Introduction
As the holiday season approaches, retailers are already looking for ways to make the most of their sales. Conversational commerce is an increasingly popular way to interact with customers and help them make the most of their purchases. This innovative technology can help businesses reach a wider audience and boost holiday sales by enabling a more personal, seamless, and conversational buying experience for their customers.
By leveraging conversational AI, businesses can automate simple tasks such as customer service, product recommendations, and more, allowing them to focus on what matters most: providing the best customer experience possible. With conversational commerce, businesses can create a more personalized shopping journey for customers and increase their satisfaction—all while increasing their bottom line.
What is Conversational Commerce?
Conversational commerce is an experience where customers can interact with brands through a natural language conversation. Customers can ask questions, get answers, and make purchases—all through a conversation with your brand.
Conversational commerce relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to enable a seamless experience. It’s an evolution of traditional eCommerce that allows retailers to offer a more personalized, hands-off experience. With conversational commerce, customers can ask questions, get product recommendations, and even make purchases—all without having to click, scroll or go through a traditional online purchasing process.
Conversational commerce is not only helpful during the holiday shopping season, but it can be implemented year-round. Whether customers are shopping while they’re at home or on-the-go, conversational commerce can help them get what they’re looking for in less time and with less effort. It allows businesses to keep the customer experience consistent throughout channels, no matter where the customer is engaging with the brand.
Benefits of Conversational Commerce for Holiday Sales
Unlike traditional eCommerce, where customers have to search for products, navigate a site and seek help to make a purchase, having a conversational commerce platform allows businesses to focus on providing the best customer experience and let AI assistants handle customer concerns. Through a conversation, brands can go beyond just selling products by providing a personalized experience tailored to each customer’s individual needs. With conversational commerce, businesses can also:
1. Drive up conversion rates
According to HubSpot, approximately 25% of online shoppers will abandon a purchase if it takes more than two minutes to complete — and that number increases to 40% during the holidays. Having a conversational commerce experience can help businesses reduce the amount of time it takes to make a purchase, keeping customers engaged and increasing conversion rates.
2. Enhance the brand perception
Customers want to shop with brands they can trust, and conversational commerce is an ingenious way for businesses to prove that they are innovative. Having a conversational commerce experience allows customers to interact with brands on a more personal level, helping them feel as though they’re interacting with a brand that they are deeply familiar with.
3. Reduce cart abandonment
During the holidays, shopping cart abandonment is even more common, meaning businesses are likely to lose potential sales due to lack of communication. Conversational commerce can help businesses better address the needs of each individual customer, reducing the likelihood they’ll abandon their cart without making a purchase.
Leveraging Conversational commerce
While conversational commerce is a powerful way to boost holiday sales, it’s important to note that it’s not a magical solution to all of a business’ problems. Businesses need to make sure they have a robust strategy in place that focuses on providing a tailored, personalized experience to each individual customer. With that in mind, here are a few characteristics businesses should look for when adopting a conversational AI assistant for commerce:
1. Staying Omnipresent
One of the biggest challenges retailers face when transitioning to a conversational commerce model is keeping the customer experience consistent across channels. Customers should be able to seamlessly transition from one channel to another and continue the same conversation with no interruptions. To solve this, businesses should opt for a conversational solution that can provide an omnipresent approach to customer interactions. Doing so will not only help businesses boost holiday sales but will enable them to sustain this experience throughout the year.
2. Personalization
With more time and attention being spent on the customer journey, there’s no better time to capitalize on the power of personalization. Whether customers are shopping in-store, on mobile, or on desktop, they should be experiencing a tailored experience. Doing so will help businesses boost holiday sales by increasing customer satisfaction, as well as brand perception. With the recent advancements in the conversational AI space, businesses can adopt an AI assistant that has the ability to hyper-personalize experiences for each of their customers. For example, for a customer who has stayed loyal to a business for many years, a conversational assistant can be automated to recognize such customers, and customize an offer right away that caters specifically to the customer’s needs. This way brands can encourage brand loyalty and repeat purchases and avoid customer churn.
3. Self-Service
While businesses are swamped with sales, some customers may only want help to finish their transaction or get a query answered. Such buyers are quite willing to use self-service options. Conversational commerce can infuse customer conversations with the information that customers need to make their purchases with minimum hassle. In fact, 36% of customers prefer interacting with virtual agents to solve their queries quickly than waiting to interact with a live person.
4. Payment Options
One of the biggest challenges retailers face in the digital space is accepting payments. It is imperative for brands to adopt a conversational assistant from AI forerunners who have a variety of tools at their disposal, that offer seamless payment options on their conversational platforms.
Conclusion
One of the most important aspects of leveraging conversational commerce is making sure it’s successful. With a robust strategy in place, businesses can ensure that their conversational experience is a success. Beyond that, they can also use certain metrics to gauge their accomplishments such as click-through rates, the number of questions answered, the average lengths of conversations, adoption amongst employees, and much more. Get in touch to learn more on how to improve your customer experience, stand out from the competition, and make the most of your revenue potential with conversational solutions from purpleSlate.
