For retailers: when a chatbot can help
Chatbots’ functionality is rapidly expanding in the field of e-commerce. If they were mainly used to answer simple user queries earlier, today virtual assistants allow generating leads, promoting and selling goods.
Messengers do not offer a more decent alternative than chatbots. And taking into consideration that over 8 million Runet users deploy Viber, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, it is very improvident to overlook this communication channel. However, bots are not almighty and don’t always increase sales. Below we explain what conditions for implementing a virtual assistant will allow making some profit.
In which cases a chatbot will help retailers
1. If the mobile segment is important
Mobile sales are one of the main channels of business development. More recently, mobile applications prevailed in this market, but now users don’t want to overload devices with different programs. Therefore, chatbots are beginning to play center stage as they do not require installing and other efforts. And purchases made in the form of dialogue have become a common practice for most users.
2. If goods catalogs are huge
Retailers know that they lose a big percentage of customers as they cannot find the desired products in huge catalogs. Chatbots help to find a specific product very quickly, saving around 70% of the time for a customer. As a result, the conversion rate increases.
3. If customers don’t know what they want
It happens that a customer wants to buy something but doesn’t know what exactly. He can type the following query: “something beautiful”. Ordinary classifiers won’t provide any options, but a specially programmed chatbot will be able to choose a product according to all possible queries, even the most non-standard ones.
4. If customer support takes too much time
Chatbots allow automating customer support. Besides that, a retailer can adjust the function of transferring chats to a live operator in case the virtual assistant cannot answer a complicated question. According to statistics, the use of chatbots removes 45-70% of the load from the call center.
5. If customers don’t return to make purchases
The core profit of any retailer depends on the stable flow of repeated purchases. To arrange it, retailers use email newsletters with notifications about special offers, discounts, new offerings, etc. Chatbot can serve as an excellent alternative to newsletters. If a user adds it as a friend, it will be able to unobtrusively inform about sales and other news.
