Social channels are the new storefronts
In a social-first world, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat are the new ‘doors to stores’ today. The rise of social commerce creates both a challenge and opportunity: to bring your in-store experience online directly on your customers’ preferred social channels where they spend the best of their time. Messaging apps play a critical role in delivering that promise. If social channels are the new storefronts, asking a question to a brand via Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram DMs is the digital equivalent of walking into a store. The question is: will your brand be present 24-7 and be ready to capture these high-intent customers?
As we move away from a web-centric experience to a social-first experience, the customer journey becomes much more fragmented and decentralized. To streamline the customer experience across social and messaging touchpoints, brands need to connect the dots and create a seamless customer experience—while maintaining a 360-degree, single view of the customer. A unified social inbox with conversational AI capabilities makes this possible, at scale.
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Now that Google has abandoned the tracking cookie and Apple has begun restricting the ability of advertisers to re-target visitors, brands are turning to social commerce to maintain connection with customers across the vast and ever-changing digital landscape.
With social commerce, brands can engage in 1:1, private conversations across social channels, effectively re-creating the in-store experience of engaging with staff rather than simply visiting a static digital storefront. These personalized experiences are the heartbeat of social commerce.
Today, when a brand can engage directly with a customer across multiple channels in near-real time, conversations have become the new cookies—the golden thread to keep customers engaged and loyal.