Author: Saish Kakodkar

Over the last two decades, the development of e-commerce has brought revolutionary changes in the way we make purchases in the retail sector. Even while offering the ease and speed of online shopping, it cannot offer one important factor – that is, the personalized service we are provided at a physical store by a customer care representative. Businesses have shifted to automation when they have found difficulty in meeting and adapting to the ever-changing requirements and demands of their customers. This resulted in using conversational AI chatbots that can improve customer-centric practices in e-commerce.   

7 Ways chatbots help e-commerce business  

The basic objective behind using or deploying a conversational AI chatbot in a business is to serve the customers better. Customer relationships and management are essential for the growth and success of any business. If a business fails to address the requirements of its customer, then there begins the failure of the business itself. There are many other uses for these automated chatbots. Let us talk about the different ways through which these chatbots help e-commerce businesses.   

Delivers personalized services  

AI chatbots are capable of recollecting previous conversations or any kind of interaction between a particular customer. The chatbot uses the data to initiate a customized conversation with the users the next time they interact with the chatbot. Moreover, these bots keep their complete attention on the customers while leading them throughout the whole journey of shopping by giving product recommendations and necessary assistance/support. Additionally, through these personalized services, you are increasing engagement rates and also save a lot of time for the customers by recommending only significant products.   

Offers quick, cost-effective, and reliable services  

Customers are happy when they get to shop 24*7 but that is not practical when it comes to physical outlets because they don’t function the whole day and night. But the e-commerce chatbots are live 24*7 to provide the best quality customer service to the customers. E-commerce chatbots are capable of building a live connection with users by enabling two-way communication similar to that of a real customer service agent. These conversational chatbots can answer up to 80% of repetitive questions by customers. Also, if the bot fails to resolve the problem, it will forward the issue to the live chat agent. Moreover, it makes the customer understand the advantages and offers of making payments online.  

Display catalogs across multiple channels  

Sometimes customers tend to purchase products they see or like while using a social media platform or any other app. In such situations, they wouldn’t want to go through a particular site or app to find out about the product they saw on another platform. Here, the most convenient way is to let them purchase directly over that app they are using. You can deploy your AI chatbot on multiple touchpoints like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or any other platform. This way you can allow your customers to browse your catalogs directly from any application they use and make purchases from there, without switching to another app or website. This not only minimizes the customer’s effort and time but also provides them with an omnichannel experience.  

Records real-time interactions  

Enabling real-time customer interaction is a remarkable feature of AI chatbots in e-commerce businesses. The information collected during the interaction can be used to provide quality services based on user input. Quick access to crucial data helps in minimizing functional costs and increases the efficiency and effectiveness of a business.  

Act as the perfect knowledge base  

Providing the necessary information to the customers and creating awareness among them is a difficult process but quite easy for AI-driven chatbots. For instance, the bot will give single-touch access to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section on the screen whenever a customer chooses a particular product. Also, the chatbot can display any additional required information the customer asks for, within seconds. It helps in simplifying the purchasing process as there is effective communication between the chatbot and the customer, which in turn increases sales and customer engagement.  

Gather analytics and boost sales   

In e-commerce, no other factor is important as an interested customer who is ready to buy your product. These customers choose the products they need from the website and either add them to the cart or wish list, which will remain there for months without any action being taken. Because of this reason, many products remain untouched by customers and somehow, AI bots are changing this method altogether. Chatbots can learn and understand the preferences and requirements of customers by analyzing their previous activities on the website or application, their cart, and their product wish list. Based on this analysis they recommend products and services to the customers to develop the customer base.  

Gather customer feedback  

An e-commerce business chatbot mainly uses two ways to gather customer feedback – one is through reviews and the other is through forms. If a business pays close attention to gathering reviews manually, at some point they will realize that it is not cheap. It is indeed a time-consuming process. Therefore, the number of genuine reviews you get will be very less. The other thing is if your company is delivering a defective product to the customer, then definitely the customer will post a bad review. Negative reviews adversely affect the business, which is why the customer experience needs to be improved. Deploying AI chatbots in e-commerce businesses stimulates the feedback collection process within a limited period of time. Chatbots can interact and sympathize with customers, thus gathering feedback from them. In addition, they ensure that their problem is forwarded to the relevant team in real time. This minimizes the impact of poor marketing as well. Here, people are more likely to support your platform among their circle as one of the most trusted ones.  

Wrap Up  

The e-commerce chatbot always strives to satisfy its customers with an unprecedented experience. When your customer gets the best experience, it will automatically result in giving the best customer satisfaction rate. In addition to the business perspective, getting feedback from customers is very important. This is one of the best ways to identify weak points in the chatbot conversation stream, including wrong answers, poor speech design, continuous responses, and knowledge gaps.  

