SINGAPORE – Emplifi, the leading unified customer experience platform, today announced the launch of Emplifi Social Commerce Cloud, offering industry-first social commerce capabilities for CMOs, eCommerce leaders and social media teams charged with driving high conversion rates and increased revenue across social platforms. The innovative, first of its kind platform delivers a full suite of solutions to enable the social shopping experience by synchronizing social commerce activities across platforms, providing automated and live assistance during the shopping experience, and giving brands a single, holistic view of their social commerce efforts, along with advanced analytics.
Online retail in Asia Pacific is forecasted to reach US$2.8 trillion by 2025, an increase from US$1.7 trillion last year, according to Forrester. A report by Facebook and Bain & Co found that social media topped as the key channels for discovery (37%), influence (31%) and research (26%) for brand consideration in Southeast Asia. The report also notes that ecommerce marketplaces (32%) and social commerce sites (21%) will make up at least half of online purchases in 2021. The region will be home to 380 million online shoppers by 2026.
To help brands remain competitive across the social commerce landscape and maximize their ecommerce tactics, Emplifi Social Commerce Cloud contains a full range of social commerce tools, including:
- Shop Sync™ — By allowing brands to easily orchestrate, integrate, and synchronize activities across all social shops, Shop Sync™ enables ecommerce teams to provide an omni-shop synchronization across social platforms without relying on heavy IT involvement. The easy API integration with Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops eliminates any long and laborious tech efforts, helping brands rapidly scale online shopping experiences. Shop Sync™ also tracks inventory across all social shops so that ecommerce and product managers gain a full view of product availability and performance across all platforms.
- Shop Clerk™ — Emplifi’s AI-powered Shop Clerk™ bot delivers a first of its kind personalized shopping experience through sophisticated conversational commerce capabilities, guiding shoppers from discovery to purchase. The intelligent bot can answer product questions, complete transactions, offer in-store pick-up information, recommend additional product add-ons, seamlessly hand over to care agents and deliver quick surveys via Emplifi’s Natural Language Processing and proprietary Intent Engine abilities that go far beyond the standard, limited Bot FAQ offerings.
- Shop 360 Analytics™ — Based on input from early adopter customers, 360 Shop Dashboard™ was designed to offer the industry’s most comprehensive view of product performance and inventory status across all social media shops. The intuitive UI makes it easy to access valuable insights and advanced social commerce analytics.
- Social Care – Seamlessly integrated alongside other customer support tools like Emplifi Agent and Emplifi Bot, Emplfi’s Social Care is the consumer engagement tool that brings together marketing and operations to help service customers, while measuring the success of their entire customer journey.
“Social commerce is the next frontier for cutting-edge B2C brands that wish to connect, convert and monetize today’s shoppers. Social media shops are rapidly becoming the new shopping malls,” said Emplifi CEO Mark Zablan. “We’re excited to release Emplifi Social Commerce to the market to enable our customers to revolutionize the shopping experience, win unprecedented conversion rates and drive revenue gains.”
“Social Commerce is quickly becoming a significant revenue stream for brands as today’s shoppers increase their reliance on social media as the de-facto platform for communication, entertainment – and now – shopping,” said Alan Webber, VP, Digital Strategy and Customer Experience at IDC. “The opportunity of social commerce as a sales channel can no longer be ignored.”
According to App Annie, US$78 billion is expected to be spent in social apps through 2025 globally. Consumers are expected to spend US$6.78 billion via social apps this year, rising to US$17.7 billion in annual spend in 2025. This growth is driven by livestreaming features such as real-time chats, multi-guest rooms and virtual “gifting”, paving the way for creators to boost engagement within social apps.
In Southeast Asia, social commerce also plays an important role during mega sales events such as 10.10, Singles Day (11.11), Black Friday and 12.12 which are also known as the Golden Quarter Retail period. Emplifi’s Southeast Asia data shows ad spend among brands on Instagram increased 15% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) during Q4 2020 to USD 2,300 per ad account per month. The period was also the most engaging time for ecommerce brands on Instagram last year with over 185,000 interactions.
Emplifi Social Commerce Cloud is the first major platform announcement from Emplifi since the company’s rebranding earlier this year. With the goal of unifying marketing, commerce, and customer care through AI-powered CX solutions, Emplifi was born from the combined technology of the customer experience platform Astute Inc. and the social media marketing platform Socialbakers. For more information, visit Emplifi’s social commerce product page.
