Consolidating all your SaaS eCommerce applications

There is no question that the many intuitive add-ons and plug-ins available can enhance a SaaS eCommerce platform, including one click-to-purchase, abandoned cart savers, and Instagram carousels which are perfect for social sharing. Yet, despite shoppers’ eagerness to use these features, retailers struggle to unify the customer experience, as often these applications and workflows don’t fit together nicely. One tool that can unify divergent SaaS applications to deliver a superior omnichannel retail strategy is a communications platform as a service (CPaaS), which offers an omnichannel communication automation suite.

The issues with a multichannel approach to eCommerce

One company’s eCommerce SaaS platform could leverage multiple payment and product or brand channels. However, multichannel will not suffice in today’s modern age where everything is connected. eCommerce SaaS platforms need to be augmented by communication tools like CPaaS for a better omnichannel experience.

One bad experience can ruin a customer’s day, and if they project their frustration across social media for the whole world to read, a business’s reputation could also be at risk. With CPaaS capabilities, retailers can provide a better customer shopping experience.

CPaaS improves productivity and communication

Besides improving the shopper experience, retailers may struggle with optimizing staff productivity and streamlining internal communication workflows, ultimately preventing them from realizing a successful omnichannel retail strategy. Just as fragmented eCommerce communications are less effective than a unified one, so is a disorderly internal communications network. This issue is an epidemic, as 80% of employees believe that a lack of collaboration and communication tools causes failures in their workplace. (Flock, 2020)

When different departments use separate communication tools, valuable information gets isolated, and stakeholders get left out of the loop. By leveraging CPaaS, team members such as IT staff, can integrate trouble ticket management systems to enrich internal processes. Manual operations like equipment management and internal notifications can also get optimized through automation. These CPaaS platforms also include APIs and ready-to-use applications, helping IT teams quickly and easily build workflows for various online retail needs.

SaaS eCommerce platforms and siloed data

Imagine a shopper calling customer support about the size of an outfit on that brand’s eCommerce site – halfway through the conversation, the shopper realizes they have something important to attend to, and they hang up. Later, that same shopper calls back, expecting your customer service agent to remember where the conversation left off. With siloed data, this scenario is impossible to handle and could leave the customer with a negative impression. Whichever agent answers the phone would need to ask the shopper to repeat their question, payment information, etc.

Likewise, should the customer resume the dialogue with a different channel, like a web chatbot plug-in on the eCommerce site, these disjointed communication applications will cause the caller to become frustrated. However, a proper CPaaS solution can un-silo data and foster an omnichannel retail strategy through smart routing, digital assistants, and built-in integrations.

Consolidate your SaaS applications with the ultimate communication tool

Almost every eCommerce store utilizes one or more SaaS platforms, and there is no better consolidation tool for communication – internal or B2C – than IntelePeer SmartFlows. Whether you need to automate SMS notifications within Zendesk or communication between different CRM systems, our drag-and-drop tool has you covered.