Customer engagement is the starting point for any interaction between a shopper and one of Needle's advocate. For this reason, a primary goal for us at Needle is to find new innovative ways to connect customers to advocates.
Currently, Needle's primary means for starting a conversation with an "advocate" is through chat. While effective in it's own ways, chat has a notorious reputation online for resulting in a poor customer experience. This was only confirmed through our own set of in-house customer observations. Fortunately, where there are problems, opportunity for improvement also exists.
The "Instant Answers" project was an exploration into new ways to increase customer engagement. Rather than a full chat, Instant Answers gave customers the opportunity to read answers to questions previously submitted by other customers. If it was a new question, the customer would be put directly in touch with an advocate for a quick live answer.
