For many online retailer businesses managing customers, maintaining conversion rate, and providing an ultimate user experience can prove to be tricky. Especially if you’re a small team, managing multiple customers at a time is impossible. Thankfully automation can solve this problem for customers and business owners alike. Investing in an innovative chatbot for your business can provide an incredible online shopping experience and support for your consumer base.
What is a Chatbot?
Chatbots are software programs created to engage users and help people proactively using predefined rules to drive conversations or natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to analyze and understand the unstructured chatbot conversations. Chatbot platforms aim to mimic real-life conversations, exponentially gaining popularity as they are transforming the way people do business today. Extensively being used in the Sales, Customer Service, Research, and eCommerce realm, AI chatbots help enterprises automate and streamline their business processes, answer questions, and save time and money.
Let us look at some of the best chatbot examples that businesses use to communicate with customers in online shopping instantly.
Chatbot examples to grow your business
Chatbots to automate Customer Support
AI-powered Chatbots have found colossal success in automating customer support. Turning resources like FAQs or knowledge base articles into real-time conversations, chatbots can be trained to give instant responses to website visitors without them being on the phone for hours and significantly reducing back and forth emails. Faster response times mean more satisfied customers.
Higher ticket deflection is one of the quickest benefits organizations see when implementing chatbots for their business. With an increase in the bandwidth for the support agents to solve more complex issues, chatbots provide a quality channel of support to resolve customer issues without compromising the support quality.
Because a chatbot can reside on your website at all times, another very tangible benefit is uninterrupted 24/7 customer support without too much human intervention. Be it Black Friday or Super Bowl, use chatbots to do what they are designed to do!
Chatbots can also ensure quick scalability that is in sync with your business season. Low dependence on hiring and training of human resources is what catches the eye of many.
Chatbots for lead generation
Selling products to customers can be hard if you don’t know their interests. Chatbot eases this task. In recent years, companies have employed chatbots to do the heavy lifting. Chatbots serve as lead generation agents who automatically ask contextual questions that substantially increase qualified lead generation.
Enterprises are making use of conversational chatbot messaging to educate customers without being intrusive and collect data (name, email, phone numbers, etc) from them safely. And because they’re available for your customers 24/7, you get a lead generation machine for yourself at all times. To take it a step further, companies can also qualify their leads faster by giving visitors booking meetings faster.
Through pointed surveys, questions, and quality lead engagement, chatbots can serve as a high-quality lead generation tool helping stakeholders understand their consumer’s likes and products and services of choice.
Chatbots for eCommerce & Order Tracking
eCommerce has seen a boom in the last decade. With the proliferation of the internet and people’s buying capacity, people are shopping online now more than ever. But the customer’s questions somewhat remain the same – “Where is my order?”.
Intelligent chatbots for eCommerce have proven to be a blessing in this matter. Not just for presales, chatbots have been coming to rescue post-sales too. Studies have shown that the most common and repetitive questions asked by consumers in the eCommerce space revolve around order status. In fact, while customers appreciate updated inventory and discounts, a transparent order fulfillment process gets you returning customers.
Now even though they make up for a large number of requests, do you need a human agent to go back into your database every time and find the order status and tracking number? Enter Chatbots.
Organizations are widely using the power of chatbots to keep their consumers informed about their orders. With just key information like the order numbers, the chatbots do a great job giving people visibility into their order fulfillment. Informed customers mean happy and returning customers.
Product Recommendation Bots
Product recommendation is not a new sales strategy. Retailers have been using it to upsell their products and services for a very long time. But now, with the rise of e-commerce platforms, how do e-retailers pitch relevant products to buyers? Smart AI-powered chatbots.
How does an eCommerce chatbot work? Simply put, chatbots use Artificial intelligence, and enormous data from visitor conversations understand buyer’s requirements and assist them accordingly. AI-powered chatbots are designed to remember past purchases. This functionality is helpful to narrow down the search better and to provide more accurate and informed recommendations.
Chatbots can provide consumers with the instant satisfaction of finding the product of their choice. Businesses like to host their own chatbots on their website – homepage, landing pages, etc to actively interact with website visitors. By promoting bestsellers, add-ons, new arrival recommendations, chatbots can promote cross-selling and upselling. Chatbots help eliminates the need for continuous scrolling of multiple pages on the website. This helps consumers find what they’re looking for through easy, pointed, and less intrusive conversations.
Promotion & Marketing Bots
Chatbots have the potential to be one-stop marketers. Chatbots have become a popular marketing technology, as the rules of engagement between consumers and businesses have changed over the years. A chatbot can market your products and services, increase lead generation, and improve sales by engaging in real-time with your user through conversational marketing. By including chatbots in your marketing campaigns and strategies to provide your customers with the latest and greatest coupons, discounts, etc., you can proactively reach out to website visitors and increase your chances of converting visitors into customers.
Chatbots for collecting feedback
Chatbots are commonly found to be used to automate sales and customer support processes. But in recent years, they have proved invaluable in market research, collecting user feedback. Chatbots for research help garner insights into customers, buying behavior, and products without traditional surveys or focus groups.
With AI and interactive conversations, these humanized surveys are less “robotic”, making these interactions seem safe and comfortable. Chatbots are fruitful in helping businesses understand their customers better. And better-understood needs mean improved bottom line.
With companies around the world aiming to be customer-centric, Chatbots can engage in research conversations to help enterprises hone their products and services for continuous improvement. Product teams may use this feedback to prioritize their roadmap, or stakeholders might use this to develop their customer experience strategies.
Chatbots to recover abandoned carts
Studies show that over 71% of customers will abandon a shopping cart without completing the purchase. While the metric may result from prices being too high to buyers simply comparing products, abandoned carts are almost always bad for business. eCommerce competition is fierce, and one way to stand out is to take care of abandoned carts.
In the older times, businesses tend to send out abandoned cart emails to encourage the buyer to finish the sale, but with the popularity of chatbots, businesses do not want to wait but prompt their visitors instantly. Organizations have been leveraging chatbots to minimize the abandonment rate.
Using good abandoned cart pop-ups and triggered chat messages, chatbots have helped significantly decrease the abandonment rate. Chatbots can easily create a sense of urgency, and by helping customers realize the effort they’ve already put into the shopping. Chatbots can also promote a sale by presenting an incentive to encourage buyers to complete their purchase.
Chatbots to streamline Return processes
The advent of eCommerce has helped businesses gain profits, but one key area where the companies struggle is the reverse logistics of returns and refund processes. Unfortunately, RMA and return processes take up a lot of time and effort of customer support teams. Returns are considered a consistent source of profit-sapping and frustration and are equally a nuisance for the customer.
So how can chatbots help relieve this pain point? By significantly increasing the speed of hassle-free return processing and increasing customer satisfaction. Whether an item was bought online, or at a store, Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered bot, when combined with a powerful workflow automation software (using APIs), can help in collecting preliminary data for refund processing, instantly generate and share electronic RMA(Return Merchandise Authorization), update inventory in integrated systems such ERPs(Enterprise Resource Planning), eCommerce platforms.
Conclusion
In the age of Alexas and Siris, artificial intelligence and automation have brought a transformational wave in almost every industry – healthcare, BFSI, automotive, etc. Customers have been loving to interact with chatbots now more than ever. The beauty of chatbots is that they can be customized and configured to meet innumerable business needs and use cases. If you’re on the lookout for a virtual assistant to help grow your business, speak to one of our experts today.
