Chatbots in times of pandemic
The e-commerce revolution
Currently, with the coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, people’s lives have been transformed in many ways: how they relate, now at a distance via videoconference; how they behave, mostly isolated in their homes and using masks and hand sanitizers when they go out on the street; and how they shop, mainly via e-commerce due to restrictions on operating businesses in many cities. This scenario posed a major challenge for merchants, especially local and small businesses: How to sell your products and services without having direct contact with the consumer?
Many businesses do not have web pages to commercialize their products or services and, even those that do, may not update them frequently or the pages are not known by their consumers. As an alternative, most businesses started to respond to clients demands via conversational channels, such as WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat (ABC) and Google Rich Communication Services (RCS), further leveraging the new electronic means of commerce, also known as Conversational Commerces. However, as the number of consumers increases, the number of attendants tends not to increase at the same pace, which can result in significant delays in service, less specific and personalized responses, incorrect notes, and other factors that can culminate in a bad consumer experience.
In order to address scalability problems, attendance to hundreds of consumers simultaneously, availability, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week support if necessary, chatbots have been developed to work with consumers during their conversational commerce purchases, where they are able to generate requests, clarify frequently asked questions (FAQ), recommend products or services and refer users to human service if they wish (or when the chatbot finds it difficult to respond properly to the user). However, as it is possible to find in explanations around the internet, there are several ways to build a chatbot, from that ones based on predefined rules or flows, similar to IVR attendance (Interactive Voice Response), to others based on deep learning models, capable of understand the messages from users — Natural Language Understanding (NLU) — and generate responses — Natural Language Generation (NLG) — in real time. There is still no consensus on which approach is the most suitable for building chatbots for conversational commerce, however.
Therefore, we decided to review how chatbots are being used in the Brazilian market. For this, we conducted a survey to identify which sectors of Brazilian commerce already use chatbots and what are their “skills”, for example: is a chatbot only able to follow a well-defined conversation flow, or is it able to interact freely with it? We take the opportunity to present a successful case that we, at WAVY Global, developed and are already in operation in the market, helping our client to boost their sales, even in times of pandemic. In our next article, we will present more details on how we build chatbots.
Chatbots in the Brazilian market
Major retailers are pioneers in the use of chatbots in Brazilian e-commerce, mainly in customer service support, in the automation of the sales process, among others. For example, since 2016 Casas Bahia, big retailer in Brazil, has integrated the chatbot called “Baianinho” into its Facebook Messenger, in order to carry out marketing actions on key dates for sales, such as: consumer day, Christmas and Black Friday. As a result, during the 2019 Black Friday period, the chatbot supported traffic exceeding 39 million messages with consumers, in addition to increasing the retailer’s sales volume by about 25% in that period. Magazine Luiza is another example of a large retailer that has also used chatbots to leverage its e-commerce. “Lu”, as the chatbot is called, has several features to assist consumers, such as tracking order delivery, generating a second copy of bills and electronic invoices (NFe) and providing order status information.
Similarly, other sectors were also investing in the use of chatbots even before the pandemic. For example, in the financial sector, Banco Itaú, a brazilian bank, counts on “Paula”, a chatbot responsible for analyzing the profile of candidates for job openings offered by the bank, in addition to providing information to candidates about the day-to-day and culture, in a friendly way. In food market, iFood, a FoodTech Company, together with Wavy, recently used chatbots to sell gift cards, called “iFood Cards”, through the Apple Business Chat (ABC) messaging application. There are also several examples of chatbots in the areas of health, entertainment, logistics and other sectors, which show a clear trend that chatbots are already a reality for large companies. However, in all of the aforementioned cases, chatbots perform specific tasks on proprietary channels, such as the company’s App, or on just one communication channel, Facebook Messenger or ABC. In addition, there were few examples of small businesses using chatbots to help them before the pandemic.
This scenario has recently changed, driven by restrictions on the opening of businesses due to the pandemic, it is becoming increasingly common to find local businesses using conversational channels to sell their products and services. Undoubtedly, the food sector has been a pioneer in the use of this technology among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Brazil. As recently published on the TI Inside, Fazenda Cubo, a vertical urban farm located in São Paulo — SP, uses chatbots to sell its products and answer customers’ questions via WhatsApp, in a scalable and efficient way. In this solution, the consumer can freely interact with the chatbot to have a complete shopping experience without the need for human service. However, if the consumer wishes, they can be redirected to human service at any point in the flow.
In addition to Wavy Global, other players have also developed solutions with chatbots for conversational commerce, more specifically, aimed at the food sector.
Conclusion
Despite being a new market and still having a lot to evolve, conversational commerce has proved to be a good alternative to leverage SMB sales, helping to overcome the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. Although the food industry is predominant in this new medium of electronic commerce, it is expected that in the near future more segments will also adhere to this new trend, since conversational commerce uses means of communication already known to consumers, like WhatsApp, ABC, Facebook Messenger, etc., without the need to install new apps, which can be a restrictive factor for the engagement of new users. In addition, conversational commerce chatbots are increasingly “off-the-shelf software”, making it more affordable for merchants to purchase such solutions and also making it faster and simpler to implement them.
by Frances Santos and Kelly Lopes
