If you don’t innovate as an eCommerce business, chances are you’ll be outperformed by competitors. Indeed, one of the most fundamental lessons in this field is that businesses should be innovative to stay ahead of the trend. Since customer needs and preferences are constantly evolving, a failure to keep up with them means fewer orders and flagging consumer interest.
There’s a lot going on in the world of eCommerce platforms that you should pay attention to, but in this article, let’s talk about chatbots in eCommerce - an innovation that has been helping businesses to achieve one tremendously important goal:
Meeting customers when and where it matters to them.
Simply explained, chatbots are apps that pretend to be humans by mimicking our conversational qualities. Their outstanding ability to mimic human online behavior makes them a valuable addition to customer service in eCommerce and allows to open a new, engaging channel for selling products online.
In fact, the global chatbot market is projected to reach $1.25 billion by 2025, which supports the claim that more and more businesses are investing in them.
If you’re looking to open this channel for your business, too, then you definitely want to know what makes chatbots in eCommerce such a desirable addition.
Why Chatbots in eCommerce?
1. Improved Personalization
Regardless of the market niche your business is operating in, it’s safe to claim that your customers want personalized services. With online shopping being so popular, eCommerce businesses need to be trusted advisors to their customers to improve their experience and keep them from leaving off to competitors.
Personalization of customer experience with an eCommerce business has become a strategy for achieving this goal, and people love it. What’s more, 63 percent of online shoppers expect personalization as a standard of service and are willing to pay more for personalized services.
On top of that, personalization (source: Business Insider):
- Leads to increase customer loyalty resulting from personalized experiences.
- Increases sales; one survey found that 49 percent of online shoppers report purchasing a product after receiving a personalized recommendation.
- Decreases product returns on impulse buys, as only 5 percent of consumers who bought something from a personalized marketing message said they wanted to return it.
The ability of eCommerce chatbots to deliver personal experiences is one of the main reasons for strong interest from businesses. In fact, many industry experts think that they’ll be able to finally breach the gap of personalization that customers experience in online shopping.
But how exactly chatbots can do that? Here’s how.
- As soon as someone subscribes to your chatbot, you gain access to their information such as timezone, language, gender, name, and profile information.
- A chatbot is essentially a digital personal assistant that displays information based on the input of the customer.
- By analyzing interactions between chatbots and customers, you’ll be able to discover their product preferences, common questions, etc.
As a result, you can personalize your website based on these variables, sending customers to different flows. For example, you can show a customer a menu based on their interactions to engage them.
2. Faster Customer Service
This is one of the most important promises of chatbots for eCommerce. The traditional online shopping experience has a lot of problems they can help with solving; for example, many consumers report about problems like hard-to-navigate websites, a lack of answers for common customer support queries, long waits, and others.
In fact, here’s what businesses expect to get from chatbots in eCommerce, according to this report from Drift.
Credit: 2018 State of Chatbots report
While chatbots aren’t exactly suited to handle every single customer support request, they can work very well in a number of important use cases, including:
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Help with responding to a high volume of requests. By engaging new customers with chatbots, you’re giving human support agents more time.
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Providing answers to basic customer support questions.You can teach your chatbot to give answers to the most common service questions your team gets. For example, with the chatbot of Argomall, customers can track their items, view promotional offers, make orders, check out the availability of products, and more.
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Directing customers to appropriate support agents.By providing specific menu options for customers, eCommerce chatbots can define the problems they’re having and lead them to support agents who can start working on the problem without spending time on finding out what the issue is.
To ensure that a chatbot has the best chance to help customers, the answers it generates should be relevant and clear. That’s why companies often look for professional help with writing chatbot scripts, with online writing tools like Best Essay Education, Grammarly, and Grab My Essay being a typical choice.
For example, Sephora’s chatbot collects the following information from customers before connecting them with a human support agent:
- The question they need help with
- Order number (if applicable)
- Email address for quick identification of the customer
As a result, the human support team member won’t have to ask for these details again, so they should be able to serve more people.
3. Product and Purchase Recommendations
“Ecommerce chatbots are a great way to help customers find the right product for them as well as let them know about sales and promotional offers,” says Brooklyn Dawson, a digital marketing expert from Studicus. “For example, you can make your product provide customers with product categories and ask them questions to define a product they might buy.”
This is exactly what Best Buy’s chatbot does: it helps to define a device category, price range, manufacturer, and then redirects a customer to the website with all customized results.
This process takes less than a minute and it much more engaging than navigating complex website menus with countless options. Besides, as mentioned above, customers appreciate personalized recommendations, so you can use this way to improve engagement and drive sales.
4. Content Marketing
A chatbot can also help to keep your business on the top of your customers’ minds by supplying them with relevant content, including:
- Latest product guides
- Sales announcements
- Promotional offer announcements
- Latest blog articles
Let’s consider a couple of examples. The chatbot of Booking.com, for example, sends trip recommendations based on the user’s past search history.
This serves as a relevant and personalized recommendation, as the chatbot extends the engagement with the company beyond booking hotels.
Next, the chatbot of Jeff Bullas, a digital marketing expert, supplies the subscribers - mostly marketers - with original, helpful industry-related content they can use in their work.
To attract the attention of readers, the chatbot supports every content piece with statistics, which is a good technique to convince more people to download.
The Future of Chatbots in eCommerce is Bright
With so many businesses investing in eCommerce chatbots, it’s clear that they will ultimately become a must. Whether it’s providing immediate customer support or helping a client with choosing a product, these digital assistants can benefit your business from day one.
Also, remember that you can develop your own chatbot with a visual building platform and personalize it as much as possible to reflect your brand’s image and communication style. Although this certainly requires investments, keep in mind that a chatbot can help you to meet your customers when it matters to them, which is priceless for any online business.
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