Conversational Commerce: Where it’s At

Over the last couple of years there has been great progress in conversational platform technologies as well as live chat. The rise has been thanks to the deeper development of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and become a vital part of the ecommerce experience.

With the explosion of ecommerce and its sustained level throughout last year, brands and retailers are increasingly looking to find new and better ways to attract and maintain customers.

80% of customers have interacted with a chatbot; yet 86% of customers prefer to talk to a human. And so trying to balance cost-saving strategies with customer preferences is a tight ropewalk to navigate. And is always being under review.

Whether it be a robot or human, live chat, or conversational commerce, is an important tool that brands and retailers can have on their website – to answer customer inquiries, concerns, assist with updates or stock levels. With swift and clear communication from a live chat, a brand can counteract that instinct in consumers to bounce to a rival’s ecommerce site when they’re unable to easily find what they want. 

Yet what a live chat can do, and the general level of conversation, is entirely dependent on the tech you’re using and the team that’s implementing and managing it. Popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify and WordPress (with WooCommerce, the in-house ecommerce platform for WP) are more limited in what they can do and how customizable they can be. At the other end of the spectrum, platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud (both its B2C Commerce wing and its B2B Commerce wing).

As one of the best platforms for building stronger brand-customer relationships, using Salesforce Commerce Cloud translates into unified conversations across platforms, across social media, across email and phone, etc.

Little time; lotta channels

The website, email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp… there are endless channels of communication for customers to reach out to brands. This in turn means that customers expect brands to connect with them faster than ever. No more email response within 1-2 business days; responses ought to be ASAP.

The balancing act between human interaction and bot interaction can become narrowed by injecting artificial intelligence and its automation into live chats. The advantages are clear: it saves money and time. But with AI like Salesforce’s Einstein AI brands can really close the gap between standard bots and real like humans.

The Salesforce chatbox provides the flexibility between the two: AI helps to solve the issues of customers by identifying common solutions, but when there is more complexity involved, the bot hands it over in real time to a human, to take control of proceedings.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud integrators. Contact us to see how we can work together.