How ecommerce chatbots are empowering retailers

AI is lending retailers a helping hand to invigorate their conversion rate optimisation strategies.

By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, retailers can enhance their website’s performance, improve the user experience, and boost SERP rankings.

Conversion audits and strategies can be time consuming, but AI-powered technologies provide automative and innovative solutions to help online retailers quickly identify friction across each touchpoint.

We've explored the key aspects of using AI-powered chatbots to drive metrics (such as conversion rate), and provided insight below to help retailers grow their business with smart technology.

What are Chatbots?

A chatbot is a computer program that can converse with its users. This AI simulates conversations by transmitting automated messages, synthesising voice(s), and remove friction from the customer journey.

We commonly see chatbot software in ecommerce and retail spaces, especially within customer service. CS chatbots can recognise the intent of customer's messages and provide predefined replies to guide them to where they want to go or put them in contact with the correct departments, etc.

AI chatbots use the aggregated data from every user interaction they have to learn what works best and subsequently improve responses over time.

What are the benefits of chatbots?

Businesses integrate chatbot technology into their ecommerce platforms to ultimately save 3 things:

1. Time

2. Money

3. Resources

Benefits of chatbots in ecommerce

• Lightning fast replies ⚡️ - Chatbots can send predefined automated responses in a heartbeat. In peak hours, chatbots can provide invaluable service during peak hours when customer service agents are tied up. The more time chatbots save, the quicker the conversion.

• 24/7 support 🔋 - Chatbots will sleep when they're dead. Immune to boredom, they will provide support to customers day and night; learning more and more with each conversation.

• Le chatbot, el chatbot, das chat-roboter 🗣 - Modern chatbots are capable of understanding multiple languages and providing multi-lingual support. They're continually learning new languages along with their respective dialects and

• Chatbots ❤️ Omnichannel - It's a modern necessity for customer service to embrace omnichannel. Forrester reported that 95% of customers use 3 channels or more in a single customer service interaction; especially with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger becoming increasingly popular as a medium of customer service.

• Personalised Chatbots 🤝 CRM - The technology to integrate chatbots with customer relationship management databases is widely available. It enables bots to determine if website users are existing customers or prospects. They can proceed to help existing users pick up from where they left off, or help first-time users to find what they're looking for or guide them with a tour of the website.

• Collect user insights 🔍 - AI is always learning in order to provide quicker and more accurate answers for users. With every interaction, they collect data and continuously analyse that information, converting it into invaluable insights for ecommerce merchants.

Chatbots can be valuable tools for Conversion Rate Optimisation

By automating tasks, gathering data, and testing and iterating, chatbots can help ecommerce retailers to improve the customer experience.

AI can help retailers with their CRO strategies in several ways:

Chatbots can...generate leads

Chatbots can be used to generate leads by collecting contact information from potential customers. This information can then be used to follow up with potential customers and nurture them into paying customers.

Chatbots can...be tested

Chatbots can be easily tested and iterated, which allows businesses to quickly find the optimal approach for their customers or ascertain why lead magnets may not be converting.

By analysing data and making predictions from precious data and insights regarding customer behaviour, ecommerce merchants can make far more informed decisions about how to optimise their website and improve the conversion process.

Chatbots can...be easily built.

Fortunately, modern chatbot technology is easy to build, deploy and integrate to other systems like mobile apps, SMS, Facebook messenger and more.

Take Salesforce's Einstein AI chatbot; capable of delivering contextual recommendations - it's easy to get started with its intuitive, point-and-click interface that enables users to build and launch chatbots in 'minutes'.

Chatbots can...assist with remarketing campaigns

Increase your chances of conversion with chatbots by implementing them into remarketing campaigns.

Chatbots can identify users who have previously or abandoned carts and display similar items throughout webpages or social media websites.

Chatbots can...co-exist with humans

AI won’t comprehensively replace customer service agents. Customers will always want to know they can interact with a fellow human for issues that require a personal touch.

However, for the small stuff that doesn't require a customer service agent, they offer a quicker solution that saves agents precious time and provides customers with the answers faster than humanly possible.

Wrap

Chatbots have evolved in recent years, and today, they are changing the ecommerce landscape in more ways than one.

They are interactive, effective, and an engaging way to accelerate business growth.