After a very successful year, ContactPigeon concluded 2021 with the only way a multi-award-winning company could: with a brand new feature. The launch of the Samaritan Omnichannel Chat is the latest addition to the company’s customer engagement platform, setting their standards even higher.
With its 360o capabilities, the new feature will bring retailers one step closer to a complete omnichannel experience, combining helpdesk attributes with customer engagement. George Mirotsos, CEO and co-founder of ContactPigeon answered our questions, allowing the readers to get a glimpse of this new addition, and how omnichannel has altered the retail landscape.
How did you come up with the idea of the Samaritan Omnichannel Chat?
It was quite simple actually. Before the pandemic, did you ever go into a physical store to ask if a product was in-store or if that specific t-shirt that caught your eye in the storefront was available in your size? Imagine how abrupt was the post-pandemic transition for all those consumers that used to shop in the physical stores and had these questions. Suddenly they were faced with a significant problem that they had no control over and no solution to. They had to go online and search randomly the website on their own, with no guidance and help.
Due to the overall lockdown for non-essential retail stores, we realized that the market was in dire need of a solution that would remedy that. We wanted to give back control to our clients and restore the sense of normalcy they had lost. Samaritan was the perfect tool that would give retailers and e-shop owners the chance and the ability to fix this communication breakdown between their brands and their customers. The live chat functionality would fill the need of the consumers to converse and consult a retail employee, just as they did when they were shopping at the brick-and-mortar stores.
Why Samaritan?
The name was inspired by The Parable of the Good Samaritan. The famous parable is about a man that was going from Jerusalem to Jericho and came across some robbers that would beat him, strip him and leave him half dead. Passers-by would ignore him and no one would help him until the Good Samaritan saw him, and tended to his wounds with oil and wine.
In peoples’ minds, the name is associated with someone who offers aid and assistance to strangers in times of need, and we thought it would be fitting for our omnichannel chat to be described as such. Our aim was to show that we are aware of the needs of our customers, we acknowledge their problems and we are present. With Samaritan we help our customers help their customers, creating a chain reaction that will make their day-to-day tasks a little easier and more efficient.
How is Samaritan chat different from the competition?
The Samaritan omnichannel chat is defined by the reason it was created and the purpose it was designed to serve. Most of us have associated chat rooms as a means that would allow us to communicate with our friends and family. Not reaching out to a brand and asking for support, or buying something. Samaritan’s purpose is highlighted mainly by its 360o features and its omnichannel philosophy.
It is a chat that was developed in order to support retailers and provide assistance to the visitors of an eCommerce webpage. Customers will now be given specific and personalized help, according to their individual needs and preferences. With Samaritan, the customer support agents will have access to every online transaction, and they will know immediately how they will be able to provide the best possible solution. From the moment the interaction is initiated, up until the final step (the point where the customer rates the agent), the customer service department will have full knowledge of this customer’s entire journey (purchase history, abandoned cart products, pages visited, product recommendations).
Therefore, the quality of the assistance will immediately and automatically be improved, as the customers will be communicating with an experienced member of the customer support team. The agents will have a crystal clear view and understanding of the user and offer them exactly what they need.
So, is this a chat solution specially built for retailers?
Yes, exactly. If you need a chat to reach out to your friends, it’s best you used another application. But Samaritan is a build-in chat designated for retailers who need a platform that will provide the optimal customer experience and address their customers’ inquiries.
Additionally, omnichannel customer engagement is fundamentally embedded in the entirety of the feature. It is not just a helpdesk, developed for the customer support team, it is a sophisticated tool that can further nourish the relationship between each brand and its customers. So if you need a chat that can both provide support to your customers and further encourage them to stay invested in your brand, Samaritan is the perfect mediator for that.
How much time did it take for ContactPigeon to go from ideation to releasing the Samaritan Omnichannel Chat?
From the moment we figured out the kind of struggle our clients were facing because of the pandemic and the quarantine, we knew we had to act on that. Retailers took a massive hit, that was entirely justifiable, but the necessity to take action was adamant nonetheless. Customer service departments could not cope with the volume of inbound phone calls, as they didn’t have either the adequate resources or the staff to help their customers. Whether they were calling just to ask a simple question or resolve more complex issues, customers were staying on hold for a long time before they finally got an answer.
And of course, that led to frustration and disgruntled customers. So we thought that the best way to restore that situation would be to develop a product that would allow the customer to contact the e-shop easily, on their own time and without all this hustle. With Samaritan, retailers would not be obligated to hire more people for their call center and the agents would have all the necessary information to truly aid the consumers, not just offer a basic level of service. Therefore, we dedicated the majority of 2021 and our resources to the development of Samaritan, because its launch was really high on our priority list.
What’s the very first feedback from your clients about the omnichannel chat feature since it went live?
They are absolutely thrilled. Our clients recognize the fact that now they have a platform that literally does everything, and they really like this efficiency. The accounts that have activated the feature, have already noticed a big difference in the overall experience that Samaritan provides and their customer care has significantly improved in such a short amount of time.
And we can attest to that since, at the end of each chat conversation, we added a small survey so that the customers can rate the agents and their experience. This provides credible information about customer satisfaction, that can be later used for segments and automations. The agents, slowly but surely, are starting to get higher ratings with each interaction, offering meaningful assistance.
Also, we believe in the power of feedback and we always encourage our clients to speak their minds. They already have a small list of things they would like to be different, and for us, this is a very big personal wager. We aspire to provide the only chat solution that they will ever have to use for the foreseeable future.
What difficulties did you encounter during developing the Samaritan omnichannel chat widget?
I wouldn’t say that we had that many difficulties to overcome in the chat’s development. The team is already accustomed to working with Big Data and with systems that accumulate and process a large amount of information. Yes, of course, for someone that would now start working with these systems, it would be kind of difficult. At times it was even challenging for our team, but I can’t say that we faced issues that we weren’t able to overcome in the end.
Is omnichannel the future?
Omnichannel is not just the future, it is the only future. Anyone that believes that they can work only online or only in brick-and-mortar stores, or even only via phone, would put their eggs in one basket. Suddenly, the physical stores were closed because of the lockdown and retailers had to save their livelihood. Everyone was tested during the pandemic and those that claimed that they would never join eCommerce, eventually had to adapt to the new reality, and they had to do it fast.
Some of them managed to pull through, but unfortunately, a lot of them didn’t make it. And now, instead of learning from their mistakes, some retailers did the exact opposite. They completely went the other way, and made their stores exclusively digital, closing down their physical stores altogether. And this is not good either. The market is an ecosystem that needs both the digital and the physical to co-exist, and that is why omnichannel is the only way forward.
Getting started with Samaritan
Explore Samaritan’s features and find out why investing in an omnichannel customer engagement plan is the best strategy for your brand. Discover the capabilities of a truly customizable helpdesk specially build for retail and eCommerce, that bridges the gap between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
