Conversational commerce is a concept that should be considered by most business owners. While it was initially introduced as a business tool, it can also be understood as a mindset or approach to customer care. In an age where your customers expect to communicate with you on multiple channels, conversational commerce is an essential part of any business with online interactions.
Read on to find out why!Â
What is conversational commerce?
According to Shopify, put simply, conversational commerce is the âintersection of messaging apps and shopping.â In other words, conversational commerce enables you to use messaging apps to communicate with customers in real-time with the help of chatbots. Without having to be online yourself, conversational marketing allows you to deliver a seamless customer experience and build customer relationships.
With the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), you can interact with your customers using their preferred channels, such as Whatsapp, Facebook, or Twitter. Once on these platforms, conversational commerce can be done via chatbots and voice assistants that answer customer questions about your services or products and make personal recommendations.
Conversational commerce is here to stay
Conversational commerce technology enables you to constantly interact with your customers and support them through their customer journey anytime, anywhere. Additionally, conversational commerce technology allows chatbots and voice assistants to make highly personalized recommendations and suggestions to your customers. With data-driven technology, conversational commerce allows your business to provide a unique and personal customer journey to each one of your customers. With social media apps having an engagement rate of 80 percent, the ability to provide a seamless, personalized customer experience and regular, reliable communications is essential for any business wanting to stay afloat. As business to client communications over social media are becoming the norm, you can be sure that conversational commerce technology is here to stay.
Conversational commerce and customer care
Besides enabling a constant online presence in places that matter, conversational commerce also helps avoid shopping cart abandonment, brings customers back to carts, and increases Average Ticket Value (AVT).
Sales chatbots or voice assistants help avoid shopping cart abandonment by helping navigate a webpage, navigate the checkout process, and inform on delivery and return policies. By creating a seamless, intuitive customer experience, conversational commerce technology helps your customers stay on the page and follow through on their purchasing process.
In the case that a customer does fail to check out, chatbots can incentivize them to continue their shopping process. Another benefit is that chatbots are capable of asking customers why they abandoned the sales process. Without conversational commerce, most businesses try to reclaim their customers by sending email promotions. Such communication is not always timely, and will not lead to useful feedback about your business model.
In addition to helping abandon lost sales, conversational commerce helps increase your average ticket value (AVT). By using customer data, conversational commerce is capable of suggesting products that are especially relevant to your customers, and therefore, increase sales numbers. Recent studies show that positive customer experiences lead to 40% more spending among customers. Relying on a single channel of communication and not having constantly available customer support is no longer a sustainable option for any modern business.
Bottom line
With conversational commerce, you can make sure that you are constantly visible on the channels that your customers frequent most often. Additionally, conversational commerce will help you through the entire sales process, by helping avoid shopping cart abandonment, keeping customers engaged, and by increasing AVT.