Introduction 

The growth of artificial intelligence has brought with it many new ideas of development. However, the rise of a chatbot cannot be denied. The integration of Artificial intelligence (AI) in chatbots is a great success and has many advantages. You may have noticed the presence of different types of chatbots in the market but are never the same in terms of functionality, interface, purpose, and more. It is true that the ultimate aim of every chatbot will be the same, that is – perform the same way as humans would do but without any rest. The difference lies in where it is used and what specific function it performs. For example, the chatbot you use on an eCommerce website would be totally different from the one you use for Banking.  Just as we differ in our personalities and abilities, the same goes for the looks and functions of chatbots. 

Types of Chatbots 

Since we know that chatbots function differently according to different business needs, we should also know the different types of chatbots used in various industries. Here are some of them: 

Menu/Button-based chatbot  

These are the standard type of chatbots currently available in the market. These chatbots are mostly dignified decision tree hierarchies given in the form of buttons to the users. With this chatbot, the user has to make a number of choices in order to find out the answers to these chatbots like the automated phone menu which we use every day. These chatbots are enough to answer frequently asked questions, which make up almost 80% of assisting/support questions; they are very rare in more advanced situations, especially where there is too much knowledge or too many variables that determine how users will get to certain answers with confidence. One thing to be noted is that these menu/button-based chatbots are the slowest when it comes to giving the expected value to the user.  

Linguistic/ Rule-based chatbot  

A linguistic chatbot can be the best choice for your business if you can foresee the types of queries your users may ask. Linguistic or rule-based chatbots use ‘if or then’ conditions to generate conversational streams. Defining the language requirements of your chatbot is the first thing to do, and then you can generate conditions to interpret and analyze words, their synonyms, and word order. If the conditions designed in your chatbot match the user’s query, then your bot can provide prompt and appropriate assistance to the customers in a minimum time. 

Anyhow, it is your responsibility to make sure that the arrangement and presentation of each query by the customer are defined in a way that is comprehendible for the chatbot. This is the reason behind the slow but incredible development of the linguistic model. 

Keyword recognition-based chatbots  

Keyword-based chatbots are capable of listening to whatever the user types and giving the response immediately.  These chatbots use custom language and Natural Language Processing (NLP)- an application of artificial intelligence – to decide how users should be given responses appropriately. These types of chatbots fail to meet the standard when you have to answer many similar questions. The NLP chatbots start to slip when they have to respond to many similar queries and when there are keyword repetitions in similar questions. 

Hybrid chatbots based on keyword recognition and menu/button are very popular in the market. These chatbots give customers the opportunity to directly ask their queries or use the chatbot’s menu buttons in case the keyword recognition functionality gives bad results or if the customer needs assistance to find a solution to their query. 

Hybrid model  

The advancements offered by the AI-based chatbots are adored by businesses but most of them cannot support these chatbots as they lack huge amounts of data and skillsets. Therefore, they chose the hybrid model, which delivers the functionalities of both worlds— the sophistication of AI-bots and the intelligibility of rule-based chatbots. 

Machine Learning chatbots  

You can easily identify how strong conversation context can be when integrated with AI and ML. They are also called conversational chatbots, which use Artificial Intelligence as well as Machine Learning (ML). These chatbots store and learn customer behavior to deliver enhanced services in the future. They are also smart enough to improve their performance without any external interventions. It gives customers the option to respond simply to questions the chatbot has already prepared based on the previous actions made by the customer. Thus, improving the customer experience to a greater level. 

Voice bots 

Businesses are now adopting voice-based chatbots to make conversational interfaces more local.  Voice bots are being used widely over the past few years especially with virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. The convenience and ease of use offered by voice-based chatbots cannot be replaced with any other technology. A voice bot delivers a tension-free experience directly to the customers and as you know speaking is much easier than typing. 

How to choose the right one? 

Before you decide to choose a chatbot for your business, think from the customer’s perspective, the service they value, and the service they receive. Does the context of the conversation significantly affect this value? If it doesn’t, the time and resources are not worth installing it.  

The target user base and the preferred user experience are two other things to be considered. Instead of asking questions directly to chatbots, there are users who prefer chatbots to help them with visual menu buttons. Users have every reason to check your chatbot thoroughly before you implement it completely. 

When it comes to choosing the right chatbot, choose the one that serves the value the customers expect. It may need some enterprise-level AI skills in certain situations, but otherwise, menu buttons are the best solution. 

Wrap Up 

There are many types of chatbots available in many variants for different businesses and enterprises. When businesses choose strategies for automation while saving resources, time, and effort, there will be an automatic hike in revenue and improved brand recognition. Once the chatbots take up the responsibility for time-consuming and repetitive tasks, they establish smoother connections with the users, add value, and provide a great customer experience. The results of such kind of automation are not limited to empowering the marketing experience but also delivering greater satisfaction on both sides.