Amazon CRM – How to Master the E-Commerce CRM Strategy?

Amazon is not only the world’s richest company, but it’s also the world’s most customer-oriented company (that’s what they have been striving to achieve from the very beginning). According to numerous polls and studies, Amazon has been ranked as the best and most trusted online shopping platform for customers in North-America. In fact, many programs have ranked Amazon Prime as the best loyalty program.

Developed in-house, Amazon’s CRM software captures customer data at the point of purchase, which it uses to instantly customize its users’ online experience. Amazon’s interface is simple and easy to use.

The essence of Amazon’s success lies with the robust Amazon CRM strategy. Honestly, there’s so much to learn from the Amazon CRM strategy for small eCommerce businesses to see how you gain customers’ trust and build a loyal following around your business.

Folio3 offer robust dynamics and amazon integration service.

Benefits of Amazon CRM Strategy

Below are some of the lessons that small ecommerce businesses can learn from CRM Amazon:

Design the CRM so comprehensively that there is no need for customer service

There’s a famous saying from the CRM Strategist Brent Leary about Amazon CRM, which we believe should be the essence for all ecommerce businesses. According to him, over the course of 17 years that he has spent shopping on Amazon, never once he felt the need of contacting the customer service.

Yes, the beauty of Amazon CRM lies with its comprehensive and customer-oriented approach. It’s a dream CRM that runs seamlessly every time, giving customers a 100% smooth online shopping experience with zero compromises of safe transactions or downtime.

This is why customers become loyal followers of the Amazon marketplace because they no longer need to worry about the quality of the product or having to run after the customer support team to pull off a product purchase.

Create an Interactive User-Interface

Basically, the beauty of Amazon CRM starts with its highly intuitive and easy to use user-interface (UI) that makes using the website a bliss for all online shoppers. The interface is minimal, decluttered, navigable, and easy to understand. Here are some of the elements that make CRM Amazon a winner in all perspective:

• High-quality images (customers can see the actual product)
• Precise description (everything customers would like to know about the product)
• Clearly visible prices
• Bold and visible ratings
• Structured categories
• Easy and clear checkout process

All of these elements make shopping with Amazon much similar to what shopping at the grocery store looks like, in fact with a better shopping experience. Just like with the traditional grocery store, if you need flour, you will get all types and sizes of flour right at the baking aisle. Just pick up one which you want and proceed to checkout. Shopping experience with Amazon is not much different.

Make Self-Help Easy

Apart from a comprehensive user-interface, Amazon also maintained a robust and impressive help center. Whether you want to review your order, manage accounts, check out the FAQs or contact customer support representatives, you can access all pages from a single screen. Also, if you aren’t able to find the right answer for your query, you can always search it down with the search bar.

Interestingly, this doesn’t end here. In fact, all of these help and support resources are just the beginning and there are tons of other useful help resourced available in form of articles, which again you can easily access to find support for whatever you may need. Basically, Amazon CRM takes a similar approach towards the help and support resources, as they take for their product pages. You can search either the complete categories or a specific product.

The benefit of such a vast volume of help and support resources is that customers are able to find all the support they need by themselves and don’t have to waste time waiting in line for the customer service representatives to answer their queries. And since the Amazon maintain such impressive help and support resources, they actually encourage customers to find their answers themselves, thereby, significantly cutting times for those few customers who want live agent’s help.

Provide Human Support

While it’s great to have a large and impressive help and support resources, live agent support is unavoidable. In fact, there are always people who like to talk to a customer representative to find a way out of their queries.

And while Amazon does encourage customers to help themselves with their support resources, they also maintain a robust and imposing customer representative team that can be accessed via phone, email, or live chat.

If you haven’t already tried the Amazon phone support, the best part about their service is that when you decide to get connected with them, they are right there to support you. Yes, no frustrating waiting times. Even better, the help support is available 24/7, so they have your back whenever you need it.

Have you tried the “Mayday for the fire”? it’s surely one of the craziest and coolest innovation from Amazon, where all you have to do is to tap twice to get connected with the live support agent who will guide you through the problem.  

To get things even crazier, Amazon resolved to get customers connected with the live agent within 15seconds and they were able to achieve that under 10 seconds, talk about customer service. While the Mayday was discontinued in 2018, customers who used the service still remember it as an astounding example of Amazon’s resolve towards customer service.

Communicate Challenges

As we are writing this, the world is going through an unprecedented challenge of COVID-19. This is a time where Amazon customers are facing many problems including delayed delivery, stocks going out, delays in the refund, and many more. All of these problems haven’t been experienced before by Amazon customers and while Amazon can’t do anything about this, they have done what they should and could do. They have informed clearly communicated to their customers about the situation and the pressing challenges faced by the company.

The Amazon site runs bold banners warning customers to expect delays and other problems. The company has also published various articles to make aware customers about the situation in depth. All of this to ensure that the customers are aware of the challenges and that they don’t leave disappointed for the shopping experience with Amazon.

Loyalty Incentives

As we mentioned earlier, Amazon Prime is one of the best loyalty programs in the world. And no, it isn’t just us but it’s according to various polls and studies that have ranked Amazon Prime as the best model for a loyalty program. The program comprises crazy amounts of incentives including; discounted and faster delivery, highly customized content (Movies, TV, video games, and more); priority access to Amazon deals and the list just goes on from there.

