Buying Groups

Inboxes for Buying Groups eCommerce: Complete Guide

September 16, 2022  |  4 min read
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Utilizing Inboxes for Buying Groups

Inboxes for a buying group eCommerce platform are important to the customer and employee experience, though they are often treated as an afterthought. Many businesses will simply use the messaging system as it comes out of the box and alter their workflows to accommodate for a rigid system that doesn't adapt to their needs. They force themselves, and their customers, to work around any failings the messaging system might have.

Buying group eCommerce inboxes that can be modified for your employees' and customers' needs make interactions smoother and easier. This is especially important when people's inboxes are so often swamped with dozens of messages a day from various sources. That's why having a buying group inbox system that can be tailored to your needs can make or break the success of your messaging system.

Let's look at what a smart inbox looks like on a buying group platform, including the adaptability it provides to accommodate the needs of any business model.

How Simple Inboxes Hurt Buying Group Business

Making do with the out-of-the-box inbox is one way to implement a messaging center for your buying group eCommerce platform, but your operations will be less efficient than they would be with an inbox messaging system that can be adjusted to your needs. Here are some common issues companies run into with less-advanced communications channels.

Overwhelmed Inboxes

Overwhelmed Buying Group Inboxes

Your employee’s traditional inbox can get overwhelmed by internal emails, customer emails, personal emails, and spam. Rather than be overwhelmed and have trouble finding the important things, a robust buying groups inbox system is the go-to message center for all things customer-related, doing away with the other distracting messages.

Lack of Alerts

You can’t rely on a customer coming back to your site in order to get an update from their inbox. Customers should get to choose the way that group buying platforms will contact them, whether that’s via email, chat, or text.

inbox alerts
inbox channels

Too Many Channels

A messaging center that’s too simple makes customers bounce back and forth between messaging systems. For instance, a customer might get a quote from your salesperson, then go back to their own email system to get the quote approved. Once that quote is approved, the process is reversed, which means one more step at which messages can get lost. Keeping all messages in one spot makes the process much smoother.

For Your Customers

  • Intuitive Use – Customers have come to expect certain user-friendly elements no matter what kind of inbox they’re dealing with. Inboxes are designed to be intuitive while allowing for customizations, including your company branding.
  • Preferred Alerts – Customers might not think to return to your site for updates unless they receive alerts. You can offer, and your customer can choose from, a variety of methods for alerting the user that they have something in their inbox. They can opt for texts, emails, or on your eCommerce platform.
  • Chosen Frequency – Customers can decide not only how they’re contacted with offers but also how often. Pinging them too often could lead to them becoming annoyed.
  • Unmissable Icons – Whenever a customer returns to your site and goes to their inbox, icons will draw their eye to the messages that they haven’t read yet. They must be obvious without being intrusive.
  • Messaging and Notifications – Messaging (direct communication) and notifications (automated communication) can be broken out for better organization.
  • Multiple Messages, One Inbox – Customers may start messages from any page (asking about a particular product from the product page, starting a return request) but the inbox will become the centralized location where their questions get answered.
  • Messages to Their Coworkers – Customers can send messages to other people in their organization that also have an inbox on your platform. Common examples would be, “Hey, I ordered that box of widgets for you, it should be at your office by Friday,” or “I loaded up the cart on our joint account, could you approve it and hit the order button?”
  • Marketplace Messages – You don’t have to be involved in every message. If your eCommerce framework is a marketplace that hosts sellers, the buyer and seller can message each other without you being a part of the conversation. You can also set up smart alerts to inform you if the buyer and the seller on the marketplace are trying to take their business offline and cut you out.
inbox for employees

For Your Employees

  • Message Hub – Different notification types can be broken out, such as direct messages, RFQs, spam, flagged, etc. Employees can create their own folders to accommodate personnel workflow preferences.
  • Workflows Trigger Notifications – Workflows within your CMR or ERP and the eCommerce platform can send out notifications to employees regarding their next tasks. It can also auto-send messages to customers.
  • Product Assist – When a customer asks a question about the product, details about the product are automatically called up so that the CSA doesn’t have to spend time looking up and researching the product. 

Working With Clarity

At first, buying groups eCommerce inboxes might not sound like a very important or dynamic part of your business. But when you take advantage of their customizability to get them to work with your workflow, you can see just how advantageous they can be.

Clarity has tailored these inboxes for many clients to make them work perfectly with line-of-business software. We’d love to take a look at your business model to see how a customizable inbox could make your job easier, so we’re offering a free discovery process to help you find out. We’ll not only bring technical analysts to the table, but also a business analyst with suggestions on how you make the most of your entire eCommerce platform.

Give us a call or click the demo button below.

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Author
 
Written by Stephen Beer
Stephen Beer is a Content Writer at Clarity Ventures and has written about various tech industries for nearly a decade. He is determined to demystify HIPAA, integration, and eCommerce with easy-to-read, easy-to-understand articles to help businesses make the best decisions.

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