook!!! Click!!! Ok, I will contact them in Facebook. Easy, as i was on my mac most of the time and Facebook was right there, next to the official contact page of company.Sent a message of Facebook and what do i get??

Thank you for contacting us. Please call XXXXXXXXXX for instant service. Sometime later in the day, someone from the company replied — Yes sir, we are here to help you. Let us know your problem and we will forward them to concerned department. Sigh!!!

Then, i thought, wait a second…Facebook messages can be automated. I just saw that in one public chatbot. How come they never used chatbots for generic questions. It is not like i wanted to know exact amount due on my credit or where is my money going? I just wanted to know what kind of schemes are there. These are simple question which can be pre fed in a system and easily extracted from the knowledge base. Yes, i do love human touch but not if that requires more time and money.

Then we began developing our own chatbot solely based on this idea. Core idea – I don’t want to wait for someone to handle conversation or get stuck in a loop. So, our team decided to work on chatbot. First thought — should we build our own system or use Facebook. Upon exploring idea of Facebook, we thought lets see what facebook has got. And how we were pleasantly surprised. Everything from Image Carousal, quick replies , buttons and simple NLP with access to Wit.ai..Great…Now, i feel like we have everything, not only to build a chatbot for customer service but for businesses as well..

We are currently exploring the idea of selling products via chatbots themselves. And our motto is serving us well here — Whenever there is new technology, nobody tells you how to use it.Just use it as your wish.

This happened to us 7 years back when mobile application started booming and we think that the same case will go for chatbots.

Happy Chatting!!!

This article first appeared on Medium @ 22 Oct 2017

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