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AI chatbots for e-commerce have become essential for customer engagement. As per Juniper Research, businesses will be able to save 2.5 billion hours using AI chatbots by the year 2023. This reflects the huge impact conversational assistance can bring to e-commerce and retail businesses.
How conversational AI can enhance the shopping experience
Relevant promotions and offers: Customers feel happy to see their desired products available at reasonable prices. AI-powered shopping assistant bots can understand their preferences and give them the most relevant discounts or offers.
Visual recommendations: Shopping assistants integrated across websites, WhatsApp, social media and other channels can enable visual searches for customers while engaging them. They can bring any product available in the inventory to the customer with one request. This improves the pace of buying decisions for customers.
Real-time information: Every customer wants brands to be instantly and proactively available to respond to their questions. And, that’s what Conversational AI for shopping assistance does. They are always there to understand customer needs and offer required information and solutions without making them wait.
Personalized experience: Conversational AI does more than general FAQs like chatbots. They engage customers on a 1:1 level of conversations and assist them with intent-based solutions and suggestions. This attracts customers over and over to the same brand to get personalized shopping assistance.
Why your brand needs conversational AI shopping assistants
In the digital age, AI-enabled shopping assistants have become crucially important for e-commerce businesses. They help to establish a direct communication channel with customers, instead of leaving them alone with the navigation of websites, products, and services.
1. Increasing sales conversions by engaging online store visitors
Almost every customer spends a lot of time navigating through the product pages of an online shopping portal before buying anything. For instance, in order to buy a dress, a customer would spend time browsing through the long list of brands and designs available at an online store. This process can be simplified with AI assistants.
An AI chatbot can engage and retain customers’ attention with humanized conversations, aligned with their shopping requirements. Bots can share a customized list of products, so a customer can easily browse and quickly make his or her purchase decisions.
2. Assisting with product selection and placing orders
With a huge collection and variety of product choices, customers, very often, feel confused to make their final decision. AI shopping assistants can be there to help through the product selection process. Based on their browsing history and filtered preferences, a shopping chatbot can create a list of all the relevant items a customer wants to look for.
The omnichannel presence of conversational AI plays a vital role in achieving this. Bots create a seamless journey across all customer touchpoints and simultaneously understand their needs and preferences to help with product selection.
During product selection, an AI chatbot for e-commerce can assist customers in terms of product variations, quality, discounts, costs, specifications, and other information. Then, they can help with order placement, payment submission, and more relevant assistance.
3. Improving the ease of finding product knowledge
Along with the list of products, customers also look for unique information and send additional queries to further understand a product. Many doubts can occur in their minds while navigating product pages and reading product descriptions.
Hence, the presence of a conversational assistant proves to be highly effective in resolving those doubts with instantly available product information. In fact, customers don’t even have to browse through the pages when an AI bot is available. They can simply ask their product-related queries to the virtual assistant and receive instant answers. This helps to close deals way faster than usual.
4. Sending order tracking-related details
Apart from assisting through shopping decisions, order tracking updates are another valuable functionality AI chatbots provide. Customers often feel concerned about the on-time delivery of the products they order. Hence, delivery tracking offers them a sense of calm and confirmation regarding the status and movement of their orders.
5. Conversational cross-selling and up-selling
Maintaining a conversational relationship with customers allows AI assistants to cross-sell and up-sell products based on their previous purchases, which increases the chances of conversions and customer retention as well.
A gentle reminder, an exclusive offer, or sharing unique product features can persuade customers towards adding more items to their Wishlist. And that is what a conversational AI shopping assistant can do for customers without requiring any human intervention.
If you feel the need to accelerate your online e-commerce or retail customer engagement, ORAI can help you with an omnichannel adoption of Conversational AI Shopping Assistant.
Let’s chat over WhatsApp, or book a FREE DEMO with us.
Swapnil Jain
CEO-ORAI Robotics
Stay in contact with ORAI