Businesses now know that digital transformation is no more a hype; small, medium, and large enterprises know that relevance and survival in the global market depend on customer satisfaction. To this end, it has become necessary to do whatever it takes to improve the customer experience.
Digital transformation is a process of integrating technology, revamping legacy apps, and improving employees’ technical know-how to enhance a smoother operational process. The eCommerce industry, which heavily relies on online transactions to serve customers, needs to take the lead in digital transformation initiatives.
Customers have become more enlightened and have access to social media platforms where they daily share their views about brands and their performances. Some eCommerce sites enable product reviews, and consumers leverage them to express their feelings about different products.
The time has gone when consumers swallow all you dish out to them, hook, line, and sinker; it has become almost impossible for any brand to monopolize products. The voice of the customer (VoC) has become a crucial index for improving services; businesses strive to improve customer experience due to the internet making the world a global village, thereby enhancing healthy rivalry in the business world.
Customer satisfaction hinges on how you deploy digital adoption into your business operations and how far you are ready to transform your organizational culture.
Dropshipping
Dropshipping has come as a shift from the traditional method of eCommerce retailing; with little or no funds, you can embark on dropshipping; the things needed for drop shipping are the client base, website, laptop, and the internet. If you’re new to dropshipping, you should consider a dropshipping course. The best dropshipping courses will not only teach you the basics but will give you the tools to get ahead of the game in this competitive industry. Since you don’t need to keep inventory and only fulfill orders, you must expect dropshipping to be very competitive; and that is a potent reason for you to integrate digital transformation into your dropshipping business. Reverse dropshipping has attracted a lot of attention in recent months, and a quick check of Google Trends confirms this. Reverse dropshipping works on the same basis as standard dropshipping in that we do not require inventory.
A success factor in the dropshipping business is delivery time. Delivery time is the combination of processing time and shipping time. Customers purchase products to meet daily needs and demand to have the products they ordered in time. Utilizing only the best dropshipping tools is practically crucial for a direct delivery business to stay afloat and grow.
Drop shippers may not even come in contact with products they sell; the whole idea is to get orders from clients and pass such orders to wholesalers who will label, package, and ship the products. The processing time is how long it takes the wholesaler to source the products, label, and package them before sending them to a third party that will do the shipping.
Incidentally, your customers start counting the delivery time right after making payments for their orders. Digital adoption is vital to shorten the time you need to process orders; relying on human labor can make the process more time-consuming and fraught with errors.
By integrating AI to enhance digital inventory, your wholesaler can drastically reduce processing time and effectively improve customer experience. If you can reduce processing time, the other task you have is to ensure quick shipping.
Shipping time is how long it takes the product to get to the doorsteps of your customers after sending them to the shipping agent by the wholesaler. The amount you pay and the nature of the products will determine if the shipping agent will send them through the air, rail, sea, or road.
Since China has become the manufacturing hub of the world due to cheap labor and quality products, drop shippers favor ordering products from China. However, customers experience long shipping times that can even run into 30 days or more than that.
Giants in the eCommerce sector, such as Amazon, Walmart, and HyperSKU, try to counter this long shipping time by having warehouses in different parts of the world. They are also incorporating dropshipping drones to facilitate quick shipping times.
This is a digital transformation initiative that is AI-enabled. You can program a dropshipping drone to deliver products to the doorsteps of your customers.
By integrating this digital transformation initiative into the dropshipping business, you can greatly enhance customer satisfaction and remain relevant in the dropshipping business, which according to a source will hit a market cap of $476.1 billion by 2026.
Customer service
The first impression your dropshipping business makes to potential customers is very important to your conversion rate and even the retention rate of old customers. Customers want to have real-time attention; and considering the different time zones in the world, it may not be possible for you to offer a 24/7 service.
You can, however, overcome this hurdle by integrating chatbots into your dropshipping business. Chatbots operate on technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), AI, and machine learning.
Chatbots are capable of mimicking humans and can even chat with customers in their different languages. What chatbots bring to bear in your dropshipping business is ensuring that your customers can access your customer service section any time of the day.
Unlike human beings, chatbots don’t have needs such as lunch breaks, holidays to relax from stress, and visits to hospitals and clinics for treatment and sessions with therapists. If your customer service runs efficiently, you are on the path to building brand loyalty and brand ambassadors.
Personalized messages
Email is an essential mode of communication in the dropshipping business; customers are no longer interested in the generic “Dear customer” address; they want you to treat them as individuals and not as numeric entities. Apart from personalizing the address, you must also personalize the subject line and the content.
Going by the estimates that 1.7 MB of data are created each second for every person globally, you have the data to personalize the email messages for your dropshipping business. With data, you can segment customers into their behavioral patterns, geographical locations, psychographics, and demographics.
Integrating big data analytics into your dropshipping business puts you shoulder-high against the competition. You also improve customer experience by sending personalized messages.
Insights you gather from customers’ data will enable you to display their favorite products on your website.
Conclusion
Though the data you gather about your customers will mostly be in the unstructured format, sentiment analysis which is a digital adoption strategy will enable you to convert the data into a structured format. Dropshipping can be highly competitive; however, if you make digital transformation the pivot of your dropshipping business, you will be dictating the tune in your niche.
