Today, brands are finding ways to scale automated consumer communication while keeping the human touch. Creating conversational interactions enables brands to meet advanced consumer expectations on the one hand while delivering immediate consumer satisfaction on the other. It doesn’t matter whether the conversational experience is offered to a potential consumer via a chatbot, messaging platform, chat app, or voice assistant. Conversational commerce can enable brands to offset the absence of personal interaction in their online stores. That applies not only to the physical absence of a helpful shop assistant but also to the type of content customers receive. This blog post will guide you through everything you need about Conversational Commerce.
Introduction to Conversational Commerce
Conversational commerce is a term utilized to define selling services and products through chat applications. In essence, it is a connection between eCommerce and messaging. Brands can guide their customers through the entire marketing and sales funnel via their preferred channels and create personalized interactions to enrich the conversational experience. They can engage through popular chat platforms like WhatsApp Business, Apple Messages for Business, Google’s Business Messages, and even communicate via SMS. Consumers now have the option to seek assistance from either a live agent or a chatbot, access product pricing information, receive tailored recommendations, explore product catalogues, and complete purchases seamlessly within a single conversation.
Steps to Get Started With Conversational Commerce
Just as Rome wasn’t constructed overnight, so your conversational commerce strategy must be completed in 24 hours. Attaining remarkable results and distinguishing yourself requires meticulous attention to the most minor details. Below are steps to initiate your journey into conversational commerce:
- Analyze Your Business Needs
- Do Your Research
- Identify a Partner
- Launch Your Conversational Commerce Tool
- Measure Success
1- Analyze Your Business Needs
Before embarking on implementing your conversational tool, it’s imperative to assess the challenges faced by your team and your customers. Establishing realistic goals is essential for success. Perhaps you aim to boost sales, so addressing issues like reducing shopping cart abandonment would be instrumental. Alternatively, you might prioritize enhancing customer support to foster greater brand loyalty by providing faster and more convenient assistance. Once you’ve compiled your list of aspirations, categorize and prioritize them to identify those most critical to your business. It’s essential to recognize that you cannot overhaul all processes simultaneously.
2- Do Your Research
Before committing to a particular solution, establish your benchmark. Investigate how other companies within your industry leverage conversational commerce’s potential. Next, compile a comprehensive list of available solutions. Request demos and enroll in free trials to assess each solution’s merits and drawbacks. If you already have a solution or channel, familiarize yourself with notable examples that can inspire you. Additionally, prioritize customer feedback. Review your input to identify any gaps in your services. Consider interviewing customers to gain deeper insights into their current needs.
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3- Identify a Partner
Selecting a dependable conversational solution that seamlessly integrates into your existing framework marks only the initial step in the process. The subsequent challenge lies in effectively implementing and managing it, which often necessitates specialized personnel. For instance, if opting for live chat, it becomes imperative to adequately train your team to deliver prompt and high-quality support via text. With the average response time for live chat being 47 seconds, prolonged delays can provoke customer frustration. In cases where swift service isn’t viable, exploring a chatbot platform might be advantageous, although this demands proficiency in conversational design.
4- Launch Your Conversational Commerce Tool
After choosing your conversational tool, the next step is defining key performance indicators (KPIs). These include metrics like the volume of customer conversations, satisfaction scores, or conversation rates. These KPIs will enable you to gauge your success, identify the most effective solutions, and pinpoint areas that need refinement. Once all is set, you’re ready to embark on your journey into conversational commerce.
5- Measure Success
Even if you’ve neatly done everything, monitoring your performance is essential. Utilizing quality, real-time metrics can aid in evaluating your performance and enhancing your conversational efforts at each phase of the buyer’s journey. Integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities enables personalized recommendations and more efficient customer service. Regular monitoring and iteration based on feedback ensure continuous improvement and alignment with evolving consumer expectations.
