Impact of AI on Sales and Customer Service in the eCommerce World

eCommerce has come a long way from its initial days. Today consumers are happily engaging with eCommerce platforms as they do with the traditional brick-and-mortar stores. eCommerce portals are now providing their customers with a uniform sales experience making sure that there is no disconnect between the offline and online worlds. Owing to the push to provide a seamless customer experience, we have seen this industry invest heavily in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics to drive conversation as well as sales. AI’s evolution over a period of time has made it invaluable for the eCommerce segment to analyze customer data and anticipate customer needs to drive personalized experiences across devices. Statista estimates that the global retail sales of eCommerce are expected to generate $653 billion in 2018. With eCommerce platforms becoming a norm, and technology changing the way commerce is done, eCommerce companies have to work aggressively and intelligently to convert, activate and engage their prospective consumers. 

In recent times, chatbots are becoming an indelible part of the eCommerce experience. A Ubisend report shows that 1 out of 5 consumers is willing to purchase goods from a chatbot. Almost 40% of consumers use chatbots to look up sales and offers. Chatbots are the online virtual assistants that are being leveraged by organizations across the globe as a productive customer touchpoint. It is an AI system used by businesses to communicate with the customer inside of the application in use. Leveraging Natural Language Processing or NPL as it is more popularly known, chatbots identify and understand customer requests and provide relevant answers to the same. More advanced chatbots employ the use of Machine Learning to give a more personalized experience and enhance customer interactions. As a result of this, the responses from chatbots are less robotic. 

Chatbots have also become a natural part of the eCommerce evolution. As the consumers of today and the rising millennial population spend most of their time using messaging apps, it becomes a logical step to use chatbots to market to customers. In eCommerce, here’s a look at how chatbots are impacting sales and customer service. 

Significant Savings in Human Capital

eCommerce chatbots are relatively easy to implement and can provide 24/7 online customer support unlike human customer service agents. Repetitive questions can be handled by the chatbots, freeing up the human agents to tackle more complex enquires which increases efficiency.. Chatbots have a higher engagement capacity and can remind customers about products by sending them relevant promotional offers and product updates. This helps in keeping the customer continuously engaged without burdening the human assets.

Greater Engagement Levels

Chatbots, powered by AI, can learn from the customers’ past behavior and are able to cross-sell and upsell to a customer in an engaging, conversational, and personalized manner. AI gives chatbots the power to become intuitive and helps them make contextual recommendations. For example, if an individual buys a Smart television from an online store, the chatbot can make relevant suggestions by displaying peripherals which the customer might need. Since the chatbot is able to identify the implied need of the customer by displaying ‘things that you might find interesting’ in context with the purchase, it can often convert the consumers’ implied need to an explicit need and can lead to a successful sale.

Wider Reach

Chatbots can help sales teams by increasing their reach and penetration without the additional effort. Millennials, for example, are very active on social and messaging platforms. This demographic also has the most buying power. Almost 67% of online sales are done by millennials. Chatbots can now not only identify this audience but also engage with them, respond to their queries and be involved in group conversations. Sephora’s virtual artist chatbot allows users to share their “virtual looks” with friends to ask for advice before deciding to purchase the products. Chatbots can be easily integrated across messaging applications and social media websites and can thus lead to deeper market penetration.

Data-Focused

Forrester suggests that “how an experience makes the customer feel is the biggest predictor of loyalty in many industries.” Chatbots can make predictive sales more compelling by using AI to analyze feedback, customer comments as well as user data (latest purchases, hobbies, preferences, location analytics etc.). Chatbots can accumulate and analyze this data, raise red flags if any, and direct people to the right resources when needed, making sure that they keep customer sentiment in mind. Gartner estimates that by 2020, customers will be more comfortable conversing with chatbots than with their human counterparts. Chatbots thus become great vehicles for collecting customer feedback and other associated responses, analyzing them and gain deeper insights into the consumers' psyche and what she is looking for. By working with data that is relevant, chatbots send appropriate notifications to the consumer regarding new products and services through the channel of their preference on the device of their choice. 

Improve Customer Interactions

Chatbots are not only great at collecting and analyzing customer information, but they are also a great vehicle for providing quality information to the customer in a more engaging manner. By creating fun and engaging interactions with the customers, chatbots help in creating deeper engagement with the user. The Whole Foods chatbot, for example, allows users to search for recipes using simple emojis through Facebook Messenger. Since chatbots react to customers with appropriate and relevant data, offer the right products, interact with the customer throughout the buying journey, right from product selection to placing the order, they manage to create a flawless chain of events that is devoid of any errors. This helps in lowering the cart abandonment rates and driving sales. 

Technologies such as AI and chatbots have become more important than ever as we move deeper into the experience economy. AI chatbots improve eCommerce workflows, make the customer journey smoother, and simplify sales. These chatbots are no longer a futuristic and emerging technology. The technology is fast taking roots and will have matured completely in no time. It is only a matter of time before we wonder, how we even got by without this technology.