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Employing chat features to up customer experience for business growth
Online customer services, as part of the country's growing e-commerce sector, are inseparable from Indonesians' penchant for conversation.
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Chat features are an essential part of a digital business in capturing Indonesian customers, who tend to converse habitually – both on- and offline. (Shutterstock/Rawpixel.com)
The number of online businesses continue to rise every year, including those in Indonesia.
According to Republika Online, these online business in Indonesia have reached a combined value of US$12 billion. Meanwhile, Unlocking Indonesia's Digital Opportunity by management consulting group McKinsey & Company suggests that the transition from offline to online businesses will contribute up to $150 billion to Indonesia's economic growth by 2025.
Online businesses have grown hand in hand with the rapid spread of internet users across the nation. To date, over 93.4 million of Indonesia's 260 million population are active internet users, of which 73 percent use mobile devices to access the internet. This figure is expected to grow on a daily basis.
Considering the growth in internet users and online businesses, Indonesia's small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs are also growing increasingly popular. To date, more than 3.8 million SMEs have opened online stores across a variety of platforms from social media to online marketplaces and messaging apps.
Online businesses, as part of' economic activities in the country, cannot be separated from its people's habit of chatting. It is not far-fetched to assume that the market’s huge reliance on this chatting habit might prompt big e-commerce players to install a chat feature to accelerate online transactions. Incorporating a chat feature might offer a sense of comfort and familiarity, especially for potential customers who still have concerns about making online transactions.
It is thus inevitable that chat features have become one of the key tools in providing customer service. Big brands have also welcomed this practice with open arms, readily providing their customers with contact numbers that link directly to the chat feature. Ever-growing technological developments have expanded the array of customer service tools that incorporate substantial chat features like LiveChat, Omni-Channel, Live Agent, Chatbot and more.
Millennials and Gen-Z are the largest targeted cohorts of the e-commerce market, which might be aware of the phrase “customer experience is the new currency”, as a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study attests that 73 percent of customers make their purchasing decisions based largely on great customer experience.
The chat feature as a customer service tool can boost customer experience as, according to eMarketer, 63 percent of customers will revisit a website if it offers LiveChat or Chatbot for replying to customer queries in real-time. Using AI technology, analyzing customer conversation using transcripts is feasible to gain insight for improving the business's customer service further. (kes)
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Arra Primanta is a communications strategist with 13 years in the field of communications, including marketing and storytelling.
