As an e-commerce business owner, you should always be looking for new ways to increase sales and customer satisfaction while reducing costs. You may have tested different solutions to achieve this, but handling them often presents a challenge.
Whatever you’re currently using a live chat service, a call center or a knowledge base, you’ve certainly already heard about chatbots and their applications in customer service. Put simply, chatbots are a computer program that mimics human conversation (if you want to know more about it, check our article on what is a chatbot.
In the case of online retail, an ecommerce chatbot could be used to answer customer questions, recommend products, and even upsell and cross-sell. e-commerce chatbots can help in everything from increasing customer satisfaction to boosting a business’ bottom line.
Let’s take a closer look at how chatbots can help grow an ecommerce business:
Main Uses
Generate more leads
Regardless of the product it’s selling, a business undoubtedly needs to generate leads from its online prospects. Converting cold visitors to customer requests and collecting a minimum amount of information about these customers (i.e. name, email address, etc.). Of course, you can use newsletter forms or propose that visitors download product guides and content against this data, but let’s be frank, this tactic is incredibly common and it’s no longer as effective as it once was.
Using intelligent prompts, an e-commerce bot can provide dynamic support, engaging passive website visitors and slowly encouraging them to reveal useful data in exchange for information.
After a certain number of interactions, the bot may discover what the customer is looking for and offer to:
- Download some related content
- Lead them to a dedicated landing page
- Push them to sign up to a newsletter
- Warm them up to the next engagement level
Understanding customer requirements and guiding them towards an offer is one of the main purposes of a chatbot. Built on a foundation of NLU (Natural Language Understanding) and Machine Learning, an ecommerce chatbot opens up a new channel for which to generate leads from cold new prospects.
Generate more sales
Picture this: Every day, thousands of visitors are reaching your ecommerce website and most of them are just bouncing out. Whatever you’ve paid to get them there (via search advertising or social media) or not, you are losing thousands of sales every single day.
Why?
It’s difficult to know for sure……
You can’t be everywhere
Were your products inaccurate or too expensive for them? Did they have questions they didn’t find any answer to?
You can’t be everywhere at once, nor is it possible to contact every single visitor of your website individually. But, deploying an ecommerce chatbot can make for an interesting alternative solution. Acting as an automated sales clerk, the bot has the capacity to assist every single one of your visitors, offering help and assistance to guide them all along their customer journey. It can answer their questions, understand their requirements and recommend them to relevant products.
If implemented correctly, an ecommerce chatbot may even pull up reviews and go for upsell and cross-sell options, increasing a customer’s average basket amount automatically.
Get them back before they leave…
A chatbot is also a great tool to help with one of the most frustrating e-commerce challenges: cart abandonment.
“69.99% of online shopping carts are abandoned in 2022” - Baymard Institute
There’s nothing worse for an online business than a customer that took the time to crawl your website, add some products to their basket and then, vanished…
Instead, an ecommerce chatbot can send reminders, push incentives or catch your prospect's attention before they leave to complete their purchases.
Support your customers
To generate long term business with customers and limit churn rate, you need to invest time and money in customer support. Therefore, regularly maintaining such a support function, particularly as a business grows and scales, can be challenging. As an ecommerce buyer, getting a clear answer to your questions is still often hard, especially over phone or email. You’re forced to contact the service during its opening hours and can sometimes wait several days to get an answer.
As an e-commerce manager, you’re enticed to answer the same questions, over and over, facing the same problems and losing precious time in the process. An ecommerce chatbot can help to resolve customer queries and issues automatically, whether it concerns order tracking, refunds, cancellations or payment issues.
Main Features
24/7 availability
How many sales opportunities is your business you missing out on while your customer service/support teams are sleeping? Whether your prospects are looking for information, reporting an issue or just looking to have a question answered, your team is only human and can’t be available all the time (at least not without considerable cost)… An ecommerce chatbot, on the other hand, never sleeps and can be available to help customers when and where it suits them best.
Instant responses
Even if you could provide human support around the clock, it’s still impossible to be everywhere at the same time. Even a well-staffed customer support team can struggle to always answer questions or provide information in real-time, especially in the event of unforeseen traffic spikes. But, again, an ecommerce bot has no difficulties scaling up its support capacity to handle any amount of traffic, with the bonus of it not costing any extra as no additional humans need to be onboarded.
Reduce Customer Service Costs
Dealing with a broad spectrum of regularly recurring tasks such as responding to FAQ or providing troubleshooting assistance, an ecommerce chatbot can free up customer service representatives to concentrate on more complicated queries, reducing costs and increasing resolution rates at the same time.
Indeed, a bot can help keep business costs in check over time and allows to handle a larger volume of inquiries without having to increase the size of a customer service team.
You can learn more about this on our ecommerce chatbot use cases page.
Getting even more efficient with an AI chatbot
Working with e-commerce chatbot platforms such as boost.ai can help businesses like yours build greater customer service efficiency, ultimately allowing them to save money and increase operational efficiency. These platforms require no coding knowledge and can be integrated with major e-commerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento) and third-party customer service solutions (Salesforce, Zendesk).
New technologies are making it easier than ever for businesses to, upgrade existing “simple” chatbot solutions into powerful virtual agents that can have a positive effect on customer service and business goals, By onboarding artificial intelligence powered by Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to understand user inputs, these bots are able to provide helpful, personalized responses that create a much more streamlined customer experience.
This technology enables e-commerce companies to quickly qualify potential customers by responding to their inquiries, providing them with real-time answers and helping them find what they’re looking for, faster.
Some of these AI chatbots are now offering fast and scalable solutions, able to handle much larger volumes of inquiries without sacrificing quality and provide valuable insights into consumer behavior when integrated into e-commerce sites thanks to the power of conversational ai in e-commerce.