Chatbots: Boon for e-commerce businesses

E-commerce is an intensely competitive market where businesses need to keep innovating and adopting new technologies to sustain. These technologies come in packages, large & small, to help optimize the systems and processes, ensuring seamless experiences for the customers.

One of these technologies — Chatbots — has been a popular topic of discussion in the retail and e-commerce industries. Some discussions focus on how the user experience is improved while the remaining provides a detailed view of implementing and adopting chatbots for businesses. In this blog, we try to provide a holistic view of how chatbots help scale e-commerce businesses and subsequently consumers by dividing the benefits into three categories — predictive recommendations, engaging consumer engagement, reduction in the purchase process

Predictive recommendations

E-commerce industries are user heavy and need to cater to different segments of audiences and their requirements. Whenever there is a discussion about the role of chatbots, one quote stands out -

“Goal is to turn data into information and information into insights.” — Carly Fiorina, Former CEO of HP

Imagine chatbots to be the one that hoards information and turn information into insights. They help customers find the products they’re looking for without extensive browsing, thereby providing users an incentive to stay on the platform and reduce drop-offs.

For instance, Amazon provides best-in-class search for users to find the products they want. The search takes into consideration a number of factors including user dialects, ease in product categorization and user buying behavior & patterns.

Simple & Quick Consumer Engagement

The primary function of chatbots is to be conversational by nature using text, buttons, and images and understand typed natural language requests. This is the reason that the most famous chatbots run inside messaging applications such as Facebook Messenger or Skype.

Hence, chatbots provide a huge benefit to e-commerce businesses to connect with the users. In a high volume business of e-commerce, chatbots provide a highly scalable system to manage individual user conversations simultaneously for millions of users while gaining user insights to improve the product flow and experience.

Reducing Purchase Time

Chatbots help consumers to interact with the products at critical stages of their journey, increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement. Chatbots provide the assistance to access product information quickly and make informed decisions to purchase the products.

Moreover, customers do not need to look at any other source to gain information on the products. Chatbots process information in the form of notifications, reminders, product updates to fuel conversions and enhance social experiences.

Originally published at icecreamlabs.com on November 9, 2018.