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How we found out about the Brand Messaging pilot
- One of our clients received an invitation from Amazon to participate.
What we know about Brand Messaging so far
What is it?
- Amazon-hosted seller-to-shopper chat on storefront and in detail pages.
- Dates: the pilot is running from 10/14/19 to 11/23/19.
- Will this become a future feature?
Requirements for sellers
- Enrollment in the Brand Registry program.
- Meet Amazon’s Brand Messaging SLA.
Relation to Amazon Questions and Answers?
- Amazon Question Answers – originally supposed to be a live chat format.
- The Amazon Answers interface appeared visually like a chat in the past.
- Brand messaging conversations will likely be private.
Future implications of Brand Messaging
How to prepare
- Enroll in Amazon Brand Registry: https://brandservices.amazon.com/
- Consider hiring and budget for chat agents.
- A team of 5 to 10 agents to cover 12-hour, 7 days per week SLA with minimal coverage.
- Estimate chat volume.
- Consider ASINs and/or storefront pages would have the chat enabled. The number of daily sales for those ASINs could allow you to somewhat anticipate chat volume. This would still only be an educated guess.
Potential limitations
- How many simultaneous chats are permitted (queue width)? = how many agents do you need?
- Most major chat systems include a maximum number of ongoing chats that can be accepted at any given time.
- Chat Availability and SLA penalties?
- AI or chatbot assistance for sellers?
- Will there be a new interface or technology to learn?
Potential impacts
- Drive sales!
- Zendesk: “With 92% customer satisfaction, live chat leads the way over telephone, e-mail, and social media support.”
- Sales training for CS agents (or apps out there that automate marketing campaigns – https://www.zaius.com/ ).
- Prevent negative experiences from happening.
- Prevent negative product reviews.
- Prevent unnecessary returns.
- Increase CX / CSAT scores.
Amazon Brand Messaging is an open, ongoing topic, we’ll be back with more information in another episode.
Do you have info on Brand Messaging? Share it with at keepsmiling@sellersmile.com.
Ep. 020 Transcription
[Tygh]: Welcome to Keep Smiling: the E-commerce Customer Experience Podcast. Selling products online is challenging and can lead to poor experiences. We explore how entrepreneurs and organizations create better experiences for the people they serve. Amazon, Shopify, artificial intelligence will discuss what matters today and what you can do to build a better e-commerce business.
[Tygh]: Hello listeners thanks again for joining us I’m your host ty Walters and joining me again today is my co-host, Michael Melgar.
[Michael]: Hey everyone, hope you guys have a great costume planned for Halloween.
[Tygh] I probably have a costume that’s too scary for our listeners so I’m not gonna show it, what’s yours, Michael?
[Michael]: It’s a secret but I might or might not be Tygh.
[Tygh]: We have an exciting update for you today so we’re doing a shorter minisode where we’re gonna cover a new feature that we’ve learned recently about, it’s called Amazon Brand Messaging and it’s a new pilot program. In this episode we’re gonna cover how we found out about Brand Messaging what we know about Brand Messaging so far and future implications for Amazon sellers.
[Michael]: As Tygh mentioned, the way that we first heard about this pilot program is we had a client of ours reach out about a message they actually received from Amazon so if you’re listening today you might have received a similar message we don’t know exactly the specifics of who was sent this message or perhaps like maybe any any sort of specific reasons why they were picked but the message reads as follows: “Brand Messaging enables you to live chat with customers from the detail pages of ASINs that you choose along with your brand store page if you have one the dates of the pilot are October 14th through November 23rd. In order to participate from October 14th through November 23rd, you must be able to actively monitor incoming chats from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, seven days a week during the pilot. During that time you must respond to incoming messages within a minute or less.
