When you work in a trillion-dollar industry, you know that the competition is as stiff as it gets. You cannot get complacent for a single minute or afford to not convert the maximum of leads that come your way even if you are comfortable with your numbers already.
If you are analyzing your ecommerce website metrics, have you noticed all those customers who were at your doorstep but went without buying? Of course, you have. But often this analysis results in building popups to capture those leads so that you can pursue them later.
The success rate for this is there but less. Often customers have lost interest or completed a purchase elsewhere.
What if you could stop them from leaving by problem-solving instead of just getting their details?
Yes, capturing lost leads needs innovative thinking and proactive solutions to keep the sales flowing.
This is why every Ecommerce website needs a chatbot that can assist customers when they reach you.
Even though ecommerce has revolutionized shopping habits, there are some things that a physical store does better. A personal touch is one of them. Imagine browsing a retail store and meeting a salesperson who can help you make the right choices without demanding a lot of effort from you.
That is what a chatbot can do for your ecommerce website. Of course, a chatbot is just a computer program but you can customize it to your needs, your industry, and your consumer’s buying process. You can set conditions that trigger a chatbot so that you never lose any consumer over a question you could have solved.
Customer support is the backbone of any business. Chatbots can help you strengthen your customer service while reducing costs by nearly 50%.
Valid question, but the truth is these two departments are mutually exclusive. Customer support teams are the big guns that solve bigger issues and help you improve your reviews and CSAT scores. By involving them in resolving smaller doubts or issues, you increase turnaround time and reduce productivity.
You must understand that even across a computer screen, customers expect conversations and immediate resolutions. Emails and call centers make this process very difficult whereas chatbots solve their pain within a few clicks.
Customers stay for less than a minute if they can’t find what they came for. Exit pop-up chatbots with navigation assistance can make this problem go away. Reduce customer effort and make it easier for them to stay with you longer.
Ecommerce chatbots help you capture consumer behavior and analyze them in real-time to build better solutions. Not every customer may reach out via email but even a TOFU customer interacts with a chatbot. It is easier and gives you a lot to go by.
With ecommerce chatbots, you can serve customers across time zones and provide 24/7 support truly.
But if you think that ecommerce chatbots are just for talking to your customers and can be a one size fits all solution, we have a lot more in store for you.
When done well, your chatbots can help you run your ecommerce business and optimize every step of the buyer’s journey.
Let’s take a look at how.
There is more than one type of chatbot program that can help your ecommerce website. As we said, you can implement them across channels and for every step of the process to optimize conversions.
Wondering how?
Take a look at this list below.
Sometimes by handling the easy part first, you can cross a major chunk of tasks off your list. Statistically, the reasons why a customer moves away from your website is also a few simple questions that went unanswered.
So why not implement simple ecommerce chatbots to get this out of the way?
These chatbots are simplistic in their programming and deliver predefined answers to frequently asked questions to your customers. They do not learn anything from the customer’s previous behavior nor does it go beyond being an interactive FAQ tool.
If you want to start a chatbot program but are feeling unsure of its impact on your business, begin here.
This chatbot will give you a sense of what your customers expect from you and help you get the low-hanging fruits in the conversion process squared away.
Based on the demand, you can scale this chatbot or migrate to a smarter version.
AI is easily the biggest thing to happen to the trillion-dollar Ecommerce industry. With AI and ML, personalization is now easier than ever. And while you are mostly leveraging this technology to improve product recommendations in your marketing efforts, did you know you can boost your chatbot experience too?
What if the chatbot on your ecommerce website goes beyond being a FAQ machine? What if you could bring the intuitive and interactive salesperson experience online without shelling out a fortune?
Yes, Smart chatbots can make this happen.
You can customize your chatbot programs to learn from your consumer insights, navigation maps, purchase behavior, and more to offer custom solutions to your visitors.
Sounds amazing, right?
Here a few use cases for smart chatbots for inspiration :
As annoying as popups can be, welcome bots are often “welcomed” by people because it saves them the effort of actually navigating the website or store. Ensure that you make it as non-intrusive as possible so that customers can still ignore them. Of course, your copy and design have to ensure that they actually don’t.
Upselling and cross-selling are everyday affairs in the ecommerce world. But sadly they often happen sporadically or on other channels. Pushing them to only on the conversion page is also a bad idea since it disrupts the conversion process.
Solution: Personalized product picks for upselling or cross-selling to a customer by a friendly bot salesperson on the website.
Making navigation is a challenge that every ecommerce business has to tackle head-on. Sometimes the algorithms can be way off from a customer’s expectation. So this is the time to make the chatbots step in and ask the customer what they really need.
AI conversational chatbots can improve conversions and enhance the experience for the customer. With a personalized recommendation program in place, the chatbot can close deals within minutes and earn you a happy customer for life.
Do you want to truly level up your customer service efforts? Would you believe if we told you that the way to a customer’s heart is via engagement? Yes, this is true. Customer engagement cannot be restricted to social media channels or other marketing channels. You need your customers happy and in the zone when they are shopping too.
So bring up the chatbots and let them make your customer happy.
A few ways to engage your customers and step up their on-site experience are :
When you are running an ecommerce business, social media is the beast you have to dance with, no matter what. You have customers there and they would absolutely love to connect with you there too.
What you must understand is that social media channels also serve as a litmus test of customer experience for many customers, especially those belonging to the Gen Z and Millennials generation.
Implementing customer service chatbots for Facebook and Instagram has become the need of the hour to tap into the enormous potential these platforms possess.
If they have a good experience there, they are more likely to visit your ecommerce store. Or if your social commerce game is strong, you might close some transactions on social media itself.
What is it that you can do to gain an edge over your peers when it comes to chatbot implementation? Often with technological solutions like this, we tend to leave them on auto-pilot. But a few personal touches can catapult your customer experience metrics to new heights.
A curation of ecommerce chatbots best practices :
Let’s not pretend to be something we are not. Your customers should upfront know that they are interacting with a bot and you must acknowledge that it is not a substitute for human customer support.
The chatbot exists to make things easier and the introduction copy must own up to it.
Keep the language simple so that customers can navigate the commands easily and they have the right expectations from the beginning.
A picture speaks a thousand words and in a chatbot experience, the right media can mean the difference between a satisfied or unsatisfied customer. Finding the right product and fulfilling expectations is a challenge for every shopper.
Bridge the gap with your personalized chatbots by replacing text with media using AI solutions. AI can help pick the right product out based on the descriptions your customers provide. As the customer chooses, the bot learns and delivers better.
But for this, the brand has to build a media-rich repository.
While the chatbot is not a substitute for a customer support executive, they still represent your brand. So it is important to ensure that right from the content’s tone, design, and overall UI is consistent with the brand’s visual identity.
Work with a designer and customize it to make it work for you.
Ecommerce Chatbots are here to improve your customer experience. The question is, are you ready to level up your ecommerce business? If you are ready, hire the right people to create ecommerce chatbots. Or there are plenty of convenient tools that let you set up your chatbot in no time. There’s no question of whether you need a chatbot or not. The question is how you do it.
