The next step in technological evolution is always around the corner and every invention within this evolution is affecting our lives profoundly. As humans, we have to be on our toes to explore, experience and enjoy the ground breaking technologies all the time.
Since last few years, the tech industry is constantly scrutinizing few leading technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) services, VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), IoT (Internet of Things), Big Data and many more.
It might be a bit unconventional, but “Conversational Commerce” is has a lot to do with AI than generally expected.
Conversational Commerce & AI
Chris Messina coined the term “Conversational Commerce” in 2015 while observing a new trend approaching the communication and messaging space. WhatsApp got acquired by Facebook for a whooping $19billion deal, Google launched extraordinary real-time translations, Fetch introduced texting shopping assistants and Uber’s seamless integration into Facebook Messenger. Something amazing happened in this space and a new commerce had emerged.
Conversational commerce is a relatively new term, but you can’t deny having an awareness of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and chatbots. A chatbot with AI interface boosts up the responsiveness of an app. The term of conversational commerce comes into existence due to a real-time intelligent interaction between an AI based chatbot, and users.
For new comers, it’s a bit difficult to understand the connection amongst AI, chatbots, and conversational commerce. And you might feel hesitant to adopt the new concept and reap the business benefits. So, let’s learn about how AI, chatbots, and conversational commerce are interconnected with each other.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Understand Artificial Intelligence (AI) in detail by referring Artificial Intelligence: A Rising Star of Mobile Technology.
Chatbots
It’s a computer program that simulates human conversation or chat with the support of AI. It is also popular as a chatterbox, chatterbot, talkbot, bot, or artificial conversational entity. Chatbots are dialogue systems used to set up a conversation in textual or auditory form. They are specifically designed for the commercial purpose, such as information acquisition or customer service, where system interacts with the users almost like a human. It behaves like a communication partner.
There are two types of chatbots. One is a function-based that runs according to the pre-defined set of rules. Another is AI based that not just understands the commands, but language too. It learns through the everyday conversations with users and continuously gets smarter in providing the most relevant response to them.
Conversational Commerce
Conversational commerce, an emerging concept, is representing a next great technology for business communication. It enables organizations and customers to interact using the texting and voice communication facilities of chatbots. Customers can ask queries, get customer support, read reviews, receive personalized recommendations and make a purchase using a messaging app of the organization.
With the help of chatbots (having AI interface integration), organizations can respond to the customers instantly without any human intervention. They can prepare a set of required information and install it in the chat app/tool. The app responds to the customers’ questions accordingly.
AI based chatbots understand and analyze human behavior after each response. The app starts reacting intelligently to each question in terms of identifying customers’ concerns and delivering satisfactory human-like responses.
Why Conversational Commerce Is A Game Changing Strategy for Online Shopping?
The combination of AI and chatbots has evolved the concept of conversational commerce. It enables small to mid-sized organizations to add extra values to their digital channels. They can set up a seamless communication platform to reap exclusive business benefits of:
Greater Customer Intelligence
Chatbots with the AI interface can log and store key data points to reach out to a large customer base. An organization can use the data to optimize product development and deliver a more personalized purchase experience.
Highly Scalable Customer Services
Automate the functions of your customer service department by introducing AI based chatbots. Ask your customer service representatives to focus on optimizing the chatbot experience rather than interacting with customers directly. Provide human assistance only when necessary. Companies can run the business with less human resources, as chatbot shares the responsibilities to engage customers and interact with them.
Competitiveness of Small Businesses
The business landscape is getting more and more competitive as SMEs have started using hi-tech technologies of cloud computing and remote services. Now it’s quite easy for them to boost up their business capabilities through big data analytics, video conferencing, etc. Chatbots work as extra employees for the small and mid-sized enterprises. It performs various strategic functions on behalf of the company and contributes to an accelerated growth rate.
Personalized Sales and Marketing
Offering a human-like touch to conversation process, organizations can give the feeling of connectivity to the target audience. It increases customer engagement and helps companies in establishing a strong relationship with them. Marketing and sales team can utilize the data collected by chatbot to launch highly efficient campaigns that aids in winning the competition and increasing customer loyalty.
A Different Way of Communication
Clicking on a drop down menu or search tab are quite old fashioned aspects to find out the required information. Chatbots have set a new trend by facilitating customers with conversation based communication. Companies can receive customer’s feedback quickly and change their products/services according to deliver maximum customer satisfaction.
When we are talking about to shift conversation approach from text-based to human-like, it will be definitely not stopping by sending emoji-based reactions. What we can expect is, more real-time interactions to deliver more realistic user experience.
Popular Examples for Conversational Commerce
Uber
Uber, the pioneer and industry leader in ride sharing domain, announced its plan to facilitate users to hail an Uber ride using Facebook messenger. Users can adopt this new approach, Uber offered 20$ credits for trying out the service chat with drivers, as well as pay for the ride using the Facebook Messenger. But yeah, they cannot book the ride from this platform. To encourage users to.
This integration helps companies in terms of increasing consumer base and improving customer engagement by offering all the services at one place.
WeChat is a well-known social media platform having 700 million monthly active users. The company tried out something different and unusual from competitors in the China region. Along with the standard features, WeChat started offering various services such as online food ordering, tracking fitness goals, paying utility bills, buying movie tickets, and much more.
The result? More than 10million Chinese businesses have opened their accounts with WeChat. They prefer to run the business using WeChat instead of developing mobile app or website.
A new human-like digital ecosystem is rising! Development of chatbot having an AI interface allows you to interact with the organizations similar to your friends and family.
Aspiring to adopt conversational commerce and build up an AI based chatbot? Feel free to share your expectation with team Intuz. Utilizing a decade long experience in mobile app development , we build up next-generation chatbot for your business to drive incredible customer-driven values.
Image Credit: Uber| WALKTHECHAT
