Chatbots and Ecommerce: What makes a chatbot useful?
Chatbots are on the rise. In 2018, more and more businesses are finding innovative uses for these clever little machines. Here at PixelBeard, we have recently centred a lot of our thinking around the uses of chatbots, and more importantly, their tangibility within the ecommerce space.
Chatbots come in all shapes and sizes, everything from sharing songs via the Spotify messenger chatbot, through to The Wall Street Journal's implementation of chatbots to keep you updated on the latest financial and business news.
The whole point of a chatbot is to quickly attain the information you need. Chatbots are useful — if they are available when the user needs them. If, for example a chatbot is inside an app, which is inside of a list, inside of a menu — it defeats the purpose of having that immediate accessibility to information. Think of Siri, Siri is useful for aiding basic tasks because it is always available for setting reminders, checking the weather, getting the latest updates on live sporting events, or even…checking Will Smith's age. Don’t ask.
As I mentioned above, we have been doing a lot of thinking lately surrounding the usability of chatbots within e-commerce. This thinking has allowed us to investigate the capabilities of what the latest machine learning and chatbot systems are capable of. Part of our study work was to understand how we could make chatbots more of an integral part of the e-commerce experience. The chatbot has to feel part of the user’s experience — and on mobile whereby the screen real estate is already limited — this has to be implemented in a clever way to ensure maximum impact.
Why use chatbots in e-commerce?
E-commerce is a multi-headed beast, it caveats many different user types, and expectations. There are the: “I know what I want” in and out kind of shoppers, and there are the: “I just want to browse the whole store twice in case I missed something” shoppers. I’m confident you know which you are. Chatbots have the power to serve all, and not just serve, but to truly enrich the shopping experience. Machine learning is a powerful tool, and with machine learning, we are able to take a wealth of customer browsing data, and create clever (and more importantly) useful results for users.
E-commerce is becoming more mobile-focused by the day. And with this, more and more consumers are living in the fast-moving economy where no result is quick enough.
Now, we’re not here to give all our secrets away — however, this is a field that we can see becoming more and more prevalent within the overall e-commerce (and offline) retail ecosystem. As brands understand what data they have to utilise, chatbot technology has the space to become more and more intelligent with the ability to work alongside the user for maximum impact whether that be revenue increases or better engagement metrics.
Are you interested in hearing more about our thinking surrounding chatbots? Drop us a line: Helloworld@pixelbeard.co
