Every eCommerce business needs automation to flourish. Whether offline or online, customers expect their shopping needs to be met. That’s where conversational commerce comes into the picture.
Conversational commerce is the new trending way online retailers sell their products by way of social interactions on social platforms. Most conversations are driven by leveraging artificial intelligence powered conversational tools on eCommerce websites, messaging apps, and social media pages. The primary goal of conversational commerce is to deliver a personalised user experience and improved customer service with a smooth and quick purchase journey.
With conversational commerce, consumers can engage through chat with the company’s human agents, AI chatbot, or a mix of both to get customer support, ask questions, get personalised recommendations, read reviews, and make a purchase from messaging apps.
Top 4 ways in which you can implement conversational commerce technologies:
1.Voice AI/voice assistants
A voice assistant is a strong AI tool that is activated by voice commands and can understand users’ natural language and answer users’ questions. Today voice assistants, such as Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana, or Siri, are becoming a popular feature available on most electronic devices. Customers love interacting with them as they are convenient, bring fun, and let them multitask.
With help of machine learning, AI systems, computer science, and natural language processing, the voice assistant can learn about a particular user’s interests and make recommendations that match their earlier choices.
2.Conversational Chatbots
A chatbot is a software tool that provides answers to users’ questions via text messages. Chatbots are powered to chat with multiple users at the same time and provide information within seconds. Its exceptional functionalities have made it a very popular form of conversational commerce even among less tech-savvy customers.
A conversational commerce chatbot can be integrated into your website’s landing page, your mobile applications, or even messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, etc.
3.Live chat
Live chat allows one agent to chat with two, or even three, customers at one time. It is easy to use and lets customers get immediate answers through the retailer’s website, helping brands to reduce the wait time and boost customers’ satisfaction.
Live chat apps have huge eCommerce potential where brands can proactively engage their customers on your website and offer personalised recommendations to help them choose the product. You can integrate the live chat functionality on your brand’s mobile app and website, and social apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook messenger and Instagram.
4. Social Messaging apps
Statistics show that 70% of customers spend two times more with brands they have an emotional connection with.
Social commerce is the way of selling products on neural networks, social media platforms and messaging apps like Messenger or WhatsApp, by exchanging instant messages with user contributions and social interactions. Popular messaging tools allow for using memes, GIFs, videos, and emojis that help boost customer engagement. Statistics show that 70% of emotionally engaged customers spend two times more with brands they have an emotional connection with.
Steps to turn conversations into conversions with conversational commerce
A step-by-step lowdown of where you can meet your customers during each of the five stages of the customer’s purchase journey.
Stage 1: Exploration
In this stage, eCommerce brands can use chatbots/live chat on their website/app to initiate conversations with users who land on your eCommerce platform, wanting to know more about their products or services.
The conversational AI tool lends a hand to casual visitors with the right information about the products to push them down for purchase.
Stage 2: Consideration
The consideration stage is where customers end up comparing your brand’s offerings with that of the competitor. A user compares the quality of your product with others in the market. Here’s where various types of chatbots can help engage with a user at this consideration stage.
Stage 3: Decision
This stage is all about assuring the visitors that they’ve made the right choice. Your conversational commerce tool can help in key decision-making factors like delivery charges, payment methods, estimated delivery time, and return and refund policies.
Stage 4: Retention
The retention stage is all about taking extra care and efforts of retaining your existing loyal customer base. You can send personalised (Early Shoppers) offers to loyal customers, remind them to restock their favourite product, send specially made recommendations, update them about upcoming product launches, etc.
Stage 5: Advocacy
At this final stage of the customer journey, the customer becomes brand ambassadors for their wish and willingly recommends your products to their friends and family. They leverage conversational AI and ask customers for their valued opinion, real-time feedback, and ways to enhance the future customer experience.
Benefits of Conversational commerce
- It reduces the number of steps in the customer’s purchase journey, making the experience convenient and quick.
- Helps eCommerce brands to establish a two-way relationship between the customer and the virtual assistant by driving proactive and personalised conversations.
- It allows customers to seek answers quickly, not on the brand’s preferred channel but the customer’s channel of choice.
- Reduces cart abandonment by offering problem solving support to the customer to complete their order.
- Helps close potential leads.
- Send customised live chat greetings to let your user data know about your seasonal discounts, new additions, offers, and discounts.
- Use an ad free chatbot on the checkout page to answer all the last-minute questions concerning the delivery options or refund policy.
- The use of chatbot reminders will enable users to use the live bot to monitor the price of products and get notifications when required.
- Gather feedback from your customers through natural conversations live chat post-chat surveys which is much more effective than using typical web forms.
- Upselling and cross-selling opportunities can give you a chance to double your profits by selling more to customers who are considering purchasing for you.
- Provide personalised product recommendations via LiveChat.
- Helps build customer loyalty by offering a helping hand to a customer through every step of their journey.
- A Chatbot can be used to share promo coupons.
- Use a voice assistant to support your customers, help them search for information, or easily order your products.
Steps for Getting Started with Conversational Commerce by Adobe Commerce
1. Analyse your business needs.
2. Do your research and check out how your competitors utilise the potential of conversational commerce.
3. Identify a reliable conversational solution partner like Adobe Commerce to implement and manage it effectively.
4. Launch your conversational commerce tool after you have selected your key performance indicators (KPIs).
5. Measure success by regularly monitoring your conversational commerce performance with real-time metrics and improve your conversational activities at every stage of the visitors’ journey.
Wrapping Up
Creating your new strategy to begin your conversational adventure will probably take some time. Managing your conversations might also be challenging. But for every great loyal relationship just initiate with a little, casual chat.
With the trending conversational commerce tool powered by Magento open source (now Adobe Commerce); you can engage your customers throughout their purchase journey through real-time chat with human representatives or chatbots.
What is conversational commerce? understand with 3 real-life examples. Verloop.io. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://verloop.io/blog/conversational-commerce/
Conversational commerce 101: Everything you need to know. The BigCommerce Blog. (2022, February 21). Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/conversational-commerce
Conversational commerce definition – what is conversational commerce. Shopify. (n.d.). Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://www.shopify.co.uk/encyclopedia/conversational-commerce
