If the last few months have taught businesses anything, it's that their workforces are vulnerable to massive disruptions like the one wrought by the coronavirus. That realization is pushing many in the business community to accelerate their plans to invest in a new wave of automation tools and techniques. In doing so, they hope to both lower overhead and ensure business continuity in an increasingly uncertain world.
What's been surprising to many is how many opportunities for automation are available using today's off-the-shelf technology. In particular, businesses in the eCommerce sector have been leading the charge toward automation. It's due in part to the need to keep costs contained in a competitive market, as well as to cope with the sudden surge in demand that has accompanied the pandemic.
All of the recent movement toward automation in eCommerce should come as no surprise, however. It was, and remains, an industry well suited to process automation. To elaborate, here are three primary eCommerce tasks that can already be completely or partially automated.
Abandoned Cart Re-engagement
One of the biggest challenges that eCommerce businesses have always faced is the propensity of shoppers to abandon their shopping carts before completing a purchase. When that happens, they not only lose out on revenue but also incur the infrastructure costs associated with a shopper doing everything but buying something. By March, statistical analysis indicated that the average eCommerce business had an 88.05% abandonment rate.
That's a figure that's at once too high to ignore, as well as too high to address with individual human-powered intervention. That's where automation comes in. Using rudimentary tools, eCommerce businesses can implement a sophisticated abandoned cart re-engagement effort that uses automated email and SMS messaging to nudge shoppers to come back and complete a purchase. It's a low-cost, high-reward strategy that can bolster a company's bottom line with minimal up-front investment.
Invoice Automation
Without a doubt, the most labor-intensive tasks involved with running an eCommerce operation revolve around managing the invoicing of suppliers as well as the billing and collection of payment from customers. This is especially true when it comes to high-volume B2B eCommerce businesses, who often have to deal with a thicket of different payment terms, order frequencies, and credit arrangements from account to account.
But this is yet another area ripe for automation. There are already a variety of plug-and-play invoice automation options that integrate with existing eCommerce software and add seamless automated functionality to their workflows. They're equally adept at handling everything from a one-off order for industrial equipment to an ongoing flower subscription and everything in between. And every automated transaction represents an opportunity for bottom-line savings.
Augmenting Customer Support
Perhaps the biggest challenge that eCommerce businesses faced when they sought to deal with the sudden rush of orders brought on by the pandemic was having to scale up their customer service operations at a time when hiring new workers was almost impossible. It served as an object lesson in the value of automation in the customer service process. The good news for them is that automated customer service options have become quite advanced in recent years.
IBM's own Watson Assistant is an excellent case in point. With it, eCommerce businesses can deploy a multichannel customer service operation that gives customers the option of self-service that functions almost on-par with traditional human-led customer service centers. Using powerful AI to help classify and direct customer requests to the right resources, eCommerce operators can reduce the strain on their front-line workers by resolving the vast majority of customer queries with no human intervention required. The result is an agile and responsive customer service function that increases customer satisfaction without the added overhead that comes with hiring a call center full of live operators.
A Transformed Industry
Although it's too soon to tell what the ultimate effects of the coronavirus pandemic will be for most businesses, it is already having some pronounced effects. One of those effects is that it is remaking the eCommerce industry by driving up automation adoption. It's a trend that was well underway before the pandemic and has accelerated sharply ever since. That makes it a safe bet that the industry as a whole will emerge from the other side of the crisis looking quite different from the way it started.
On the whole, eCommerce businesses should emerge leaner, more efficient, and with less overhead than they had prior to the crisis. That should leave them well-positioned compared to other businesses when the global economy returns to some semblance of normalcy in the coming months. It will also leave them as a very visible reminder to other businesses of how much they stand to gain by embracing automation. And that may well end up as the lasting legacy the coronavirus will leave in its wake from an economic perspective – which is a rare bit of good news in an otherwise unfortunate situation.