Use Cases For AI Ecommerce Chatbots

AI Ecommerce chatbots are leading the way for the future of online retail in 2024. Investing in an AI first strategy is a must-do for any eCommerce business trying to stay in the game. When it comes to chatbots, there are many reasons that it’s worth investing in. The use cases of how it can help grow your business are plenty. Let’s take a look at some of them now.

Creating Online Shopping Assistants

The gap between eCommerce shipping and brick and mortar has never been smaller than it is now. Personalized recommendations offered by shop assistants have already been worked on; by AI powered personalized product recommendations. Personalization in general has helped shoppers not feel alone in their eCommerce experience.

However, until now this level of personalization has not been interactive, but this is what chatbots change. Chatbots use AI to find even quicker and deeply tailored personalized recommendations through chat. This offers a superior customer experience.

Implementing Visual Discovery

Having a visual discovery unit within your search bar improves your customer’s experience. Customers appreciate the opportunity to engage in multimodal search. Sometimes shoppers may not know the names of certain products, or not know exactly what they are looking for. Perhaps an image is the only reference point they have.

Within an AI chat assistant, shoppers are able to post an image into the chat. The chatbot will understand this image, and offer suggestions as to what they are looking for. This is so quick and efficient, compared to the customer having to manually search. This will reduce so much time from your customers’ buying funnel, and help boost your sales.

These same benefits could apply to voice search. If your chatbot is able to process voice requests, you could also engage in conversational commerce. This allows shoppers to search in language that is familiar to them, and would smoothen their shopping experience even further.

Increasing Engagement

When a chatbot icon appears on your customers user screen, this catches their attention. When shoppers don’t trust your chatbot system, then this can be seen as distracting or an irritation. However, when the chatbot is of high quality, this can have multiple benefits.

Aside from answering queries and offering personalized recommendations, it helps the customer engage with your business. This will help connect them to the brand, and raises the potential of a lifetime customer.

Proactive engagement can reduce cart abandonment, and increases the success rate of personalized email and SMS marketing that can follow purchases. The more comfortable your shoppers are to engage with you, the more likely they will return to your store and trust your business.

Predictive Analytics

These chatbot systems can use the data that they gather from your customers’ enquiries in order to help power your business further. Through storing the data for queries, you can understand historical data, trends and customer preferences.

Through chatbots you can gain insight into:

  • Trends: depending on what most customers are interested in at any given time
  • Personalization: recommending products to shoppers you know have been interested
  • Inventory: understanding how popular your products are
  • Marketing: audience segmentation can be created from this data
  • Dynamic pricing: understanding the balance between price and demand

Make sure that you collect the data that you can from your use of chatbot, because this can have a very positive impact on the way your business moves forward.

Things To Consider

These use cases for AI ecommerce chatbots can all help grow your business incrementally. However, these are some things to consider when installing a chatbot in order for it to produce the results you want.

  1. NLP: your chatbot should use natural language processing in order for shoppers to be able to search in the language that is easiest for them
  2. Omnichannel: your chatbot should work on mobile devices, social commerce & browser
  3. Analytics: you should be able to test and see how your chatbot is functioning
  4. Integrations: your chatbot should be fully and successfully integrated with your tech stack
  5. Security: ensure that your chatbot complies with all security regulations

Conclusion

It’s no surprise that AI ecommerce chatbots are becoming so popular in the ecommerce world, considering the positive impacts they can have. This post has examined some of the most beneficial use cases, but it is not an exhaustive list. As long as you take into account considerations about how the chat can be optimized, there are multiple ways that it can benefit your eCommerce business.