Last Updated: November 2024
Employing Chatbots is an efficient way to reduce the workload on your team and offer a personalized shopping experience to your customers.
According to MIT Technology Review, 90% of survey respondents have seen improvement in customer complaint resolution time after using chatbots. And some 80% of respondents have seen measurable improvements in service delivery, customer center performance, and customer satisfaction.
Because of their instant services and integration with eCommerce sites, chatbots have become an instant hit in the eCommerce sector. You can learn more about chatbots for eCommerce from this article.
What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is artificial intelligence (AI) technology that businesses use to interact with their online users for customer inquiries via text or speech. Because of their speedy and prompt services, chatbots are used in the eCommerce sector.
The eCommerce chatbots are used for answering general queries like the order status directly on the website or via messaging platforms such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, etc. An e-commerce chatbot offers many more benefits to your business. Let’s dive in to understand them.
Benefits of Chatbots
1) 24/7 Customer Support
As per Inc., over 51% of customers say that a business needs to be available 24/7. When a user has a question, they want to have an answer right away.
But to have customer service agents work round the clock could be expensive. With eCommerce chatbots, you can serve your customers any time of the day for all 7 days of the week and reduce the cost.
In situations where a chatbot cannot help the customers, it can keep the conversion going by asking required questions and gathering data so that your team can resolve the issue later.
2) Reduced Costs
By employing chatbots you can offer automated customer support services and save money on manual labor. The traditional support services require you to maintain infrastructural facilities, financial resources, and so on.
Chatbot for eCommerce requires only a one-time investment. And, you can offer customer services with minimal resource costs.
3) Instant Response
How long would you wait for a response to your query?
As per Toistersolution, 88% of customers expect a response within a minute of asking a question. If users do not get faster responses, they will feel frustrated and most probably look for another store.
Now, imagine you have a service that can ‘immediately’ respond to your customer queries. The eCommerce AI chatbot is such a service designed to offer instant responses.
Offering immediate responses results in the reduction of average response time, which is a vital helpdesk metric for any business.
Also read: Importance of automated ticket resolution in customer service
4) Helps in Personalization
The eCommerce AI Chatbot remembers the past interactions of the customers and uses them to personalize future conversations.
E-commerce chatbots while helping the users also concentrates on guiding them down the sales pipeline by offering these services based on their purchasing behavior.
- Notifying them about new products,
- Out-of-stock items,
- Recover abandoned carts by informing customers about the items they did not buy but added to the cart and left.
- Offer last-minute deals and offers to users,
- Saves time for users by suggesting better alternatives or relevant products and recommendations.
The Chatbot offers such personalized services to customers and makes them feel special. With an e-commerce chatbot, you can improve the customer engagement rate.
5) Product Guidance
Chatbot in e-commerce provides product guidance to users and helps them to find the right product among the millions of products on an eCommerce store. It does this by answering specific customer inquiries and enabling them to make purchases right away.
With the chatbot for eCommerce product guidance benefit, you can increase your sales revenue.
Now, Let’s understand how to use chatbots efficiently and you can also learn more about Chatbot costs from here!
How to Use Chatbots Efficiently?
1) Be Transparent
You should let your users know that they are interacting with a chatbot. Do not let them assume that they are speaking with a human.
Most people give a name or surname to their AI chatbots and it is not wrong to do that. However, it misleads the customers and gives them the impression that they are talking with a human agent.
It is always better to add ‘bot’ to the name or give your chatbot a unique name that does not seem like a human name.
2) Protect Customers’ Privacy
You should protect your customers’ privacy and design the chatbot in such a way that it never asks too intrusive questions. It needs to ask only the questions that are required to resolve an issue.
Also, customers can share some personal and private information with chatbots like date of birth, phone number, etc. So make sure to safeguard and protect the data. Valuing their privacy should be your top priority under all circumstances.
3) Deeply Integrate AI
A chatbot is expected to answer all the possible customer inquiries, so make sure that it is equipped with properly trained AI. Your chatbot can locate and reply with accurate information to users’ queries if the AI is deeply integrated.
In case your business is spread out to more than one state or country, having multilingual e-commerce AI chatbot can come in handy.
4) Prioritize Responsiveness
The eCommerce chatbots are mainly used for their instant responses to customer questions. So make sure that chatbots are built to be extremely responsive and offer relevant services only.
When a user asks a question, the chatbot should be able to understand the issue and give a suggestion or solution promptly. Also, keep the chatbot options easy and concise. The options should be sufficient enough for customers to understand and take an action.
5) Know When to Refer an Agent
Chatbots can also make mistakes if it encounters a problem for which the AI is not properly trained. Sometimes, it creates a loop of the same responses and the user might get frustrated in such situations.
So, ensure that your e-commerce chatbot refers to customer support agents in cases it could not offer an efficient solution.
Also read: 10 Best Shopify bots and sneaker bots
Bonus Tip: Try Saufter Live Chat Services
Saufter services are designed especially for eCommerce businesses. Saufter has live chat software included with a data-driven AI chatbot that recognizes your workflows and creates a next-level experience for your customers.
It gives instant replies to user queries with engaging conversations. Let’s take a look at Saufter live chat services‘ main features.
Automate E-Commerce Workflows
With the AI chatbot from Saufter, you can offer exceptional self-help services through automated workflows like checking order status. It offers the following services.
- You can automatically send deals and discounts to customers.
- It automates the return and exchange of products.
- With the AI-driven chatbot, you can answer any product-related queries asked by users.
Recruit Experienced Agents
For answering general queries that most users have, you can use a chatbot and for complicated issues, you definitely need human agent support.
Saufter gives access to their marketplace from where you can recruit tested customer service professionals. If you wish to test them by yourself, it enables you to do it too.
Analyze Performance
You can measure and analyze the performance of your services in real-time from Saufter dashboard. It displays up-to-the-minute reports on the helpdesk metrics such as volume, response time, and user feedback as well.
Omni-channel Communication
Saufter not only offers you a webchat for your online site, but it also allows you to integrate with social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
To have seamless communication across your customer support teams and departments, Saufter enables integration with collaboration apps like slack.
Note that Saufter live chat services offer 24/7 services to any business. Also, it has a live-chat widget with which the users can utilize all the automated services.
Final Words
In order to stay ahead in this competitive e-commerce industry, you should offer your best services. Although e-commerce chatbots could never replace humans, they are an incredible asset to your e-commerce strategy.
Ecommerce AI Chatbots can execute your day-to-day tasks in a faster and more efficient manner. However, building a reliable chatbot need a lot of consideration and planning. It is best to just employ an experienced agency, Saufter to get an efficient chatbot service.
With Saufter live chat services you can automate your customer interactions easily and reap even more benefits with Saufter services.
You can learn more about Saufter from here and start your free 15-day trial here!