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As Chris Messina, inventor of the buzzword, and many other brand leaders point out – Conversational commerce is about delivering personalization, simplifying user journeys, and converting visitors into paying customers. As a result, brand leaders are leveraging a variety of conversational interfaces (online messaging, chatbots, virtual assistants, etc.) to deliver an enhanced online shopping experience to customers.
Conversational commerce chatbots effectively simulate the behavior of an in-store sales assistant – engage a customer in conversation, understand their preferences, make relevant product recommendations, and ultimately convince them to make the purchase.
The biggest success for brands is to acquire new customers and expand their customer base over time. Conversational commerce chatbots make that happen by providing instant responses with relevant offers, product recommendations, and guiding customers through their buying journey. This improves the end-user experience by providing the right buying guidance and helps businesses to broaden their reachability and increase conversions.
Now that you have already dipped your toes into conversational commerce chatbots, let’s dive further to explore the impacts and key capabilities of conversational commerce chatbots to drive top-notch customer experience at scale.
5 Disrupting Impacts of Conversational Commerce Chatbots
Let’s read this section to understand how conversational commerce chatbots influence the CX for businesses and how brands leverage the benefit out of it.
1. Reduced Cart Abandonment: Based on 44 different studies containing statistics on e-commerce shopping cart abandonment, it is calculated that an average of 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. Also, 74% of people are likely to switch brands if they find the buying journey too difficult. A conversational commerce chatbot reduces the possibility of abandonment by proactively engaging visitors in a conversation that they may find interesting and guides them to complete the purchase.
2. Increased Conversions: When a prospective customer is browsing your businesses’ e-commerce website, that is where the online conversion process gets ignited. It means it’s time to nurture the visitor and guide him to get the purchase done. A conversational commerce chatbot interacts with online shoppers in a proactive manner and helps convert them into happy satisfied paying customers. The process is personalized by recommending the best products as per their preferences and guiding them throughout their buying journey.
3. Up-selling Opportunities: Businesses offer a wide range of products and services to customers. With all the customer data collected in one place, conversational commerce chatbots can proactively recommend personalized offers and services tailored to each customer. Products suggested by these online sales assistant chatbots based on a customer’s interest and historical purchase trend, increase the up-selling opportunity for businesses.
4. Customer Retention: Customer retention is the process to turn customers into frequent buyers and prevent them from switching to a competitor. As a performance metric, it indicates whether your products and the quality of your service delight your customers or not. With personalized interactions and tailored buying guidance, conversational commerce chatbots prove to be a game-changing technology when it comes to retaining your customers digitally.
5. Cost Savings: The implementation of conversational commerce chatbots will incur some amount of investment. But, this cost is always lower as compared to the expenses made in operations, manpower, infrastructure, and education. Except for the implementation of investment costs, the extra costs of conversational commerce chatbots are quite low. Hence, brands are looking forward to these chatbots as a cost-effective solution for their business.
Key Capabilities of Conversational Commerce Chatbots
• Omnichannel Support: An e-commerce website is a one-stop-shop for customers. However, digital touch-points like Facebook Messenger, live chats, apps, and other messaging channels help to extend your reach to customers. To establish a superior quality online shopping experience, conversational commerce solutions are capable of engaging, nurturing, and converting visitors coming across any of the digital channels.
• Superior NLP Technology: Natural Language Processing (NLP) helps conversational chatbots to understand the intent of the customer queries, making the conversation more human. Conversational e-commerce chatbots are programmed with sophisticated NLP engines to seamlessly auto-detect languages, sentiment, or context of the customer.
• Multilingual Conversation Support: Mostly, customers prefer to communicate with chatbots in their preferred language. In such scenarios, it becomes imperative for e-commerce brands to ensure that their conversational commerce solution supports vernacular languages and can switch dialects based on the user’s utterances.
Given their capabilities, conversational commerce chatbots enable businesses to efficiently implement and scale online sales initiatives without higher investments. Organizations can also leverage them to cater to complex use cases through a variety of customer journeys. Ideally, you should start with primary use cases first, and progress addressing more complex problems. Having said that, we believe that this technological innovation is not just a good-to-have solution, but a necessity for business survival in this digitally evolving e-commerce world.
How Does it Help Businesses?
Conversational Commerce Chatbots help businesses combine the ease and efficiency of online shopping portals with personalized assistance that customers are likely to receive in a brick-and-mortar store. They can prove to play a huge role in improving the customer experience curve by:
➼ Understanding the need and intent of users, their primary concerns, and preferences for products they are looking for.
➼ Recommending the best product options that fit their needs and meet all specific requirements.
➼ Convincing customers to opt for products that have the best reviews on the features/aspects customers are looking for.
➼ Communicating with users about the buying process, offering the best discount options, assisting them with returns and refunds, and many more.
➼ Personalizing the communication platform for customers leveraging e-commerce chatbots to accompany them in their buying journey, interact in the context of historical purchases and act as a virtual guide while customers navigate through the products.
Wrapping Up: Key Takeaways
Building an intelligent conversational commerce chatbot with advanced NLU algorithms strengthens both customer support and acquisition for e-commerce brands. AI-powered chatbot solutions give wings to the CX transformation initiative and improve the overall ROI for your business. The first step is to set clear goals based on the challenges the business is trying to solve, and then finding an appropriate technological solution that requires no technical experiments or coding. Leading brand strategists and experts predict a distinctive emergence of conversational commerce solutions in the e-commerce space that can convert the pain points of businesses today, to their success stories tomorrow.
With increasing adoption, AI chatbots are ushering in the CX transformation required for business sustenance and future growth. This transformation impacts every aspect of the business, including marketing, sales, delivery, and support.
The only question is, where are you in this transformational journey?