[Tygh]: So again, this is an email that one of our clients received from Amazon, essentially an invitation to participate in this program. Let’s cover exactly what we know so far and why that’s important.[Michael]: We’ll try to stay to the facts as much as possible and then kind of elaborate on what we think future impacts might look like, to summarize it though, the main you know exciting update about this is that Amazon is testing a feature to allow chat in the product listings and storefront detail pages for your Amazon account. This is the first time that Amazon would allow sellers to communicate with their buyers prior to them purchasing or sending you a direct message. This is a game-changer in our book because whenever a customer sends in an email through Amazon, that’s something that might take up to 24 hours to receive a response. Meanwhile, if Amazon is releasing a live chat feature this is something that I mean even within their pilot messaging here, they’re talking about how they expect responses within a minute or less, and we’ll dive a bit more into what that could possibly entail.
[Tygh]: Another thing that we know about this program are some of the running dates where the pilot is announced to be running from October 14th through November 23rd of this year. We don’t know anything about whether this could be a future feature or when that might be released all we know right now are the dates of the pilot.
[Michael]: Exactly so these are the dates, you know, we’re currently recording on October 22nd of 2019 so so far the pilot is currently running there are sellers currently testing this feature but the wide-scale release might be really contingent on how that test run goes and what happens from there, but we anticipate that this would be a feature that comes back in the future. Currently what we know about in terms of requirements for sellers is, number one would be Brand Registry. In order for you to have access to storefront page and interact with your customers through your brand you would be required to use Brand Registry, at least for the duration of the pilot program. We’re not exactly sure if whenever this is wide-scale released if that’s something that’s going to be required for sellers to have in order to use it, at this time we are theorizing that that’s possibly something that might be required but for the pilot program we do know that is a requirement. In addition to that we also know about the Brand Messaging SLA. As I mentioned, right now we know that Amazon is expecting sellers who participate in the pilot to be available seven days a week from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eastern time and to be able to respond to messages within a minute or less.
[Tygh]: Another thing that we know about Brand Messaging is that it’s somewhat related, or it might be somewhat related, to Amazon Answers. We see, as a team, a lot of similarities between the two programs and just what they could be as well as some information from a trusted source what Amazon Answers was supposed to be, so we see Amazon in either case, whether it’s Amazon Brand Messaging or Amazon Questions and Answers, what we see is a similarity on a focus on instant communication and enhancing communication between shoppers and customers on Amazon and the third party seller or brand owner of those products.
[Michael]: Yeah we’ve touched on Amazon Answers before in some of our earlier episodes but Amazon Answers is one of the only opportunities that buyers have to reach out and ask questions about your product before they even purchase that’s something that we cover for a lot of our sellers currently and there was a time, you know, perhaps in the last year, 1 to 2 years, where for a very short period would notice that the Amazon answers interface visually appeared like a chat conversation, so it kind of looked similar to Buyer-Seller messaging but just a tad bit different and so we’re theorizing that Amazon answers might have at some point in time have been an early version of this live chat program. Where that’s kind of a theory, we, we’ve spoken with some Amazon, Ex-Amazon employees who also mentioned that this was something that was a possibility. We can’t say that for sure but one major difference that we can state here is that Amazon Answers is a public forum so, you know, questions and answers that are left by customers and by yourself and by the seller are things that are public. Brand Messaging, if it does interact like a natural live chat conversation it’s most likely not going to be public, that’s something that would likely be a little bit closer to Buyer-Seller Messaging.
[Tygh]: That’s a key distinction, we see usefulness in the public answers that have been previously provided by a seller about their products because then it turns it into more of a self-serve customer service option but in the case of Brand Messaging, we have a hunch that it’ll be a much more private one-on-one conversation. Michael, let’s transition into talking about the future implications of Amazon Brand Messaging. if this pilot program turns into a real offering for Amazon sellers let’s just sort of imagine and sort of project out into the future what that could mean and let’s start that by saying how can sellers prepare if this program becomes a reality, how can they put themselves in a position to take advantage of it.
