How Conversational Commerce Is Redefining Retail

Certainly is a Business Reporter client.

E-commerce can become an integrated experience for brands and customers through conversational AI assistants. 

Over the past year, a huge number of consumers have turned to online shopping. E-commerce is expected to account for 21.8% of global retail sales by 2024, and retailers are rushing to accelerate their digital transformation and deliver seamless online experiences to their customers.

But what is the best way to go about doing this? And how can you, as an ambitious retailer, ensure that you’re understanding your customers well enough to achieve long-term success?

Delivering value where it matters

In the retail commerce industry as a whole, delivering a first-class user experience will always be at the top of the agenda. According to Zendesk, 75% of customers are willing to spend more to buy from companies that give them a good customer experience.

The more you prioritize your CX by building loyalty, growing trust and creating engaging online experiences, the more successful you will be. Now more than ever, customers expect the convenience of all sales channels being connected and having the same information, alongside instant product data at their fingertips.

The solution? Delivering a unified e-commerce experience through a conversational AI assistant.

AI assistants are capable of turning millions of real-time data points on customers into personalized recommendations and actionable insights for your business. This not only enables retailers to provide customers with the exact items they are looking for, it also accelerates the customer journey by providing the right suggestions and guidance at the right time.

Transforming the online experience

Based on a user’s unique inputs, conversational AI assistants can take actions on their behalf: recommending relevant products, looking up orders, assisting with checkout and filling out forms—all effectively decreasing the number of actions the user needs to take to find what they are looking for.

By doing this, conversational AI turns time-consuming website browsing into a more efficient and engaging experience. As a result, you can minimize costly returns, reduce cart abandonment and build customer lifetime value.

Those e-commerce stores that have already introduced some form of conversational AI on their websites are increasing their annual revenue by 7%–25%.

Delivering contextual conversations

Crucially for commerce, AI assistants can remember past conversations with individual users. This has two major benefits for both you and your customers.

Firstly, your AI assistant stays in context. It can offer a guided shopping experience, like a skilled salesperson would deliver in a brick-and-mortar store.

Online shopping has infamously been an overwhelming and impersonal experience for many. According to the Rockefeller Corporation, 68% of all customers leave a brand because they think it does not care about them.

By being present as a point of contact throughout the buying process, an AI assistant creates a level of comfort and understanding that builds trust and encourages customers to return to your store time and again.

Secondly, your AI assistant can gather zero-party data from conversations.

Traditionally, e-commerce businesses have used third-party cookies and purchase history to personalize their customers’ journeys and experiences. However, with the introduction of the autonomous web, cookies will become obsolete.

Forrester Research defines zero-party data as “Data a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand. It can include preference center data, purchase intentions, personal context and how the individual wants the brand to recognize [them].”

Integrating first-party (individuals’ site-wide, app-wide and on-page behaviors) and zero-party data (gained from your AI assistant’s conversations with customers) into a customer data platform (CDP) empowers businesses. CDPs use insights to build out robust, individual profiles of a company’s eager-to-engage customers.

With this solid foundation of trust in place, e-commerce businesses can better orchestrate their interactions and use conversational AI platforms such as Certainly to continue optimizing their assistant’s approach and messaging.

A conversational web

These multiple benefits for both customers and businesses point to a conversational approach being the impetus to widespread change across the internet.

By holding the conversation on human terms, people can use natural language to immediately get what they need, while businesses can deliver a natural, hyper-personalized user experience at an unlimited scale.

Henrik Fabrin is CEO and co-founder at Certainly, a conversational AI platform built for e-commerce businesses. If you’d like to learn about the benefits gained from using a conversational AI assistant, find out more at Certainly.io.

— Industry view from Certainly

_{This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credit: iStock-1206797792}