5 Things a bot can do for your eCommerce business
The phrase, "There's an app for that," has never been more true.
Chatbots are programs that facilitate e-commerce on messaging platforms, simulating the conversations between businesses and their customers. Whether you're looking to run your own travel agency, you can use bots to make your business run smoother. And the sky's the limit when you think about how many tasks, orders, and clients your bots can handle at a time.
Some of the biggest names in instant messaging software, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat have gotten a head start on the conversational commerce game, helping companies like yours conduct business.
As bots become more useful for entrepreneurs, developers are coming up with more ways to implement them. They can develop bots for your business to help customers search and choose products, resolve customer service concerns, and follow up on orders.
For inbound marketing strategies, online marketers have plenty of tools to choose from. Although Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform, messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and Snapchat showing heavy penetration and worldwide engagement, it's clear that people use messaging apps more than social media. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted that messaging "is one of the few things that people do more than social networking."
By not tapping the versatility that chatbots offer, and by not engaging the millions of potential customers through instant messaging, you're leaving plenty of money on the table. Here are a few things bots can do for you.
Sales and Customer Support
A chatbot can run point on all incoming visitors to your online store, and once they get there the chatbot can perform several tasks, such as:
Initiate conversation.
Field detailed, specific questions about products.
Recommend options, accessories and alternatives.
Collect your customers' contact information, and send it to your preferred CRM.
The level of authentic human interaction, that is, whether your chatbot runs these tasks automatically, or simply assists your CSRs, is up to you.
Spring's Personal Shopping Assistant is an example of a chatbot integrated well with Facebook Messenger, making use of product photos and comparison tools to make the shopping experience highly personal. Another app, Operator, functions as a request network or concierge desk. Able to execute any shopping-related request from concert tickets, interior design, to products that require professional expertise; Operator is looking to "unlock the 90% of commerce that's not on the Internet". Meanwhile, Kik has its own bot store, serving millions of customers for brands such as Sephora and H&M.
Research and Analytics Assistant
As an e-commerce business, your ability to maximize the traffic through your sales funnel is crucial to your success. Even though your website and app may both have analytics, your instant messaging software doesn't. The solution: chatbots give you the capability to assess your online sales performance based on the quality of the conversation.
Personal Marketing Assistant
You can implement bots in several different divisions, from marketing and operations, to public relations and branding. Shopify.com has a virtual assistant chatbot, namely Kit, which can do all sorts of tasks, to name a few:
Create accurate, targeted Instagram and Facebook ads,
Post new products to your Facebook page,
Send personalized 'Thank You' emails,
Create business reports to help you assess sales performance,
Make ads out of 5-star customer reviews.
Also users/visitors/customers can easily recognize your brand identity design.
Send Subscription and other Automated Messages
Perhaps your marketing campaign might have weekly or monthly mailers that feature your latest items or upcoming sales. How's that working out for you?
A lot of promotional and marketing emails end up in the Spam box, so you might want to consider an alternative. Since people spend more time on their messenger apps than email anyway, you can use chatbots to send the same information to your clients via instant messages, short and sweet. And your customers will be able to place an order with a simple reply.
Facilitate Payments
Snapchat's virtual wallet bot Snapcash allows users to maintain a debit account on their app, which gives them the liberty to send money to friends as easily as they would send an instant message. Retailers such as Lancome and Target are already on board with this. Facebook also has its own bot system for handling peer-to-peer money transfers, which you can use to improve the online shopping experience for your customers.
When we chat with someone on instant messaging apps, it used to be a foregone conclusion that we're talking to a real person. And virtual assistant tasks were tedious and vulnerable to human error. But bots are becoming more competent at handling the e-commerce tasks you need them to do. The best part is they can multitask in batches, freeing up time for you to focus on more important things. It's up to you to put them to work.
