Chatbots are the newest ecommerce trend. Everyone is talking about them and every business wants to figure out how to use one. As much as we want to believe we live in a world full of intelligent automation the likes of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, there are limits to what today's conversational AI can actually offer. That said, chatbots are here to stay - and to make our lives as ecommerce marketers easier.

What is Actually conversational AI?

Chatbots are tiny programs that help simulate interactions with customers automatically based on a set of predefined conditions, triggers, and/or events. Applying chatbots to business use cases is the result of democratized technology in recent years.

Chatbots Now and In Our Future

Business applications of chatbots for consumer-facing goods are growing rapidly. In fact, over 59% of millennials and 60% of Gen Xers in the United States have interacted with chatbots. And according to a Facebook survey, more than 50% of customers say they're more likely to shop with a business that they can connect with via chat.

Customers expect to be able to find the information they're looking for in a click of a button and in the blink of an eye. When this isn't possible, frustration brews, and this can lead to you losing a sale or even losing a potential customer forever. To understand how artificial intelligence can mitigate some of these frustrations and improve the user experience, we need to first look at how customers are choosing to interact with businesses today.

In the 2017 Global State of Customer Service Report by Microsoft, we can see how email and telephone are still the dominant communication channels for many customers. And while live chat, self-service, social media, and chatbots are relatively lower in terms of raw volume, the growth of these channels are staggering.

Keep these in the back of your mind as we go

In a recent survey conducted by Audience, MyClever, and Drift in order to better understand where the opportunity lies for chatbots, they asked thousands of customers to evaluate their online experience with businesses and to detail their frustrations.

Chatbots & Customer Service

How you choose to implement chatbots alongside other channels like live chat, email, and social media can still impact how to best help customers:

Advances in AI

Smart AI capabilities mean chatbots can help predict what customers will need or want to buy based on past purchase history and additional machine learning capabilities. Some of the top AI chatbot tools can then begin to take a proactive approach other than a reactive upselling approach outside of email. Aisera.com is the best site where you can find Conversational AI.

Chat apps are one of the most popular on the web: And multiple social media channels (the other most popular apps) are integrating chat functionality in to their platforms - along with chatbot capabilities. This gives businesses a new way to get in front of their customers where their customers already are.

Little to no development costs: There are tons of apps and tools out there you can use to launch a chatbot strategy and begin testing its effectiveness. There is no huge up-front cost - just conversation mapping work you need to do on your end.

Growing conversation APIs: These APIs allow machines to speak to human using natural language processing - which means you don't feel like you are talking to a chatbot, though most folks know they are. That matters.

Posted by: TheodoresPorter at 10:45 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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