
With the fast-changing technology, companies are also changing the way of doing business to stay competitive in their industry. The way online shoppers communicate with brands is also changing rapidly. The expectations of the shoppers are getting higher and higher.
This is where conversational commerce comes in and literally changing the way of online shopping. It offers seamless communication between the shoppers and the brand. The use of digital messaging service and voice assistants is getting more widespread these days.
What is conversational commerce?
Conversational commerce is an automated technology that empowers online shoppers and brands to interact with each other through voice assistants, messaging, or chats. Chatting with a virtual assistant provides the personalisation that you may not find in traditional online shopping.
It uses natural language to interact with online shoppers during their purchase journey by offering them a personalised recommendation and help which establishing a long-term relationship with the shoppers. It’s a way businesses offer its customers personalised and convenient service.
How does conversational commerce work?
Along with voice assistants and messaging apps, conversational commerce includes various communication touchpoints such as email, social media, survey, feedback and so on. It works the same as the best opt-ins by knowing the customers, how they spend while shopping, and through constant review and analysis of the website’s analytics.
The introduction of chatbots and artificial intelligence into conversational commerce lets you implement this technology on a wider scale.
How to get started with conversational commerce?
It’s important to have an omnipresent approach if you want your brand to scale conversational commerce. You can start with by using a chatbot where your customers spend most of their time. Your company’s website is the first place where you can implement a chatbot and go further by implementing on different messaging apps such as Whatsapp, Messenger, and Facebook depending on your geography and industry. The customers not just interact with the brand but they are able to converse in real-time.
Benefits of conversational commerce
• Create a positive user experience
You can create a positive user experience with conversational commerce by generating goodwill between your brand and customers. By providing a seamless shopping experience and adding a personal touch can help in generating positive user experience.
• Prevents shopping cart abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment is one such thing that businesses face while running an online store. This is often attributed to the poor user interface, complex checkout process, difficulty in website navigation, return policies, and so on. This is where sales chatbot comes to rescue by reducing friction and offer an intuitive and smooth shopping experience. Whenever shoppers find difficulty during the shopping process, they can get instant answers to their queries and complete the shopping process.
• Time and cost effective
Chatbots are both time and cost effective as a single chatbot can handle a large number of interactions at a single time and keep running 24*7. No doubt, human support can offer support 24*7, the cost associated with gets much higher. Though chatbots are not going to replace humans totally, implementing it into your marketing and servicing strategies can enhance the effectiveness of the marketing and other efforts.
• Helps in lead generation
Conversational commerce can be used for lead generation. With complete, better information about your potential customers, creating targeted marketing campaigns become much easier. You can include high converting personalisation techniques such as name of the lead, location or product recommendation based on the lead’s interest.
• Recover an abandonment shopping cart
When customers fail to checkout, whatever be the reason, chatbots send messages and cart reminders to the customers to attract them to complete the shopping process. Chatbots can ask them the reason behind cart abandonment which helps to provide personalised incentive to lure them. Though many businesses use promotional emails to recover abandoned shopping carts, the open rate is usually low and not always timely.
• Send shipping notification
Every customer enjoy the moment when they receive the shipping notification. By sending the notification along with link, it gives customers the opportunity to view their orders and track it when they want to see the location of their orders.
• Ask for product reviews
Product reviews are important social proof that gets you more traffic and conversions. You can use conversational commerce to ask your customers for feedbacks, product reviews or things that can be answered easily.