Unlocking the Potential of Chatbots in E-Commerce

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Ameya Deshpande from Market Inspector.

Chatbots have been the main talking point in last few years in conversational commerce due to the rapid growth in artificial intelligence. They primarily help automate customer support by answering basic queries in a structured way. As they have built-in keyword analysis and natural language processing in some cases, it helps them break down queries in a matter of seconds. In the E-commerce industry, which is an online marketplace of buyers and sellers, chatbots have shown tremendous potential.

In the E-Commerce space, users have become more and more dependent on businesses to guide them all the way through their purchase journey. As many E-commerce websites can have heavy traffic in busy periods, it becomes a challenge to personalise shopping experience for each and every user. This is where chatbots can step in and add value to user’s purchase experience. For instance, many users face issues navigating through a website to reach their desired product. Moreover, the problem is made worse when customer agents are unavailable or not able to give a satisfactory answer. A chatbot that is implemented on a website’s landing page can be perfect tool to guide users to their desired product pages based on their queries. This will help E-commerce websites improve their conversions in the long run. As chatbots are capable of engaging multiple users to answer basic queries, it increases overall efficiency of customer support process as agents can focus on more complex queries which are subjective in nature that chatbots are not capable to answer yet. Thus chatbots add value to customers’ online purchase journey by complementing and working together with the support agents.

As most E-Commerce businesses are driven heavily by shopping seasons, chatbots have also justified their relevance as promotional tools. Many users are unable to make purchase decision and often abandon their shopping cart in the process. Chatbots can turn out to be very useful on a specific pricing page in order to give deals and offers about relevant products that users are searching for. In addition to being very effective marketing tools, chatbots can also be used as a great learning tool to understand your audience and improve user retention in the long run. If chatbots are given a significant role to play further in customer’s online purchase journey, it will enable them to collect statistics on user behavior and collect relevant data. This will be beneficial for businesses to provide more relevant products to its users in the future.

The future of chatbots in customer service is definitely something to look forward to. Due to its cost savings to businesses and ease of use, they have shown great potential in B2B transactions. As more and more websites experiment with chatbots on their website, users will get accustomed to talking to a bot which is also likely to increase their relevance in B2C transactions. The following infographic by Market Inspector will help readers visualize the role of chatbots in optimizing customer’s online purchase experience. It uses the most recent survey results to describe challenges faced by users when interacting with E-commerce businesses and suggesting ways chatbots can increase overall efficiency. ​​

About the Author:

Ameya Deshpande is a Communications Assistant at Market Inspector, a B2B digital marketplace for comparing quotes and offers from a range of suppliers. His work mainly involves content writing and SEO. He graduated with honors from Copenhagen University with a degree in Economics.

​See the original article on Market Inspector

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