The e-commerce industry is one of the biggest in the world today. And chatbots are playing a huge role in pushing it forward. The artificial intelligence technology is used to enhance business and customer relationship. Amongst many other benefits, it enables businesses to communicate effectively for customer satisfaction.
83% of customers reveal that they need some form of support in their online journey. Providing such support manually isn’t always sufficient. Chatbots come to the rescue by filling up loopholes in ecommerce.
Here are 4 ways you can use chatbots to grow your ecommerce business:
- Enhance your sales funnel
Sales funnel is a tool for driving sales in e-commerce. As visitors arrive on your site, they need to be guided and nurtured to make favorable buying decisions. Research shows that 57.6% retail orders are abandoned by customers who aren’t motivated to carry on to the end.
A typical sales funnel is made up of four stages namely:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Decision
- Action
Customer data retrieved via bots, can be used to stir and hold customer attention through these stages.
Providing helpful information at every point of your sales funnel keeps them longer on your site. The more time spent on your site increases chances of purchase as they may come across items they like.
Only 2% of first-time visitors to a site buy things. Rather than lose the other 98%, you can use chatbots to create a successful ecommerce strategy for lead nurturing.
Bots are able to differentiate qualified leads from unqualified ones by interpreting customer data. Hence, they focus on qualified leads to get favorable results.
- Facilitate customer engagement
Ecommerce businesses receive a lot of inquiries and complaints. Due to the virtual nature of the business, there’s no avenue for face to face interactions. Their phone lines are always buzzing and their inbox plays host to several emails.
Customers on the other end are eager to receive a response. A little delay in getting back to them rubs them the wrong way. No matter how much your support team tries to be efficient, things could get overwhelming sometimes; they cannot attend to everyone at the same time.
Operating on a first-come-first-serve basis elongates the queue, leaving many customers agitated. Speedy response is one of the strengths of chatbots. As customer inquiry comes through, the bot receives and responds to it automatically.
Thanks to advanced technologies, bots are trained to engage customers in two-way conversations. Their responses are apt, creating the natural flow of human communication.
- Personalize the customer experience
A personalized customer experience is the highlight of modern e-commerce. The online consumer audience is diverse, selling everything to everyone will give you limited results. Smart businesses are creating market segments, and offering customers products based on individual needs.
Chatbots can help you identify what customers want. As they engage in various activities online, their online history is collated and interpreted to create an individual persona.
Two customers may have similar demographics, but their interactions may be different due to individual preferences. Create a more rewarding customer experience by streamlining their engagement. The system automatically showcases only items that are similar to the ones they have taken a look at previously.
- Leverage feedback
What are customers saying about your business? The answer to that question bothers on customer satisfaction. If you tick the box in that regard, they will be full of your praises. But when you fall short, the repercussion is unpleasant.
Feedback can be used for business scaling. Lack of feedback could lead to poor customer satisfaction because you may be doing the wrong thing.
This is dangerous.
When you have no one to buy what you are selling, it’s only a matter of time before you pack up.
Getting customer feedback manually is tedious. A lot of resources go into collection and interpretation of data. Chatbots can be used to simplify the process. There are a number of options at your disposal such as emails, instant messaging and online surveys.
After a conversation with customers via instant messaging or email, an automated message is sent to them, asking for their opinion about your product.
Bots can also be programmed to send survey emails to customers periodically to get their opinions.
You know a lot of e-commerce stores, don’t you? As the market continues to boom, more businesses are trooping in. Competition is constantly on the rise as every player struggles to get their own share of customers. Make use of chatbots to step up to the plate and beat the competition.
Featured Image Credit: Pixabay
Author Bio
Chris Odogwu is a freelance content writer. Connect with him on LinkedIn.