[Michael]: Certainly. As we mentioned before Brand Registry’s gonna be one of the programs you’re going to want to look into before this sort of become a wide-scale release. Since we know very little about the pilot program as it is we can only speculate on what potential impacts it might have in terms of how to take advantage of this feature. There’s a lot of potential limitations that could affect this but right off the top, hiring and budget, that’s something that you’re going to want to consider because even if let’s say you are planning to participate in the pilot program, I believe that that pilot program participation period has already closed, but if you were to have been a seller to participate in there you would have had to taken time to consider the amount of agents you would need to cover that SLA if Amazon was expecting to be available for that time period of 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eastern for those dates. Think about how many chats might come through during that time and the amount of team resources you would need to make sure that you stick within a 1-minute SLA. That’s a pretty arduous task, or it could be an arduous task, depending on the size of your account. But in addition to that, you know, another thing to consider in terms of making sure that you adequately think about the number of agents or team members you might need to cover something like that, is you can consider perhaps a few ASINs a few popular agents consider your storefront page. Think about places that might have the chat system enabled and you can take a step further and think about the number of daily sales you have for some of those ASINs because that could somewhat allow you to anticipate the chat volume, you can at least make an educated guess in terms of how many people are at least coming to your listing to purchase and then there’s other buyers who are not purchasing that do come to your listing that might be a candidate for a chat you might be able to close the sale with. Based on just some preliminary research that Tygh and I did, we were even thinking that just for this specific seller’s pilot coverage it would likely require anywhere from five to ten agents to cover that SLA minimum coverage.
[Tygh]: Right, and for small business owners selling on Amazon an addition of five to ten people into your business might sound like a lot. For people unfamiliar with customer service teams, the best way to do this is have several agents covering at once in some type of overlapping format, so all hours of the day are covered and you’re not overworking your team because a 12-hour shift is difficult to cover seven days a week even on holidays. It becomes expensive to cover that because you’re having to pay people to come in on days that are difficult to be working.
[Michael]: Companies like ours, SellerSmile, that’s the type of challenge that we try to solve for sellers so do you think about this in terms of if this were to become a wide-scale release, hiring and your budget for this is going to be something to consider because there is gonna be this exponentially greater opportunity to close sales but you will have to have humans in front of that of that system to try to help anticipate some of that chat volume.
[Tygh]: Moving on to some other potential limitations that we’ve noted. How many simultaneous chats with Amazon allow a seller to be engaged with? We talked about this maybe in terms of calling it like a “queue width.” How wide is your intake of customers? How many can fit in at once? And that’s gonna have an implication for how many agents that you might need to cover that many simultaneous chats. If there’s a queue, how does that work? Is this program going to be enabled on a mobile device? Can you chat with your customers on the go or do you need to be using a desktop or laptop system?
[Michael]: These are things that the invitation did not include information about that so this is us kind of making our best guess as to how that could potentially impact you in the future but most chat systems that were aware of and, you know, we, we’ve mentioned Help Scout before, we worked with Zendesk in the past, Intercom. Most chat systems have a threshold on the maximum number of chats that can be going at any time so you can set it to perhaps like a maximum of three ongoing chats at any time so that way you can understand that no more than X amount of chats will come in at any given time, that allows you to plan for how many agents you might need to have at any moment in time. We don’t know if it’ll have some sort of feature that will allow you to throttle how many chats you can receive at once but that will have an impact on how much team member resources you’ll need.
[Tygh]: As a customer service agent myself with the experience of doing chat recently, I found that chat is super convenient for customers and it’s really effective at getting their issue resolved. The difference though is one interaction with a customer might span 10-15 minutes depending on the technical capability of that customer and what exactly their issue might be, and I realized that in that time, I might have been able to process 5, 10, 20 emails equivalency, so there’s this extra level of time dedication required in a chat situation compared to an email situation so take that into consideration if Amazon allows a maximum of five chats that’s much different than five emails that’s five different people on your team simultaneously working. So in this situation, we see Brand Messaging and inherently chat has a higher need for resources from a human resources standpoint.
