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Crisis Management: What's the Role of Agility and Rapid Deployment of Solutions?

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Crisis Management: What's the Role of Agility and Rapid Deployment of Solutions?

The sudden emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic requires companies to react rapidly to counter its devastating effects. As Accenture highlights in their report on responsive customer service during the coronavirus*, “…COVID-19 is requiring that brands move at unprecedented speed to serve their customers with quality while caring for their employees with compassion".

According to this consulting firm, the challenge for brands was threefold: To be readily available to clients in need of assistance, to show compassion in the displacement of their personnel, and to anticipate or manage remote workflow. Their advice was to turn to technology compatible with remote working, which would eventually initiate a positive transformation within the business once the crisis subsided. 

The crisis linked to the pandemic intensified the rate in which new strategies were being launched, decisions were being made and deployments were being performed by iAdvize clients.

The rapid evolution of conversational strategies observed on our platform

In response to the ever-increasing requests and intensifying online sales caused by COVID-19, our clients rapidly adjusted their conversational strategies by deploying innovative solutions. The Objective: to ensure continuity in their service and to offer the best customer experience possible despite the disconcerting time.

The Adjustment of targeting strategies

Pages visited, browsing time… close monitoring of one’s targeting strategy, the rule that triggers messaging assistance to its visitors, became essential during the crisis. Whether it be assisting buyers or responding to their delivery complications in a proactive way, our clients have adapted their approaches.
During the last 15 days of March 2020, we tracked 3 times more projects linked to targeting strategies than during the weeks preceding.

A significant acceleration in the adoption of bots

To treat the volume of requests and recurring questions linked to the coronavirus, a few of our clients decided to automate their responses via chatbot, which can “pull” the queries and redirect the questions linked to COVID-19 toward an information card or FAQ page. 
In the chart below you can see the evolution of the total number of bots deployed per week on the iAdvize platform. We noted a 27% increase in the number of bots deployed on the platform between February 24th and April 6th, 2020, with a spike in the week of March 9th.

A significant acceleration in the adoption of bots

Product experts are increasing in number

Experts from the ibbü community are passionate about their topics and are handpicked to advise visitors on company websites via messaging. Available on-demand, these freelance specialists are trained to help brands in assisting visitors, hence alleviating their load of online queries. 

A few of our clients opted for this solution as a support during the crisis, as shown in the chart below with the evolution of the number of experts onboarded per week from the start of the pandemic. During the week of March 30th, 2020, we registered 6 times the number of experts compared to a typical week in 2019.

ibbü experts are increasing in number

The use of mobile applications is on the rise

The confinement resulted in a significant increase in the use of the iAdvize mobile application, as some of our clients asked their professional advisors to continue their activity remotely via our platform; on the desktop as much as the mobile application. For example, we trained and redeployed 400 sales staff from one of Europe’s leading sports goods retailers on our platform. 

The use of mobile applications is on the rise

An asynchronous chat for seamless conversations 

iAdvize Messenger includes an asynchronous functionality, which gives the agent the possibility to respond later if no representative is available in real-time. Some of our clients increased their usage with this function to optimize the agent occupation rate and handle a larger volume of conversations (3.6x for one of our clients in the children's fashion sector).  

Customer case study

Mobilized to support our partners with tailored strategies, our teams are also there to help our new clients adopt the iAdvize platform in record time.
Below is a video illustration from one of our client cases:

In the Home Improvement sector, we were able to support a large company by redeploying their staff online, when they were obligated to close their doors. This company had to simultaneously follow up with customers who had already purchased items before the closure and also redeploy its commercial activity online. As the company did not have an e-commerce platform, they managed sales via three channels: by telephone, by email, and by messaging. It deployed and configured iAdvize for its website within 48 hours. This company transferred nearly a dozen of its sales support team to online assistance. While working from home, these specialists advised buyers on the site’s product pages via our platform, after having received 2 hours of express e-learning training. On March 30th, 2020, 5 days after having deployed the solution, the company was already recording close to 300 conversations in just one day.

*Source: COVID-19: Responsive customer service in times of change