Chatbot: a major asset for the future of the e-commerce
What are chatbots? In simple words, whatbots are automated chat programs that replace a person in a virtual conversation. E-commerce retails use it to answer instantly to the question of the customers directly on the website, on the application or even through Messenger! The chatbot replies simulating the answer of a real person. They are able to do this thanks to their Natural Language Processing, and the most advanced chatbots use a Machine Learning process that allow them to continually learn and have more and more relevant answers in the conversation.
In fact, to optimize you Artificial Intelligence system, it is important to regularly feed its algorithm with data regarding customer possible questions and what to answer to it.
Why investing in a chatbot?
Chatbots bring a number of key advantages both to the company and to the customers.
- It saves time spend on customer support by more than 35%.
- It saves cost spend on employees that would do the job done by chatbots.
- It replies instantly and at any time to customers’ requests.
- It attract new customers for services providers by making the reservation process easy and fast.
- Give detailed information on the service or product under request.
- It helps increase the number of repeat sales, upselling or cross-selling, by recording previous acquisition and suggest new or related products.
- It generally personalize the conversation, as if the customer had a personal shopping assistant and thus help making the customer feel special and considered.
- It is multilingual.
- It is easy to use, does not require any download or other time taking tasks to the customer.
- It can speak in the way the company wants, it can reflect the brand personality, and create a more enjoying and interactive customer experience.
- It can send a message to all customers announcing an event or a new product.
Any disadvantages? None!
For all this reason, chatbots highly improve customer experience for ecommerce businesses.
The future of chatbots?
Not only they will be more and more accurate and effective, but they are also going to have an emotional intelligence that will allow them to detect the emotional state of the customer and reply in an adapted way to this emotional state. The voice understanding capacities are also going to improve and save even more time, and improve the overall enjoying experience. One estimate says voice-activated assistants (such as the already famous “Alexa” of Amazon) will soar from 500 million current users to 1.8 billion by 2021.
Some people are still reluctant to use chatbots, but soon they will gain the trust of consumers and boom just like applications did in the past. Maybe we can even imagine future innovative chatbots using virtual or augmented reality, creating an immersive experience…