Implementing Conversational Commerce is much more than developing an e-commerce chatbot capable of resolving queries on its own. It is thinking about a conversational strategy that covers the multiple directions the interaction and purchase journey can take . That strategy is constantly evolving, based on the real interactions between customers and your company.
What are the challenges of conversational commerce? What do we need to really give customers a special experience? Mauricio Lázaro , AI Applications Manager at inConcert, explains the “behind the scenes” of an e-commerce bot, and how you can take advantage of it to maximize your sales.
The 4 keys to developing an e-commerce chatbot that helps you sell more
1) Scale the shopping experience: from e-commerce to chat
The first challenge is to transfer the user’s shopping experience to the chat . The purchase of products online requires that the results of product searches be exceptionally good, according to the user’s expectation. But adapting those search results to chat has its challenges.
Let’s look at a specific example. When you search for a product on an e-commerce platform, the results are displayed as a tile or list, with about 15 items on average. But in a chat, the bot cannot return 15 links to products, as that would hinder the user experience. The search for the products becomes crucial , to be able to return only the results that the user was looking for. At inConcert we use machine learning models and smart searches to make the result as accurate as possible.
2) Reorder the store to generate more sales opportunities
A good Conversational Commerce strategy involves not only the training of the bot and its ability to analyze user data, but a thorough work on the e-commerce site itself. The information of the e-commerce and its catalog of products must have an exhaustive classification ; and this is something that not all sites have done.
Therefore, in addition to developing an intelligent search engine, from inConcert we create an automatic process to extract the data from the e-commerce site, classify it correctly and provide an excellent search experience on any type of site, regardless of how the site has ordered its catalog.
In this way, the e-commerce chatbot not only provides the most accurate results for what the customer is looking for, but can also generate cross-selling and upselling opportunities by offering related products.
3) Integrate the chatbot with information systems and take after-sales to a new level
The e-commerce bot can be integrated with other information systems to provide an optimal customer experience. From the company’s CRM to billing and delivery systems, this type of integration elevates the experience not only during the sale, but in the after-sales stage.
For example, a user buys on an e-commerce site and receives a notification by WhatsApp saying that the product arrives tomorrow. If this does not arrive, in that same interaction the user asks what happened to the order. The system uses artificial intelligence to know who the customer is, what they ordered, and check where that order is, all in a matter of seconds . Thus, the user gets an immediate and personalized response, something key in incident management so as not to add frustration to an already annoying situation.
4) Develop the right content for special dates
With the right deals, dates such as Black Friday , Christmas or Mother’s Day help drive sales of any e-commerce. The chatbot helps to meet the peaks of demand immediately, no need for waiting .
For these strategies to work, it is essential to prepare content in advance for these important dates, for example by introducing related keywords or training the chatbot to execute related upselling and cross-selling tactics.
