E-commerce chatbots are becoming increasingly important as businesses realize the value of conversational marketing. In fact, the global chatbots market size is expected to grow at a rate of 29.5% per year over the next five years.
No surprise then, that chatbots are a popular choice for e-commerce companies looking to increase sales and improve the customer experience. Chatbot customer service is now a reality and bots can be used to answer questions, provide order updates, offer product recommendations and even offer personal shopping services, all in multiple languages. Allowing agents to tackle the in-depth issues that require human intervention.
Let's explore some of the most impactful ways to deploy chatbots in your e-commerce business:
Since most customers are likely to be using WhatsApp in their day-to-day lives, it makes sense for e-commerce companies to be using it too. With recent additions to the WhatsApp for Business offering, the case for integrating WhatsApp into your operations becomes even stronger.
Features like the ability to send multimedia files like video clips or audio messages can make a big difference to the quality and scope of your customer service solution. So can the ability to build customized WhatsApp chatbots in different languages and integrate with internal CRM systems through the WhatsApp API to fully track and personalize your customer interactions.
It’s also possible to have your full product catalog available through WhatsApp so you can help your customers shop whether they’re at home or on the move with their smartphone.
Getting to the root of a customer query is the key to a quick resolution and a happy customer. If your chatbot can retrieve customer data quickly (name, recent orders, order status, previous contacts etc) then it can give personalized and useful responses and relevant information rather than generic answers.
With a professional integration between chatbot and CRM, your chatbot can securely and quickly establish customer identity and access their account information. It will then have the ability to provide useful updates or escalate issues promptly and initiate follow-up procedures if the issue is not possible to resolve straight away.
Menu-based chatbots are like mini-websites created in your chat feature. They can provide clarity and speed when diagnosing and resolving customer queries, allowing the user to select from various alternatives via menus or buttons. The bot presents the user with a new set of possibilities depending on the selections made until a resolution is reached.
Decision tree hierarchies are often displayed to the user as buttons in these chatbots. Like the automated phone menus we all encounter regularly, these rule-based chatbots need the user to make a series of choices to get the answer they're looking for.
The menu-based chatbots can help you save time answering frequently asked questions and, in turn, allows your agents to focus on the more complex queries that require intervention.
The sophistication of AI and the use of NLP means that the quality of chatbot customer service is improving all the time but currently chatbots are still unable to take on all the tasks of a human agent. Customer experience must be a top priority so a chatbot should be able to handoff smoothly to an agent as soon as it becomes clear that it cannot handle the query.
AI can be configured to determine if a problem is too complex for a chatbot and establish a point early in the conversation where a chatbot-to-human handoff is necessary - if, for example, the discussion goes on for a long time without a resolution or a client continually repeats their request by using similar words in a different order.
Every business has different products, different workflows and its own unique character. For this reason, deploying an off-the-shelf chatbot straight into your live environment is unlikely to work smoothly. Time spent designing a custom chatbot tailored to your own business and reflecting its personality will make the interactions seem more natural. You can give your chatbot a name and a personality that fits well with your business and connects with your customers. In a region like ours with many languages used every day and diverse cultures, being able to design a multi-lingual bot can be a real boon to your business.
By analyzing the data that chatbots collect, you can learn the frequent questions that come up and adapt your chatbots accordingly to provide better service. This has the triple benefits of giving better help to your customers, giving more time back to your customer service agents and gaining invaluable intelligence into your customers and what they want from you.
Chatbots have the ability to respond instantly to your customers, provide them with useful, real-time info about their order, provide accurate delivery updates and provide detailed answers to some of your most frequently asked questions.
Through harnessing the power of AI and NLP, chatbots are becoming more helpful than ever and when deployed correctly, can take an enormous amount of strain from your customer service teams. Allowing bots to handle routine queries means that your agents have more time to give extra attention to customers with more complex issues.
With the additional metrics that chatbots can provide, your business can fine-tune its products and services to better meet customer needs.
Chatbots can certainly be an asset to your e-commerce business but make sure to spend time on designing, customizing and fine-tuning to get the very best results.