How E-Commerce Brands Use Conversational AI to Reduce Customer Effort

It is estimated that there are nearly 26.5 million eCommerce sites globally. In other words, it is a highly saturated and competitive market. As such, businesses are perpetually battling it out to find the best ways to woo and win over customers.

Conversational AI can be the secret ingredient for this sauce. It eliminates roadblocks in the customer journey and makes the value proposition accessible. The resulting reduction of customer effort makes the experience frictionless and yields a bouquet of benefits from higher customer satisfaction levels to customer loyalty to increased revenue.

Here are some ways businesses can leverage conversational AI for eCommerce customer service.

How to Use Conversational AI for eCommerce Customer Service & Support

The following are a few practical use cases for leveraging conversational AI to lend customer service and support in the eCommerce sector:

Value-Driven Engagement

Proactive and value-driven engagement is one of the greatest contributions of conversational AI for eCommerce customer service. Such engagement spans understanding customer issues, addressing them before they compound or aggravate, highlighting the unique selling point, and capturing feedback for the experience.

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For instance, Domino’s Virtual Customer Assistant greets website visitors. This simple menu-based chatbot contains options for commonly availed services like order tracking, deals and discounts, queries and feedback, store location, and more.

Such proactive anticipation of customer requirements and subsequent assistance reduces customer effort in seeking these options by sieving through the website or app. The loading of value nuggets at such interaction points demonstrates the brand’s commitment to serving its customers with a smile!

Hands-free Commerce

The hands-free economy is growing at an accelerated rate. About one in three US households owns a connected device such as a smart speaker. At the same time, a little over 27% of US consumers have made online payments using voice assistants. Such trends point toward the untapped potential of voice-enabled shopping for eCommerce.

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Conversational AI can be one medium for businesses to break into the scene. Powered by technologies like Natural Language Processing, conversational AI can capture voice inputs throughout the purchase journey.

This means that everything, from finding products to making payments to tracking orders can be done using voice commands. Such lowering of barriers will make the eCommerce store accessible to all.

Self-Service Portals

Nearly 8 out of 10 consumers attempt to resolve issues by themselves before connecting with a customer service representative. This figure emphasizes how self-servicing is gaining importance with consumers seeking DIY options to address problems.

Conversational AI can facilitate such actions through interactive chatbots and helpful virtual assistants. Such innovations can handle customer queries, offer assistance, and escalate complex problems autonomously by accepting, comprehending, and interpreting customer inquiries with high fidelity and pitching appropriate responses.

Implementing such assistive technology across multiple channels, such as websites, messaging apps, and voice-based interfaces lays the groundwork for a multi-channel support network that combats customer frustrations in record time.

Personalized Product Recommendations

Making personalized recommendations is a classic use case for conversational AI for eCommerce customer service. The technology is favorably positioned to capture and analyze high volumes of customer data that act as a window into the client’s purchase habits, spending capacity, preferences, and behaviors.

It can engage potential buyers in intelligent conversations by asking targeted and specific questions to understand their requirements. Conversational AI can then utilize this data for tailoring the customer experience by suggesting contextual and relevant products.

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Even when the technology misses the mark (as any technology is prone to do even with a high degree of accuracy), then it can perform sentiment analysis to detect negative emotions and recalibrate the strategy accordingly. Such proactive engagement reduces the customer’s effort involved in locating the right product.

Omnichannel Support

Modern-day consumers are no longer married to a particular platform. eCommerce businesses have noticed how customers weave through websites, emails, social media, phone calls, applications, and more. As a result, businesses have to establish their presence across all these channels.

Seeing this trend, about 60% of companies extend customer support across 3+ channels. And businesses have pivoted to such solutions by deploying conversational AI for eCommerce customer service.

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Conversational AI integrates across multiple channels without losing the brand connection or diverting from the native look and feel. These virtual assistants can pop up on websites, instant messengers, social media, and even voice searches to keep the customer flowing through the sales pipeline.

Even if customers switch platforms, the omnichannel setup retains context, thereby preventing the need for capturing customer inputs over and over again.

Consistent Experiences

Despite increasing eCommerce outreach across multiple channels, conversational AI ensures that the customer experience remains uniform throughout. After all, they follow a pre-configured, standardized workflow devoid of any bias. Such consistency increases the brand value and position by injecting reliability.

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Additionally, conversational AI continues to learn and improve with every iteration. Apart from sentiment analysis, it captures real-time feedback, which helps businesses understand common customer pain points, recurring issues, or areas of confusion.

Based on such insights, they can train the conversational AI engine to streamline responses, improve accuracy and relevance, and smoothen the customer experience. This paves the way for a long-term strategy aimed at simplifying and enriching the customer experience.

Improve Customer Experience with Conversational AI

The use of conversational AI for eCommerce customer service has been instrumental in reducing customer effort or improving customer experience.

eCommerce businesses can leverage their capabilities to engage customers meaningfully, implement voice-enabled shopping, launch self-service portals, personalize product recommendations, offer omnichannel support, and make customer experiences consistent.

JustCall comes equipped with conversational intelligence that infuses value in every business interaction, be it over call or chat. Get in touch with our experts to know how you can deploy conversational AI for eCommerce customer service success!