Estimates are that shoppers will do $79 billion worth of shopping online this Christmas season in just the U.S., 15 percent more than last year, begging the question of how online shopping sites are going to keep up with the growing volume. One company in Silicon Valley is working behind the scenes to make that happen.
Moxie Software, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., helps companies, including online retailers, run their ecommerce sites and the armies of contact center agents around the globe that interact with customers to maximize their shopping experience.
Just in time for the holidays, Moxie is rolling out enhancements to its Spaces by Moxie platform that manages systems like chat, e-mail and other features of sites.
If a retailer can improve the efficiency of the online shopping experience, it can satisfy this growing demand, improve customer satisfaction and increase sales.
“[Moxie’s] retail customers need to provide their customers with a good experience, they need to know who they are … so it’s really valuable to our customers to be able to do that,” said Tara Sporrer, vice president of marketing and sales operations at Moxie.
What struck me as most interesting is that Moxie is introducing an improved chat function that includes real-time text translation. These days, with ecommerce sites selling globally and many contact centers operating abroad, language difficulties can emerge.
Say that a shopper in a Spanish-speaking country is trying to buy from an American company, say, Moxie customer Dell, but Dell's contact center may have a limited number of Spanish-speaking agents. Rather than make the customer wait online for the next available Spanish-speaking agent (and risk their disconnecting from the site), the customer could chat with any agent through the real-time text translation feature and get their questions answered quickly.
“If the customer is typing in Spanish, that gets routed through a translation engine and the English equivalent gets presented to the agent and gets captured as part of the interaction history, so the original and the translated form are both presented,” said Nikhl Govindaraj, vice president of products at Moxie.
Govindaraj hastens to add that the translation is carefully tuned to understand nuances in translations given that some words don’t always easily translate from one language to another.
President Jimmy Carter learned that the hard way when on a state visit to Poland in 1977. In his remarks upon arriving, the president said that he understood the “desires” of the Polish people – still under the control of the Soviet Union -- for political and economic freedom. Unfortunately, his State Department translator used the Polish term for “carnal lust” instead of “desire,” causing much diplomatic embarrassment for Carter.
But I digress.
The goal with chat translation is to make chat as easy as talking to a clerk in a physical store, said Sporrer. Moxie’s research shows that if a customer has $100 in their online shopping cart, an effective chat session with an agent could increase sales to that customer by a factor of four. It’s called “the upsell” in retailing, when, for example, a woman buys a dress and the clerk can suggest matching shoes or a handbag.
And even if buyer and seller communicate only in English, Spaces by Moxie is also enhanced to better understand context. If someone is using the word “galaxy” in reference to the solar system, that’s one thing. But if they’re on the Samsung site, they’re more likely talking about the Samsung Galaxy line of smartphones. Come to think of it, if a shopper is on a classic car site, the system would understand that they are probably talking about the Ford Galaxie, a popular model from the 1960s (I used to own one).
Spaces by Moxie also has improved the ability of shoppers to interact with a shopping site on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, which are becoming increasingly used over typical desktop and laptop computers.
Moxie has also improved the efficiency of e-mails connecting buyer and seller so that if a customer e-mails the retailer with a question, the site can respond more quickly, improving customer satisfaction. It has also enhanced the efficiency of adding attachments to e-mails, improved password protection and created application programming interfaces (APIs) that its customers can use to customize the site for their needs. No matter how the ecommerce site is set up, the Moxie services are added to it from the cloud.
These improvements will be put to the test for Moxie’s customers this holiday shopping season, especially as demand continues to grow, said Sporrer.
“Our customers are already very large with very large [sales] volumes … and during the holidays they are going to be able to support and manage those increases better because of the capabilities that we’re issuing here,” she said. “And the customer is going to be able to shop the way they want to.”
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