Customers willing to become part of the Amazon prime are just required to spend USD 120 annually with the company. Honestly, this is as tempting as it can get and that’s one reason why an insane number of people have started to spend more on purchasing from Amazon; just for the motivation of getting into the premier Prime Club. And all of these increased spends give Amazon a chance to recover the cost of incentives offered to the Prime members – a win-win situation for everyone.

Protecting Customers

Last but not least, Amazon protects its customers. Amazon understands the value of protecting its customers against any fraud or ill-intention third-part sellers who can quickly become the black marks for the company. And they set the right examples for the third-party sellers by strictly following the rules themselves.

While it’s rare for Amazon to lack its service standards and when it does rarely happens, they don’t shy away from accepting their mistake and remedying it quickly. For instance, once my order for a computer mouse was sent to the wrong address. When I explained the situation to the Amazon, they simply resend the order with expedited shipping without any questions being asked.

From that day onwards, I have been a loyal customer of Amazon.

Amazon CRM Problems

Ok, the Amazon CRM may be just too good for customers, however, when it comes to third-party sellers, the Amazon and CRM does come with some serious limitations. Below we have come up with some pressing problems with the CRM Amazon:

Low barrier for becoming Amazon Consultant

Many sellers look up to authentic and experienced Amazon consultants to guide them through the process of selling with Amazon. However, unfortunately, there is almost no barrier for claiming to be an Amazon seller consultant. The company doesn’t run any official certification, which means that literally, anyone can stand up to claim as the Amazon Consultant. Thereby, it is important for the sellers to perform the due diligence when looking for an experienced and expert Amazon consultant who can help with the operations and data.

Cross-Border Currency Management

For sellers who are selling their products on Amazon’s international marketplace, it can be too expensive to pay an upward of 3.5% to 4% transaction fee to Amazon to handle the currency exchange. This is especially a problem for sellers offering low-margin products, in which case the fees can become too cumbersome for business sustainability. Fortunately enough, there are some solution providers that can help sellers streamline their process while cutting the cost in half and saving you sizeable margins that you would have lost otherwise. Some of the solution providers that can help sellers around with this issue include:

• Currencies Direct             
• Payoneer           
• Worldfirst

 Automate Messaging

Unless you are ready to sign-in to your seller account 24 hours and every day of the year, there’s always a chance of missing out on a customer’s query within the 24 hour period, which leaves you with compromised customer service; something that isn’t just bad for your business but may also leave you noticeable as a seller for Amazon. And if you don’t want to get stuck at your chair and table every hour of the year, you can use automated messaging tools to help you out. There are various auto messaging tools that can be deployed to send customers’ instant generic responses to at least let them know you are there. These tools actually buy you the time to spend the weekend with your family and get back to customers with a more elaborative response within a couple of business days. Some of the auto messaging tools include:

• Desk.com           
• Freshdesk                         
• Zendesk

Folio3 is your amazon CRM technology partner

Folio3 offers its clients with robust and seamless Amazon CRM integration services. Our integrated CRM integrated approach enables customers to transform the working approach and adopt the best practices. By seamlessly connecting the clients with the Amazon CRM, we help them save time and effort while maximizing productivity.

Over the years, we have completed hundreds of Amazon CRM software integration projects worldwide, offering a single point solution that is customized to your unique business needs.

Best Amazon CRM Software for Sellers in 2020

1. Salesforce

Pricing: starts at $25 for essential package and goes up to $300

Pros:

• A multipurpose E-Commerce CRM Software
• Scalable with the business needs
• Highly customizable with complete automation options
• Powered by artificial intelligence

Cons: 

• Too tough for small businesses not looking to scale in the near future
• To experience the full features of the CRM, you would have to choose a higher plan

2. BigCommerce

Pricing: 

starts at $29 for essential package and goes up to $300 and more

Pros:

• Easy to learn and use
• Speedy operations
• Various options for themes
• Scalable

Cons:

• Expensive to avail some functionalities
• Limits on annual online sales
• Quite similar sales
• Limited typefaces in free themes

3. ChannelAdvisor

Pricing:

$1000 to $12000 and more

Pros 

• Amazing workflow automation
• Multi-channel integration
• Incredible user-interface 

Cons:

 

• Too much expensive (crazy pricing for liking of most businesses)

• Often needs IT support for even small glitches

• Fixed contracts

 

4. Shopify

Pricing:

Starts from free trial version to $25 lite version and goes up to $66 and more for enterprise version

Pros

• Shopify CRM is ranked among the best CRMs for 
• features and customer satisfaction
• Multi-channel platform
• Excellent inventory system to manage store

Cons

• Transaction fee charged, if you are not using Shopify Payments
• Apps add up to the store when extra features are added

5. Amazon

Pricing:

Starts at $0.05 per hour, differ for different regions and fulfillment options

Pros

• Massive customer base
• High credibility 
• Robust back-end infrastructure

Cons

• Expensive fees
• No control over branding
• No customer loyalty