With all the technological advancements nowadays, AI chatbot is no longer mere science fiction. It is now a reality that brings businesses and customers closer. Moreover, chatbot breaks the speech and timeline barriers for customer support. Bots also allow you to do more things than you can normally do at your comfort. With this, you can now book travel tickets and accommodations, order foods and other materials, and even make payments online.
Aside from this, AI chatbot is helping businesses to grow and have wider scope in different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. This is due to the fact that over 63% of online shoppers prefer messaging a bot with speed and accuracy rather than calling customer support. To prove this Facebook even made a data analysis about how customers tend to interact with businesses that it can message anytime. To make sure that you are not left behind by the AI chatbot trend, you should consider creating yours now.
E-commerce AI Chatbot
Now that everyone seems to spend more time online than doing their everyday physical tasks, making your business go online is just the right choice. However, netizens are harsher and more demanding than your regular customer face-to-face. They want you to reply to their every message right away and sneer at your unavailability. Thus, your perfect partner for doing and e-commerce would be an AI chatbot. Let us tackle some of the roles an AI chatbot can do:
Sales Chatbot
Marketing your business is very important and being knowledgeable enough about your company is the best way to execute this. One thing that AI chatbot is very good at is engaging with your online store’s visitors. It can easily connect with your customers right at the moment that users click on your profile or webpage. It will start with a simple greeting and will then encourage users to state what they are looking for. This is when your sales chatbot will take into action and offer products and services to your customers. AI chatbot can also send direct links and online catalogs for a better transaction.
Customer Support Chatbot
You can now connect with your customers around the world 24/7 with AI chatbot. It can provide accurate information for common customer inquiries regarding products and different troubleshooting tips. It can also provide assistance to orders or shipping and delivery information. Moreover, customers have the freedom to switch from AI chatbot to human live chat depending on their preferences any time. Still, more people prefer bots because it is much efficient and reliable.
Shopping-Cart Abandonment Manager
One of the main reasons why some customers who are planning to pay for your products or services may not continue the transaction is because of some checkout problems. It could be because of some website glitches or due to check-out forms confusions. It would be beneficial for both the business and some customers to resolve this matter at hand. Meanwhile, other customers’ hobby is putting everything they like on cart but forgetting them after. AI chatbot will help you with all these issues. It will serve as your customers’ guide and reminder while also up-selling and cross-selling.
Key benefits of using E-commerce AI Chatbot
AI chatbot is already around for several years already and yet the hype about it is still not about to die down. Why? This is because online transactions are not going anywhere soon and online businesses are here to stay. Meanwhile, around 80% of online businesses are already using chatbots with all the benefits that it offers. Here are some of the benefits that you could get from AI chatbot:
Improves customer engagement
There are already millions of people who prefer online transactions rather than traveling and going to a physical store. These people also much prefer sending messages online to a business than contacting someone via calls. However, you should remember to install a chatbot on your webpage or social media profile in order to answer their demand for fast and accurate transactions. This is because a delay in reply to customers’ queries may decrease your customer engagement rate and your customers’ interest in your company. However, AI chatbot can help you as it can send replies to your customers instantly without care about time.
Decreases employment costs
All customers nowadays demand fast transactions especially on receiving replies from companies. Before they decide to buy a thing or proceed with receiving the services you offer, they always tend to ask for more details about the products or services. Moreover, you never know when they will contact you especially if you are an international brand. Thus, some companies hire customer support for the day and another set of employees who are willing to work on graveyard shifts. However, this may cost you a lot especially if you are just starting a business. This is where AI chatbot works in place of your numerous employees and reduces your employment cost at the same time.
Promotes personalization
Contacting your prospective customers personally can be a great hassle and extremely time-consuming for your business. However, AI chatbot can help you with personalization of every conversations and build trust on your customer-seller relationship. Bots can look into the profile of its customers and use it for the personalization of the conversation. This is very important on promoting products or telling your customers about sales making them feel more important. It can also give personal product recommendation depending on what your customer needs and sending them product links. What is also special about AI chatbot is that it can remember your past conversation and you will never get irritated about repeating the information you already gave.
Chatbots for shopping assistance
Shopping online is not a hassle anymore with AI chatbot. If you find shopping assistants at malls very helpful, then this is the one for you. Bots can ask its customers about what they are looking for and give them product suggestions. It will also provide links and other choices so that every shopping experience will be easier.
How to create AI chatbot for an e-commerce store
Creating an AI chatbot is like raising a child. You are the one who will build its character and hone its skills while it still has none of its machine learning. Just like in parenting, one mistake could lead your chatbot into a disaster. Thus, here are some of our tips to make your AI chatbot creation a success.
Step 1. Define the bot’s goal
You may reach the goal in the end but it should be where you start. When you are making a bot, it is very important to know what you made it for. Do you intend to make a bot to entertain your customers? Or do you simply want it to drive your sales? Whatever your goal may be, it will be extremely helpful for you if you jot down everything and note which ones are your priority.
Step 2. Select the chatbot type
If you are thinking that all chatbots are the same, you might want to make a research about it. The truth is there are actually 3 types of chatbots that you could create depending on what you think your business might need more.
- Button-based chatbot– perfect if you want the transactions to be easier and faster. The only disadvantage is that it cannot cater to the needs of your users except for those stated in the buttons.
- Keyword recognition chatbot– if you want to give your customers an experience like they are talking to a real human with scripted dialogues as it recognizes the keywords. The downside of it is that it cannot give elaborate answer if it will not detect the keywords on the sentence.
- Contextual chatbot– may be a little complicated in the process of creation but can be really helpful due to its machine learning skill. It does not need to only rely on the script as it can form its replies from its past experiences.
Step 3. Choose your platform
Now, this would be the the final and most important part of creating a bot. Whether you are planning to integrate your chatbot on your social media sites or website, you should first find the best AI chatbot platform. These platforms will be your partner on creating bots. If you are able to find a good one, you might not need any professional skills to perfect your bot.
One of the best AI chatbot platforms that you could see on the internet would be the Herobot. You will only need to simply drag and drop features that you want to include in your chatbot. Moreover, it has elaborate tutorials to help you along the way. Even if you do not have any idea on how to properly create an AI chatbot, they offer several templates that you can choose from.