Conversational commerce emerged from the demands of customers wanting everything all at once, and instantly. This concept refers to businesses interacting with their customers in real-time, offering guidance in the purchase process, giving recommendations, and all that should be delivered within seconds after the customers send them a message.
From a human perspective, this can seem like an impossible expectation to meet. Not even the best salespeople can sit there and answer every incoming message in a matter of seconds, with personalized offers, not to mention a friendly tone.
Someone, or rather, something can do just that. Artificial Intelligence-powered chatbots are designed to deliver this exact experience customers are looking for in e-commerce support. So, let’s see the 5 reasons why you need an AI chatbot for your business.
Keeping Up with the Demands of Customers and the Market
I have already mentioned at the beginning that online buyers have really high expectations when it comes to receiving support from businesses. It’s a fast world where they want fast responses, as effectively as possible. Let’s look at some numbers to make this more tangible:
Research suggests that:
- The most frustrating aspect of engaging with businesses, as reported by approximately 53% of respondents, is the extended wait for responses.
- Given the choice between a 15-minute wait for a response, 62% of consumers prefer conversing with a chatbot over a human agent.
- Approximately 90% of customer inquiries are successfully addressed within the exchange of 10 messages or less.
According to this research, the majority of businesses, particularly those in the e-commerce industry, express high satisfaction with the enhancements that chatbots have brought to their customer service and marketing activities.
Looking at some other numbers, Insider Intelligence forecasts that global consumer retail spending through chatbots will surge to $142 billion by 2024, a significant increase from the $2.8 billion recorded in 2019.
What does this show us? Mainly that an AI chatbot in an e-commerce business is now the norm. Something that is expected and even necessary.
Increasing Demands, Increasing Messages
Multichannel communication is a standard. Your customers reach you through your website, or your social media pages, like Facebook, Instagram, or through Whatsapp. Through these various channels, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage all the queries and questions of your customers.
An AI-powered chatbot can help you effectively handle most of the incoming messages. When your inbox gets flooded with questions from your customers, your chatbot is able to provide your customers with the right answers. Plus, it can also even send them relevant content or promotional messages.
Instant Replies Driving Sales
One of the most obvious advantages of an AI-powered Chatbot is the ability to instantly answer messages. Regardless of the timezone, region, and time of the day. The chatbot is working without taking a break. Many fear that this feature sacrifices accurate answers delivered to the customers. But this is not the case. It all depends on what you teach the chatbot to answer.
SAAS First’s AI-powered chatbot, Milly, works from a knowledge base you provide it with and gives answers based on the information it finds relevant. Milly can learn from customized input and undergo training for more precise responses. Flexibility makes Milly a valuable and adjustable tool for your customer support strategy.
Reduced Cart Abandonment
This might not be as obvious of an advantage as the previous ones, but it’s a really great one from an e-commerce perspective. AI chatbots can help you reduce the amount of carts abandoned in your business. How? There are several ways in which it achieves that:
- It can answer the questions of customers who are doubtful about whether they actually want to purchase your product or not. Once they have the information they require to make the decision, it is more likely that they’ll buy it.
- The chatbot can send reminders to the customers if they leave something in their carts, and ask them whether they want to proceed with the purchase. In most cases, this nudges customers to revisit their carts and buy the remaining items in there.
- If we take this one step further, chatbots can also offer personalized deals and highlight discounts to your customers who are hesitant about the final step of purchasing.
We all know that abandoned carts are a big part of an e-commerce business. They will always be there, they always be great targets for reduction. With the help of an AI-driven chatbot, this can become a lot easier.
Assisting Your Support Team
We talked about why an AI Chatbot is good for the customers and good for you and your business. One last thing needs to be mentioned here as well. Your human agents.
The fact that the chatbot can handle most of the queries means that human agents have more time and energy, and more focus on taking care of more complex messages. The ones that cannot be solved with the help of the chatbot. This will obviously result in better quality of the responses as well.
In addition, mundane tasks are not the burden of human agents anymore. What does that bring about? Happier employees. And happier employees are always the core of a successful business, a good work environment, and satisfaction among your workers.
Conclusion
To wrap it up, we saw that chatbots have a great impact on e-commerce businesses. As the requirements for offering support to customers are becoming more and more complex, it is evident that we need the help of technology now.
The 5 main reasons why you need to implement an AI Chatbot into your business include meeting the expectations of your customers, being able to handle all incoming messages, providing instant replies, reducing your abandoned carts, and helping your support team.
Was it convincing enough? If so, try out SAAS First’s AI-powered Chatbot, Milly, and see how it works in real life.
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