[Michael]: It’s an excellent point. Even in the example of, you know, off the top of my head, it seems that customers are almost, they almost feel like they’re encouraged to ask more questions because they have a live agent with them available to help them. Perhaps what might have been just a two or three email discussion back and forth, turns into like a 10-15 minute chat conversation where they’re asking about several products and they’re asking about your return policy, they’re asking about X, Y and Z. So it becomes much more of a discussion similar to like helping a customer on the phone. It’s a bit more advanced than email communication but not quite the same versatility as perhaps being on the phone with them.
[Tygh]: The next question that Michael and I had about this new pilot program would be the potential for any SLA penalties, and we mean by this is when we first started servicing Amazon accounts doing Buyer-Seller Messaging, Amazon used to display your performance according to certain benchmarks indicating whether or not you were reaching those benchmarks, and theoretically, Amazon has the capability to penalize seller accounts in multiple different ways according to certain performance metrics, and we see this where an ASIN, for instance, will drop in performance according to negative customer experiences and sometimes Amazon will suspend that ASIN in those cases. So Michael and I were worried about if we were to participate in this program, what would the implications be if our average response time did not meet Amazon’s SLA, if it was greater than 1 minute or if we weren’t available to take a chat, for instance, over those 7 days and 12 hours. We wanted to make sure that if we were representing our client in the situation that we were doing a good job and we weren’t putting their account in jeopardy because we weren’t able to meet those requirements.
[Michael]: And again, this goes back to the limited information that we had to begin with where right out of the gate Amazon saying we’re expecting 1 minute SLA responses. It’s possible that Amazon’s trying to learn about more realistic limitations by using the pilot. When they release this feature they might say hey you need to respond to customers with an X amount of time. These are some of the kinks they might be trying to work out at this time. The truth is we don’t know.
[Tygh]: Another thing that we don’t know is if Amazon will use some type of bot or solution to automatically assist customers, and the reason we have this question is because we know that some customer service ticketing systems already contain these features. If that’s the case then their need for human resources might not be as great if they’re getting this sort of passive assistance from one of Amazon’s internal bot systems. We don’t know if Amazon is using them and what that would look like.
[Michael]: Exactly, we, I mean, there’s been a lot of policing or even suggestions that Amazon’s Buyer-Seller Messaging does in general in terms of the types of messages that you can send to buyers. This is only going to be that much greater when chat conversations are ongoing and there’s many more. Amazon’s gonna likely have some sort of assistance or some sort of like policing that’s gonna impact the Brand Messaging interface in some form or fashion. We don’t know yet what that could look like.
[Tygh]: So we covered what Brand Messaging is, or at least what we know so far, and we’ve also been talking now about some future implications, what this could mean for the program for you as a seller, and let’s wrap up by talking about potential impacts. Part of the implications of this program are how it could impact your business, how could augment your business to become more integrated with the customer because as we know, Amazon is so customer-centric and as that is their goal they will release Brand Messaging if they feel like it’s the best experience for the customer. Let’s talk about how it might be able to drive sales. Michael and I have seen with personal experience that chatting with customers usually entails the sales component. Sometimes the nature of the inquiry is. “which product is right for me?” or “which product do I need could you recommend something?”, and that has implications because hopefully as an agent we’re recommending the right thing to reduce future returns and refunds and dissatisfied customers, but we’re also connecting them with a product that might be of a certain price range. There might be upsell opportunities and as far as I’m aware in my typical experience, there tends to be a difference between customer service agents and sales agents in an organization. So this might have implications that now your customer service agents would require some type of sales training on your catalog. Some aspect of sales training is inherent in the customer service process, you understand certain products and situations but when it comes to helping customers pick the right product or complete a purchase, what does that mean for your team and are they prepared to take on those types of questions?
