As an entrepreneur, time is your most valuable resource, especially when you’re in a highly competitive market. Shopify is now helping businesses maximize their time with a new app that manages customer conversations across multiple messaging platforms.
The company recently rolled out ‘Ping,’ for iOS devices. The standalone app can streamline customer interactions from SMS, Facebook Messenger, or a company website.
Shopify is putting more focus on mobile solutions for businesses as half of its estimated 600,000 retailers are already using its mobile application. Most of these merchants currently use the shopping platform to process their business needs and handle their payment system.
Communicating with Ping
The Ping app will enable retailers to communicate directly with clients and respond quickly to their requests. All conversations a company has with their clients on any messaging app can be accessed using Ping.
The fast response time is a great way to assist companies in delivering excellent customer service and building better relationships with clients.
Shopify explained in its blog that the company developed Ping as another means for online merchants to run their company. With the app, retailers “can spend less time shuffling between separate tools” and spend more time on essential things like serving clients and expanding their business.
What Can Kit Do
Ping comes with a built-in virtual assistant dubbed Kit. This little helper can help you conceptualize, develop, launch, and manage your marketing plans. Shopify explained that Kit is designed to run your Instagram and Facebook ads, manage your email marketing campaign, retarget clients, and more depending on the information collected from customer messages.
Kit can also implement complicated workflows, like touching up product images and searching for new products to expand your inventory.
The marketing bot was purchased by Shopify in 2016 and an upgraded Kit Skills API is slated to be released later this year. Some improvements expected to be introduced is a natural language processing system that will provide business owners with more insights and the capacity to represent their company in a chat environment. The built-in assistant will be able to respond to frequently asked questions and shipping inquiries. Of course, there will still be instances when human intervention is needed, like when dealing with a large order from a client.
The Ping app and Kit will also be able to do other AI processes like flag conversations that could lead to big deals or alert the owner of a customer complaint regarding an order.
Retailers big and small can now download Ping for free on iOS. However, it’s not clear just when the app will become available to Android users.