Digital assistant

Ve is a UK-based technology company that offers a platform that accompanies online store users through every step of their onsite journey and converts abandoners into buyers. The wide range of Ve apps help online retailers to reduce their bounce rates, increase customer activity, reduce cart abandonment and therefore increase conversion rates. Ve supports more than 6000 online retailers and businesses in executing their real-time marketing communications at key points within their customers' onsite journeys. Ve works with a purely performance-based commission model. There are no contract terms or set-up costs for store operators. www.veinteractive.com/de

WW: The VeAssist product search assistant is one of the applications that Ve offers to reduce the bounce rate and consequently reduce abandoned purchases. How does it work?
More than one in two customers who have already actively abandoned the purchase by clicking on the back button (landing page), closing the tab or entering a new URL and are therefore actually lost for the store, remain on the page thanks to this solution and continue their search. This in turn is directly reflected in increased customer satisfaction - the customer was able to find what they were looking for after all with the smart tool, the bounce rate is reduced, Google SEM costs fall and the webshop's sales increase sustainably. Precisely because this type of customer interaction only works in the course of an active abandonment and without the use of discounts, we demonstrably stand for two promises: There is no cannibalization of existing traffic, and additional revenue (incremental revenue) is generated.

Why do you think the customer doesn't feel pressured by this service?
To say it up front: The external impact looks very good, as our apps in general and the product search assistant in particular are seen by customers as a clear improvement in the shopping experience. One reason for this is that, thanks to our six years of experience in the area of shopping abandonment, we understand exactly what context the respective abandoner is in and we develop our apps accordingly. This means that if the abandoner is looking for products, they need to be addressed differently than if they abandon for reasons of time pressure or lack of information, for example. Secondly, we take the maturity of the user as a potential customer with whom our apps interact very seriously. This means that the customer is only approached once to offer them assistance, and the customer always has the option of rejecting the help with just one click if they do not wish to do so and want to leave the page immediately.

What other applications are currently available and where are they being used?
The latest apps are the VeAssist product search assistant mentioned above and VeProactive, our smart shopping list. With the latter, customers have the option of sending themselves the products already in their shopping cart as a wish list by email if they abandon their purchase - for example due to a lack of time. This improves their shopping experience by giving them the opportunity to continue shopping at the interrupted point at any time on any device (cross-device change). Furthermore, Ve Interactive has recently made strategic acquisitions in the areas of prospecting and re-targeting, making us - as things stand today - the only platform to offer re-targeting, re-engagement and re-marketing from a single source and on a single platform.

Which Swiss companies does Ve Interactive work with?
We work very closely and successfully with companies such as Conrad.ch and Deindeal.ch. But strategic partners such as TradeDoubler, Affili.net and Adresult are also an integral part of our work in Switzerland.

Where do you see potential for improvement/development for Switzerland in this area?
Switzerland can still catch up with other countries in certain areas of Internet development. This is mainly due to the networks and agencies mentioned above. In principle, e-commerce in Switzerland is on a very good path, and a lot has happened here in the last two to three years in particular. This is also shown by the size of a trade fair such as Swiss Online Marketing or the affiliate conference organized by Adresult.

Where do you think digital customer loyalty will go from here?
Real customer retention or loyalty is difficult to achieve in online business. With the exception of a few cases, it is actually non-existent today. It doesn't matter whether I have an account or am regularly sent newsletters and great offers. The customer is very clever, has understood the mechanisms of the stores and only uses them to his own advantage. One area where you can certainly do a lot, however, is the actual shopping experience as such. The challenge is to combine what is valued in the offline world - service, help, advice, etc. - with the technical advantages of an online store - free delivery, price comparison, a larger selection of sizes, payment on account, etc. - in order to create a better shopping experience. Finding products, interrupting and resuming the purchase process and the actual purchase and payment process must be as simple and convenient as possible. In addition, it is still astonishing how few stores offer truly appealing m-commerce. In many places, there is a lack of cross-device solutions - for example by means of responsive design - for a real alternative to buying products on a tablet or smartphone as opposed to a browser-based purchase.

Do you see further growth for your company?
I am pleased to say that we already saw this many years ago. We are now represented in 17 different countries, in 19 different languages. In Switzerland, too, we always offer our solutions in three languages. Apart from individual things where the many countries on different continents with correspondingly different mentalities naturally differ from one another - such as in China, for example, where addressing customers by SMS is more common than by email or newsletter - the basic needs and challenges for us as a service provider are always the same: Reducing abandonment, increasing sales and offering the end customer the best possible shopping experience.

Interview: Ursina Maurer