Five Ways a Chatbot can boost your E-Commerce Business
The e-commerce market has changed the way business is transacted, whether in retail or business-to-business, nationally or Internationally.
Prior to the Internet, success in retail was said to hinge on location. Now, the Internet is a global marketplace, affording even the smallest retailer a national — if not an international — presence.
This presents a different kind of challenges, the challenges of success, scaling up, meaning retailers might reach to a “breaking point”, where they are unable to keep up with incoming orders, constantly changing inventory levels, customer support, etc .. and while hiring more people isn’t always a valid option or a solution to this challenge, the need for Automation tools emerges to help retailers succeed; by saving time, money, and human effort.
On the other hand, customers are becoming more demanding, not just in the way they choose to buy, but also in the ways they wish to communicate with businesses, many traditional online experiences simply aren’t capable enough. The advances in conversational AI and the development of AI Chatbots allowed for the emergence of a new field, the field of Conversational Customer Experience, and Conversational Process Automation.
Chatbots have a huge impact on the ways businesses engage their customers. Powered by natural language processing, machine learning, and Process Automation capabilities, are able to perform all sorts of tasks that help businesses better serve their customers. 24/7 availability, offering detailed and personalized customer service, and can easily manage huge volumes of clients in multiple languages.
So what exactly can they do?
In this article, we will be discussing the 5 ways a Chatbot can boost your e-commerce business.
1- Enhancing Customer Service
Customer service is the main reason that makes consumers return to an online store or not.
Today consumers are determined and savvy, they will spend lots of time researching products online, reading reviews, and comparing prices in order to get the best deal possible. According to Statista:
“Around 42% of U.S. consumers had searched and purchased products or services online, while 14% prefer searching online and buying in store.”
A customized service that caters consumers needs, provides recommendations and suggestions, the same way a traditional knowledgeable Salesperson would (if only a Salesperson was able to learn an infinite amount of information and process them in milliseconds!), and that’s what a Chatbot can do!
Enhancing your customer service with Chatbots guarantees an upgrade of quality in customer service. A Chatbot can engage website users and answer all their questions throughout the different stages in the customer journey, recommending different products to customers, encouraging customers to make a purchase, answering questions regarding products, shipping, and delivery.
2 — Reducing Abandonment
Customer abandonment is one of the major challenges in the e-commerce industry, Abandonment is an e-commerce term used to describe a visitor on a web page who leaves that page before completing the desired action. Examples of abandonment include shopping cart abandonment, referring to visitors who add items to their online shopping cart, but exit without completing the purchase. Statistics form Baymard Institute report cart abandonment rate of up to 81.40%, which costs e-marketers up to 4 trillion dollars per year.
On the bright side, Chatbots are able to understand consumer behavior, initiate a conversation based on consumers intents, help provide the consumer with answers to his questions without having to leave the page or the cart and look for shipping info or return policy, recommend different products, and potentially help the consumer finalize the transaction.
3- Improving your marketing
A Chatbot can be your next Marketer! While many consumers might ignore your promotional Ads or site popups, botique.ai statistics has shown that almost 83.1% of consumers opted in for notifications from a botique.ai powered Chatbot about new products and updates after a successful engagement with the Chatbot on a Website or Social Media. botique.ai Content Recommendation engines learn customer’s interest, needs, and likings based on information from the conversation and historical data, and provide customized recommendations for content or “products” tailored upon the customer’s needs.
4- Omni-Channel and Conversational
Customers must be able to communicate with the brand or business 24/7, and as phones aren’t used to make phone calls anymore, millennials grew up with the gradual introduction of instant messaging, texting, email, and other forms of written communication. Thus being able to provide a text base conversational channel is vital to any business as people around the world are now connecting to chat apps not only to chat with friends but also to connect with brands, search for different services or products and watch video content.
And while many brands already provide engagement and support tools over different Social Channels, an Omni-channel will surely help any e-commerce business cut cost and effort by being able to engage customers over different channels from social media, to SMS, Email, or other conversational apps and platforms, thus reducing the hassle of managing different Platforms.
Chatbots will definitely do a lot for your e-commerce website by being omnipresent and conversational.
5- Increase Effectiveness and lower cost
Chatbots create direct lines of communication with multiple potential and existing customers at the same time. A Chatbot will help to Collect Leads, Recommend products, Retrieve and update account and payment information, answer frequently asked questions regarding products, services, billing, shipping, etc .. in addition to reducing response time and first call resolution times. Thus increasing your businesses effectiveness, and reducing costs.
According to a Business Insider report on the B2C Customer Experience:
- 69% of consumers would use a chatbot before engaging with a human, as consumers would prefer to receive an immediate answer.
- 43% percent of consumers said they perceive companies that use chatbots as innovative. Moreover, 21% of respondents noted the chatbot they engaged with was fun to talk to.
- Over a fifth of respondents would consider buying products and services through an interaction with a chatbot, and these respondents are willing to spend $410 on average.
If you’re in the field of e-commerce, Don’t waste more of your business time and money, contact botique.ai team for more info!
