The main goal of the ecommerce sector, or any business for that matter, is to increase sales and generate revenue. The ecommerce sector greatly depends on customer’s online satisfaction. The way they can achieve the aforementioned goal is by reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Thus, they began using ChatBots.
ChatBots can help in the above mission. Information is audience-specific. A certain piece of information may be important to the customer and have no relevance to the backend section of the employees involved in the transaction. The ranges of users of the ChatBot can be from customers to CXOs.
How a ChatBot works
Artificial Intelligence serves as the core for all the functions of a ChatBot. It is able to process an immense flow of data and derives valuable insights and meaningful responses from it. This is conceivable on the grounds that ChatBots saddle the procured pool of data and criticism to enhance the procedure and encourage payment processes. The concept of Deep Learning empowers ChatBots to capture product images and names.
The ChatBot will have access to details of all the customers. These details will include fields such as:
●Name
●Email id
●Phone Number
●Location
●Past Purchases
●Items frequented
●Items added in the cart
The ChatBot uses these details to create trends and predict what a customer is likely to purchase. The bot will alert the customer to new deals and promotions related to the items they have bought or frequented.
When a customer asks a question to a ChatBot, the responses given by the bot are all programmed. The ChatBot has access to all the products and their information in the portal and it also has information to the details of all the customers’ details.
Customer-end uses ChatBots in e-commerce:
1) Shipping Information:
A customer waiting for an order to be delivered can enquire about the status of shipping and details like shipping ID, date and time of delivery, contact information of the delivery person and other such details such that the customer can be available during the required time.
2) Product Information:
A customer can enquire about a particular product without visiting its page. The ChatBot can return all the information about the product like customer rating, specifications and price. A sample query for this use case is ‘Can you give me information about Instax mini 9?’
3) Related Products information:
If a customer is perusing through details of a particular product, he/she can ask the ChatBot to provide information and comparisons of related or similar products. This is a quick and easy way to arrive at a decision.
4) Remarketing:
The ChatBot can remind the customers about their previous purchases and then market related goods. The customer can also be reminded of buying the same product again if it is perishable. For example, food products. BigBasket.com uses recommender systems to perform trend analysis and form predictions on what the customer is likely to buy next based on past purchases and reviews.
5) Sending mass promotional messages:
A ChatBot can be used to send individual and mass messages to a people about upcoming promotions or discounts. Mass messages can be sent to a group of people who are related to the topic i.e. who have purchased or browsed for similar items in the past. The people must be grouped on this basis and that is done due to the intelligent factor of AI.
6) Cart Recovery:
If a customer leaves the online shopping process midway, the ChatBot is equipped to remind the customer that the process is unfinished and that there are items in the cart for which payment is pending. This is an important feature of an ecommerce ChatBot as it exercises a supremely ‘human’ factor.
7) Personalized service:
A ChatBot can access and analyse every customer’s individual profile and past purchases. This can help the bot in forming an analysis about what products or type of products the customer prefers and what have they purchased in the past and at what frequency. The answers to these questions will prove to be extremely important for the ecommerce portal as this information will help them in analysing trends of what customers like and buy. The ChatBot can then send alerts to a customer about offers or promotions in their preferred products. Therefore, there are various demographics that a ChatBot uses to settle on a target customer such as age, location, gender, history etc. They give a customized experience to customers based on profiles and give custom recommendations.
8) Reorder mechanism:
A customer can send a request to the ChatBot to reorder some previous order he/she placed in the ecommerce portal. The ChatBot will identify the Order number and the keywords and repeat the order. This saves a lot of time as the customer does not have to add the items to the cart all over again.
9) Search functionality:
A ChatBot can help a customer in searching for the web page of a particular product. The customer can pose a question to a ChatBot about the product he/she wishes to view. The ChatBot can then redirect the customer to the web page of the said product.
10) Improve the shopping experience by reducing the wait time:
ChatBots are said to perform mundane, repetitive tasks in the best possible way and extremely quick. In this way, the customer’s shopping experience becomes quicker and more pleasurable. All of the customers’ queries can get answered much quicker, thus saving valuable time. It also has 24/7 availability, thus having an advantage over a human factor who has limitations.
11) Shopping Cart Integration:
Once a ChatBot framework is incorporated with one of the shopping baskets, it can work with the majority of the stores in light of that stage. The goal of this technology is to support as many shopping carts it possibly can. Likewise, such frameworks require shopping basket coordination to recover item details, amounts, shipping terms and other data that ChatBots may use to furnish guests with precise answers.
Author Bio:
Nitesh Behani, a creative and passionate mobile application enthusiast helps companies with Industry-specific solutions on Mobile Application, AI, IOT, ChatBots, FinTech, Real Estate and more. He is a co-founder of Magneto IT Solutions Pvt. Ltd, a leading Mobile app and ChatBot development company in USA & India.
