Revolutionizing Marketing Automation With Chatbots

Let bots do the talking for you. Chetu Inc.

What we know: more than half of buyers consult with their mobile device before making an in-store purchase.

Consumers have begun to evolve alongside their technology, forcing commerce to become increasingly consumer-centric. Most retailers must now service, an “enlightened buyer,” a buyer pushing back against intrusive advertising and self-serving language, unknowingly ushering in an era of transparent marketing where merchants are forthcoming with product information.

Over the last decade, there has been a momentous push for customer engagement; customers demand an experience on top of everything they have always expected. At this point, the right price and the right product are a commerce baseline, and merchants rise above this baseline by engaging with the consumer through a highly personalized brand interaction.

For retailers, this new standard for commerce has troubling repercussions on ROI. Considering these heightened expectations are not necessarily accompanied by a willingness to spend more money, retailers must increase their expenditures to keep pace with the consumer-centric model without raising their prices. This translates into a dissonance between effort and payoff. This has forced retails to consider cost-effective methods of branding, and one of the technologies they are now leveraging is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Chatbots and Retail AI

Chatbots are an artificial intelligence system configured to respond in real-time to consumers via text or messenger; they are capable of troubleshooting, expressing human emotion, and providing product or topic suggestions. Although bots have been around for years, big data has given them the fuel they need to take retail marketing by storm.

Big data has revolutionized the bot-to-consumer dialogue and provided groundbreaking insights into consumer behavior. There is such a narrow window to captivate a consumer, every moment of brand interaction is paramount to the development of brand loyalty. Each moment must be highly relevant and highly targeted to the individual consumer. By connecting things through microsensors and funneling the data they collect to electronic devices, retailers can brainstorm innovative avenues to instrument the data.

Networking smart shelves and interactive displays allows merchants to syndicate consistency and intimacy. Smart shelves relay product analytics to suppliers and connect with wearables and mobile devices to change according to the consumer in front of them. Yes, IoT automates the supply chain sequence, but it also channels data to chatbots, allowing them to anticipate the behavior of the consumer.

In theory, bot-to-consumer exchange, will decrease the frequency of shopping cart abandonment by walking people through their buying experience and provide recommendations for the consumers based on their in-store and online brand interactions along the way. One of the most compelling aspects of chatbots is their cost, especially when compared to the cost of onboarding permanent human resources. AI Chatbot technology outperforms human capacity, in that chatbots engage with consumers on a level humans simply cannot match.

To interact at a rate comparable to chatbots, merchants would need to hire a whole customer service unit, and even then would experience backlog. Chatbots are programmed to multitask and engage with many customers simultaneously, maintaining a unique dialogue from customer to customer. With the average representative salary at $32,000, bots are an enticing alternative, especially when custom development is less than 50% of the cost and operates 24/7.

AI technology is what retailers need to dominate their brand interaction and utilize the big data collected through unified commerce channels to gain insight, sealing the deal on repeat buys. Retailers can use chatbots as a means of tackling the transparency movement — so for any unanswered questions, consumers consult with chatbots to learn more about the brand and the product at hand.

This approach to commerce is sometimes referred to as “conversational commerce,” and chatbots give conversational commerce an element of control, while still giving consumers the personalization they desire. For retailers, control is a hot commodity. If retailers have total control over how their brand is conveyed, they can manipulate their strategy accordingly, in real-time.

Chetu experts estimate mobile commerce sales will continue to rise in 2018; in other words, there is no shortage of consumers operating from their mobile device and likely to opt into chatbot interaction. The main objective is for consumers to come out of these interactions, more likely to make a purchase. If they are already engaging with a chatbot on a mobile device and the interaction is positive, there is a strong possibility the consumer organically navigates from the chatbot to a mobile commerce platform.

The back end development of chatbots does not quite mirror the simplicity of the front end. Chatbots are designed not just to arrange words into sentences, but also to interpret language and deduce meaning the way a human would.

First, you must narrow in on a chatbot’s main purpose. Will the chatbot have access to inventory to help consumers find the products they are looking for? Will the chatbot provide IT assistance and troubleshooting? Alternatively, will the bot do it all? Higher functionality means higher intelligence, in other words, a more sophisticated code and algorithm. You are essentially building a brain.

If the brain does not have a high enough IQ, it may be an annoyance for consumers, rather than a sales enablement device. For the bot to be intuitive enough to engage productively, the development must undergo error checking, API integrations, and flow optimization, on top of the foundational code.

For retailers or retail software suppliers without an internal development team, there are plenty of options for outsource. To boil it down, without a background in programming and former knowledge of artificial intelligence plus retail, developing a bot in-house is ambitious. Instead, find a developer and have them tailor the chatbot to you, building the code unique to your needs.