Conversational Commerce & Bots

Back in 2011, just like Gartner predicted; ‘By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.’, today’s world is leading to a new era of communication: Conversational Commerce.
When brands and businesses started to use AI infused technology to engage with consumers in a conversational manner, the concept Conversational Commerce have rose. While bots were just designed to automate and complete specific tasks, today, bots have evolved to a level where they learn, process and simulate within conversations.
With this advancement in bots and AI infused technology, interactions among human and technology have became more conversational, natural and personalized.
In such environment, it is the exact right time for businesses to think about how to incorporate bots into their customer care services and digital strategies.
If you are ready to enter the trend, here are some tips for getting started with bots:
“1. Plan. Set goals and expectations for what your bot can do. Focus on interactions that mean the most to your customers. (It’s not about you!)
2. Start simple. Focus on building a bot that works amazingly and will delight your customers. Keep it simple at first. If you plan to make it complex, consider releasing new features in stages so as not to overwhelm your customers. Integrate the features into the flow of the conversation where they make sense.
3. Develop your bot. Choose a frame, like the Microsoft bot framework, that can help you scale across channels. Don’t try to launch across every channel at first. Take a “test and learn” approach, and stagger your rollout across features and channels.
4. Monitor bots closely. Mistakes are inevitable. Learn from them and fix any identified errors/mistakes often and quickly.
- Examine it: What questions did people ask that the bot wasn’t able to answer?
- Teach it: What words does the bot not understand? Does it not get that veggie is another term for vegetarian?
- Humanize it: Does the tone of your brand shine through? Make the experiences more engaging.
Ask your customers for feedback, especially early on. Give your customers the option at the end of the session to participate to help make the bot better! Learn from customer interactions and feedback to generate smarter, more personalized interactions.
- Rinse & repeat. Iterate and adapt your bot regularly to make it even better and keep customers coming back for more.’’
(source: https://martechtoday.com/introduction-conversational-commerce-bots-199920)
As I have mentioned above, the world has entered a new era of new communication and interaction tools. Now, bots can give you a more hands on analysis on your customers’ personalized experiences and emotions which can lead to a much stronger bond and interaction among you and your customers.