[Michael]: Certainly, so one of the biggest advantages to having this feature made available to sellers would definitely be the ability to drive more sales. It just goes without saying that if you’re available to answer your customers questions upfront, that might make all the difference for them. You know, we’ve talked about this when we’ve talked about live chat in general but really, if your customer gets a few of their questions answered that they had, they might go ahead and proceed with a purchase right than in there, otherwise the current experience entails, I’m not so sure, I might scan some reviews, I don’t even know if I want to go through the trouble of sending a message to this buyer and then having to wait an entire day, I’m just gonna go with my gut and the best reviews, right. This might make the difference, even if you don’t have as many reviews, the fact that you have perhaps like live chat on your detail page might make the difference, you might be able to help them make an educated purchase. So something that we, Tygh touched on is really the sales component of that is, what does that mean for your current customer service agents? It most likely entails more of that sales through education, you’re essentially like, just trying to educate your buyer on the best thing for them, but this is something that’s gonna be, again, through a different format, through the chat conversation format and trying to go through a few more options
[Tygh]: And it’s such a product-specific thing, we have sellers with different colors and sizes and shapes of their products so helping customers through that process and picking the one that will make them the happiest, the one they’re actually looking for it’s so important. Other sellers offer a product and it’s sort of one size fits all or there’s really no difference in the type of product, there’s minimal variations. So this chat process allows you to address the nuances of your product and of your company directly with your customer and honestly there’s so much that we’ve learned in these chats because it’s sort of evidence of what information is or is not available on our website and how easy was that for that customer to find. For the majority of the situations, we want to make things automated, run smoother for the customer and for our agents.
[Michael]: I’m sure this will become an excellent source for sellers to learn a lot about what customers common pain points are, even more so than finding those patterns to Buyer-Seller Messaging. To drive this message home, really in terms of how this might impact your sales we have a quote from Zendesk here, “with 92 percent customer satisfaction, live chat leads the way over telephone, email and social media support.”
[Tygh]: That evidence, that statistic is likely to carry over and apply in Amazon’s environment. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t, so as an Amazon seller take that to heart and one of the ways maybe to get started early is to start enabling chat in off Amazon areas, on your Shopify or WooCommerce website, maybe under social media pages. Practice live chat there see what type of questions that you’re getting, see if your team can cover that and then you’ll be prepared when Amazon or if Amazon finally releases this program to jump right in and meet SLA.
[Michael]: Another huge impact that we see this Brand Messaging feature having in the future is it’ll, as a whole, prevent negative experiences from happening. So if you think about the trickle-down effect from that it’ll most likely prevent negative or critical reviews. It will most likely also prevent returns because if you are there and available to help answer questions about what the right items are to purchase, this increases the likelihood that your customers gonna be satisfied with their purchase. A recent example is we’ve been working with one of our clients who is having trouble with their returns and one of their major issues is a sizing issue, the customer doesn’t necessarily know the right size to purchase. This is something that right now has to be resolved by reaching out to them after the fact or perhaps through some like listing, you know, as much a listing optimization as you can possibly do but still, customers might miss that information and they might make the wrong purchase this is a great example of the type of interaction that you can help prevent now in the future if this feature becomes available because you’re there to answer those questions. You’re there to help them make an informed decision before they even purchase.
[Tygh]: Amazon Brand Messaging, this is an open ongoing topic. I’m sure we’ll learn more in the future whether or not this program starts to roll out to sellers that have gone through the Brand Registry process but will be one of the first ones to let you know because it’s such a compelling and important topic for what we do on a day-to-day basis. So if you have any information about Amazon Brand Messaging, if you’re participating in the pilot program, if you have more thoughts to share, send those to keepsmiling@sellersmile.com, we’d love to know what you found out and what you’ve learned so far.
[Michael]: only time will tell but this is a very exciting update to say the least.
[Tygh]: To find the show notes which include links to the articles and resources we discussed today, go to sellersmile.com/020. If you have your own e-commerce customer service question, submit that to keepsmiling@sellersmile.com, and we might include it on a future episode. If you liked the show, if it’s bringing you value, hit subscribe and you’ll get the next episode straight to your device. Thanks again. and keep smiling! [Music]
