The experience that a brand creates is what a customer remembers. Gartner in its Customer 360 Summit, showed that a consumer’s purchase pleasure is a game-changer for sellers. In fact, “81% of firms anticipated competing, on the basis of consumer delight in 2019”. This direct competition is pushing brands to improve their customer experience initiatives.
So what can your brand bring to your current approach to help you win?
“It’s a chatbot.”
While there are numerous things that can be done, chatbots are a must-have for your shopping experience strategy.
In this post, we will be discussing how can chatbots improve a customer's shopping experience and how implementing chatbots for your brand will bring about a positive impact on your customers’ shopping journey.
But Before We Dive Further, Let’s First Understand What Exactly Is a Chatbot, and Why Should You Use One?
A chatbot, by definition, is a synthetic intelligence (AI) software program that can mimic a discussion (or chat) with a user.
With the passage of time, traditional methods of attracting customers have been evolving. Chatbots are being increasingly adopted by all industries including fashion, finance, entertainment, healthcare, and news.
Gartner in its report in 2011 had observed that 85 % of all customer transactions will be performed without the use of humans by 2020.
Everyone is moving closer to using chatbots as a form of communication. Having a chatbot has become one of the primary differentiators between brands that provide a suitable shopping experience and the rest.
How Can Your Brand Use Chatbots to Improve Shopping Experience:
#1 Agents can use “ChatBots as” Assistants to help them out.
According to a PwC survey, nearly 80% of American buyers believe that speed, convenience, knowledgeable guidance, and pleasant service are the most important aspects of a good purchasing experience.
Chatbots make it simple for customers to acquire answers on the move. With chatbots, they no longer have to:
- Use an automated telephone system to get answers to basic questions.
- Communicate via email
- Raise issues on social media
They can seek help right away.
Chatbots not only help to reduce the primary response time, but they also help to reduce the decision time, which is an important measure in customer support.
While resolving a customer’s problem:
- 33% of an agent’s effort is spent on knowledge of the nature of the inquiry and,
- 25% in obtaining relevant purchase information
With chatbots, your brand can grow to provide round-the-clock assistance without having agents who must be available day and night. Chatbots are a godsend for businesses with a global purchasing base. Buyers from all around the world can have their assistance needs met, regardless of time zone.
Pro tip: “There are some complex questions that a chatbot will not be able to answer. Allow for a smooth failover to a help agent in such cases.”
#2 Lend a Hand in Getting There Milestones
Purchasing experience comes down to optimizing the interaction on various touchpoints in a consumer’s journey. Given that the majority of contacts these days occur in a virtual environment, “it is critical to establish virtual touchpoints to assist clients throughout their online experience with the brand.”
Let’s look at some of the contact touchpoints where chatbots can have the most impact:
- During awareness: A customer visiting a website for the first time may find it difficult to navigate around. Chatbots function similarly to site-specific seek bars, providing educational statistics, and relevant knowledge base articles. Enabling a chatbot on your website for your visitors will not only help answer their simple queries but can also provide bits of data that can stimulate the customer’s interest in your brand.
- During evaluation: Brands can capture the hearts of their customers by anticipating their needs before they express them. When a customer is browsing your website or product, they may encounter a few challenges. Setting triggers, such as rage-clicking, your chatbot can come up and reach out to the customer to assist them in such situations.
- Customer service: Implementing chatbots for customer service is highly important. Customer service is a constant source of contention for businesses. In general, customers wait too long for a response or do not receive one. This often results in poor ratings and dissatisfied customers. Companies like Adidas, Nike, and Burberry have displayed exemplary customer service just by implementing chatbots. After one month of use,(Nike’s)chatbot had an 80% completion rate, fewer inquiries to customer service, and more than 1500 people had requested assistance from the chatbot. (Adidas’) Chatbot received almost 10,000 messages, a thousand of which were “Thank You” greetings.
#3 Gather feedback and customer information
Gathering feedback is an essential task for any organization. Records are critical for determining how your clients feel about your product and the assistance provided. Almost every consumer conversation can be used as an opportunity to provide a better experience.
With chatbots, you can collect feedback through a message even while the user is still on the page. While the experience is new, the feedback gathered is more accurate. When the purpose of collecting comments is clearly understood, the survey questions requested can be tailored accordingly.
Here are a few examples of when you can use chatbots to collect customer feedback for your brand:
- Enhancing a service or product: When new features are being deployed, initiate a chatbot communication and ask customers to rate their experience with the product. You can also add open-ended questions to determine where the service or product failed.
- Improving the database: Once you identify common questions and have created solution articles for chatbots to suggest, you can further improve your database by enabling the chatbot to ask the customers if the object helped them solve their problem.
- Improving chatbot enjoyment: To measure how well your chatbot is functioning, provide the option to rate the experience at the end of conversational exchange with the chatbot.
#4 Utilize your chatbots on social media
Social Chatbots are chatbots that are employed on social media. (Facebook and Twitter chatbots) generate messages for your brand and aid in customer support, advertising, and purchasing. As a brand, it is ideal that you use social media and its tools to save your business time and filter out unimportant messages and fake users.
Chatbots on Facebook
Businesses have repurposed Facebook chatbots for modern purposes. Apart from providing quick fixes and round-the-clock service, brands are using Facebook chatbots to help them with other activities such as web hosting and managing e-commerce store.
You can also use a Facebook chatbot to send timely and personalized messages to customers based on their previous interactions. For example, TechCrunch curates articles for their readers based entirely on what they want to read.
Chatbots on Twitter
When you have your brand presence on Twitter, it is generally expected of you to meet certain expectations, such as providing quick responses and demonstrating that you genuinely care about your customers.
As such, Twitter Chatbots come in very handy.
The Twitter chatbot communicates with users via direct messaging. Clients are given quick responses to make it easier for them to communicate with their brand chatbot.
A lot of brands like Airbnb, Evernote, and Spotify have been using Twitter chatbots to provide customer care 24 hours a day/ seven days a week.
Our two cents
Using chatbots is one of the most recent trends in virtual marketing and CRM. It is intended to automate tedious tasks while also creating a perfect imitation of a human conversation.
Implementing chatbots for your business can be a huge benefit because they can save expenses, time, improve customer experience, increase conversions, and, most importantly, keep your customers happy.
Chatbots are more than just the “wave of the future” in customer support. They are in the “now and now,” giving providers more opportunities to communicate with clients in new and remarkable ways — and, more significantly, to fulfill their aspirations more effectively.
When a chatbot is “desirable at what it does,” the user has a better experience as a result of using it.
