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October 31 2019
In today’s digital world, most people stay connected to the internet twenty hours a day, seven days a week. As a result, a vast majority of your potential customers are likely to find your business online rather than visiting your store physically. This has triggered more digital traffic and more people engaging with your business over the web. Therefore, the best way forward is to tap into the digital space by reaching out, talking to customers, knowing about their preferences, and making personalized product recommendations based on those preferences.
Well, this brings us to conversational AI-driven virtual assistants, more commonly known as chatbots. Online shopping cannot get more specific and personalized than by deploying a chatbot for your e-commerce business. Yes, because chatbots can converse with humans, acquire information, understand problems, find answers, provide suitable suggestions, and whatnot—all while being operational all day long.
Before proceeding further, there is a related read—A Comparative Analysis of Chatbot APIS—for you to understand what it takes to build a chatbot and how it works.
Disrupting the e-commerce
Chatbots have been all the rage in recent years, with all industries realizing their potential to interact with digital customers. E-commerce is no exception. With chatbots, the e-commerce industry is now in a position to go a step further in becoming a more conversational as well as hyper-personalized business by leveraging real-time data and artificial intelligence. With the opening of hundreds of e-commerce sites every day, the industry is already experiencing tough competition, especially when it comes to generating leads, increasing sales revenue, and providing excellent customer service. But the role of chatbot technology in e-commerce success seems pretty inevitable in the future. Keep reading to discover a few ways chatbots are able to shape the e-commerce shopping experience!
- Upselling and cross-selling: The AI-driven chatbots are great for letting customers know about the latest collections and exclusive deals happening at your site. The chatbot technology uses the shoppers’ personal preferences, order history, and social media activity to discover and inform them about relevant new stock and relevant offers. By making use of upselling and cross-selling techniques, chatbots are the next big thing in product recommendation, thus attracting more customers and generating more sales.
- Personalization: As per statistical data, companies that provide their customers with an increased level of personalization are likely to outperform their competitive brands by 15-20%. This increased personalization for e-commerce can be achieved through modern chatbots because of their ability to read and understand customer responses and analyze the users’ browser histories and past purchasing behaviors.
- Ordering and payments: Complex checkout processes can be quite cumbersome for many customers, making them abandon carts without completing sales. Chatbots carry that power for smoother order processing and checkouts for buyers. With chatbots, one can even make purchases with Facebook Messenger. A good example is the American online floral retailer 1-800-Flowers, which utilizes chatbot technology for Messenger to make the ordering and payment processes efficient and pain-free.
- Customer service: Professional, super-friendly customer service is one of the most important factors that distinguishes a company from its competitors.The modern customer dislikes waiting and expects consistent availability of excellent customer service.This much responsiveness is easy with chatbots. They provide immediate support all around the clock with rapid responses and accurate answers—and that could be in different languages based on the user’s browser settings. Chatbots also have the capacity to answer an unlimited number of queries daily (a good thing for large businesses with a broad assortment of products). They also save your business a lot of time.
Wrapping up…
Chatbots are clearly the future of the e-commerce industry. The chatbot technology not only transforms the online ordering process but is also helpful to increase customer engagement, improve sales, and attract and retain customers. When you are running a bot-powered e-commerce store, you will be able to handle multiple customers and respond to their queries at once. It will help you reduce the CS staff as a large number of queries will now be automatically resolved by the bots.
If your business still hasn’t embraced chatbots, now is the time to employ this technology and stay ahead of your competitors. You don’t need to look around to find a bot developer for you! Simply contact us, and we can help with the best-in-class Ecommerce custom development and solutions