Conversational Commerce Benefits
Consumers find conversational experience. They anticipate the ease and comfort of interacting with brands via their preferred chat apps from anywhere. Incorporating conversational commerce scenarios improves your customers’ experience and brings substantial business advantages to your brand. By prioritizing exceptional customer service, you can expedite the achievement of your business objectives, like:
- Improve Conversion Rates
- Reduce Cart Abandonment
- Build Customer Loyalty
- Increase Sales
- Optimize Costs and Boos Efficiency
Improve Conversion Rates
Businesses often allocate significant funds toward acquiring new customers. To illustrate, retaining existing customers can be up to seven times more cost-effective than converting a lead. This underscores the importance of optimizing every interaction to enhance the likelihood of turning leads into paying customers. Embracing omnichannel solutions enables businesses to improve conversion rates by streamlining lengthy sign-up procedures, delivering one-time pins or passwords via chat applications, and implementing chatbots for round-the-clock customer support.
Reduce Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment poses a significant challenge, with as much as 70% of shopping carts being abandoned. It’s crucial to pinpoint its root causes to combat this issue effectively. Prohibitive shipping fees are among the prevalent reasons customers must complete their purchases. Many customers are deterred by the necessity to register an account or a convoluted checkout procedure. Furthermore, consumers frequently utilize the shopping cart as a wishlist, adding numerous items to gauge their total cost before departing to compare similar lists on alternative websites.
Read Also: ECommerce Customer Retention Strategies and Tips
Build Customer Loyalty
Enhancing customer loyalty hinges on fostering robust relationships with your clientele. This entails ensuring they grasp your brand identity well and trust your ability to fulfill commitments. Cultivating customer loyalty involves consistently interacting with customers, preventing your brand from slipping their minds. You can accomplish this by categorizing customers according to their loyalty level, providing tailored incentives like exclusive discounts, informing them about delivery statuses, and issuing timely payment reminders.
Increase Sales
Utilizing popular chat apps favored by your customers can significantly boost your sales efforts. Leveraging insights from their past interactions and preferences, you can tailor promotions by sending them relevant products, services, or upgrades that cater to their needs. With customers spending an average of 38 minutes daily on WhatsApp alone, your marketing messages will receive the necessary exposure to make a meaningful impact when delivered through the appropriate channel. For effective cross-selling and upselling, consider sending products frequently bought alongside items from their recent order, along with reminder notifications for items awaiting purchase.
Optimize Costs and Boost Efficiency
Customer support representatives frequently deal with numerous low-value inquiries. Introducing a chatbot to your communication system can assist in directing your contact center agents toward handling more intricate and fulfilling tasks. In the healthcare and banking sectors alone, chatbots contributed to saving over $8 billion last year. This substantial cost-saving allows businesses to allocate funds where they are most needed while significantly reducing call center traffic. A virtual assistant is accessible round-the-clock, eliminating the need for customers to adhere to specific call hours or endure lengthy wait times to connect with an agent.
Challenges to Conversational Commerce
Conversational commerce faces several challenges when using messaging apps, chatbots, and other communication technologies to facilitate commercial transactions. No matter how much success you achieve in entering conversation commerce, you’re bound to encounter specific challenges, such as:
- Data Can be Siloed
- Feel Dehumanizing
Data Can Be Soiled
When undertaking a multi-departmental or omnichannel project, it’s crucial to be mindful of the potential for data silos to arise. Imagine a scenario where a customer starts conversing with your business on Facebook Messenger, which then shifts to SMS or email. If the data from one channel doesn’t seamlessly transfer to another, it could result in the customers having to repeat themselves, causing frustration and a subpar experience. Therefore, when choosing a conversation commerce tool, prioritize ones that integrate smoothly with other platforms.
Feel Dehumanizing
Frequently, automation tools can inadvertently make users feel disconnected from the human touch, notably when their artificial intelligence lacks current updates or adequate empathy. To address this, businesses should ensure their tools effectively recognize keywords and understand expressions of frustration or a desire to communicate with a natural person. Conversing fruitlessly with a chatbot that fails to comprehend can be highly frustrating, and the aim is to prevent such occurrences.
Final Thoughts
Conversational commerce is a dynamic fusion of technology and personalized customer interaction, revolutionizing how businesses engage with their audience. Utilizing real-time communication tools like bots, messaging apps, and voice assistants, conversational commerce holds immense potential for enhancing any brand. Developing a new strategy may require time, and handling conversations could present challenges. However, every strong relationship begins with a simple, informal chat. By approaching conversational commerce as a humane, empathetic journey, you can significantly make your customers feel at ease and welcomed.