Chatbots in Retail: How Retailers can Use Chatbots to Engage Customers

Technology is disrupting the face of business and staying ahead of the competition is becoming hard as never before. Customer expectations are exceeding and embracing the technology remains on top of the list to be successful for businesses, especially when it comes to retail.

No doubt, implementing new technology needs investment, but the Return on Investment will be at par. Talking about the retail sector, customer engagement and personalisation is vital to maintaining a long-lasting relationship. Handling customer queries and addressing the problems simultaneously leads to difficulties.

It is, therefore, need of the time for retailers to start thinking about investing in chatbots. Most of the merchants are still struggling to find whether the chatbots are really needed of the time or some kind of marketing plot to trap and get the investments out.

Let us have a look at some statistics to figure out what is the potential of chatbots in retail and how you can reap the benefits.

• According to a report by Grand View Research, the global market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025 with a compound annual growth of 24.3%.
• According to a study by Stanford computer scientist James Landay, speech recognition is on average three times as fast as typing on a cellphone and error rate was slashed to 3.6%
• 21% of consumers see chatbots as the easiest way to contact a business (ubisend, 2017)
• 26-36-year-olds are willing to spend up to £481.15 with a business via a chatbot interaction. (ubisend)
• By 2020, over 80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation implemented (Business Insider)
• 95% of consumers believe ‘customer service’ is going to be the major beneficiary of chatbots (Mindbrowser)
• Juniper’s new research, Chatbots: Retail, eCommerce, Banking & Healthcare 2017-2022, forecasts that chatbots will be responsible for cost savings of over $8 billion per annum by 2022, up from $20 million this year.

Looking at the above statistics, it looks like chatbots would be the mainstream and the acceptance would be far greater than the present.

Chatbots and their Use in Retail Industry

Chatbots are advanced online customer service tool that incorporates Artificial Intelligence system to interact via text. Chatbots are used to streamline and automate recurring retail operations. In the recent years, the chatbots have been updated with stronger conversation abilities than ever before.

The biggest concern of any retail business is not only to acquire customers but also to retain them in future as well. The majority of retailers use different marketing tactics to retain customers and build long-term relations. The tactics include promotions, deals, sales, giveaways, and freebies. While on the other hand, customers want retailers to address their problems promptly. Bots can rescue retailers to handle such queries around the clock, 365 days a year.

How chatbots are helping retailers to offer a seamless experience to the customers and what benefits are associated by deploying this technology. Let’s have a look at it.

Offer Customer Service 24/7

The online shopping trend has turned the retail industry upside down. People are being tech-savvy and expect online retailers to provide every possible assistance and convenience without any hassle. For instance, if a customer wants to return recently purchased an item and needs quick assistance, what would you do?

You need to appoint a full-time customer support backed by the human, which might increase the cost. Even if you manage to appoint a full-time customer support, there are still possibilities of human error. It might mislead the customers, resulting in losing them forever.

The solution is deploying chatbots to assist customers whenever and wherever they need. Without involving human workforce, retailers can ensure seamless customer experience and assistance to make their buying journey easier. Moreover, the after sales services can be deployed with one-time investment, which yields greater ROI in the future.

Informing Addition of New Products in Inventory

Customers who have bought products recently from your store might be interested in buying more, provided the inventory to be updated. For instance, women are very much interested in buying new clothes, shoes, and other fashion accessories. How about recommending them the similar products, they have bought recently at a lesser price.

Retailers can make the best use of chatbots to recommend products based on buyer’s interest. That means more sales and more revenue, ultimately leading the company to grow. Moreover, the customers would be happy to browse through the collection, add them to wishlist and make the purchase in the near future.

Help Customers Find Items

Online retailers can make use of chatbots as personal shoppers for their customers. For example, Alexa, Amazon’s chatbots help discover items requested by customers and ships them.

Chatbots use Keyword Recognition Technology and predictive modelling to display relevant responses. For example, if someone is looking for a party dress, chatbots can offer a choice of possible colours, prices, and material.

The above example can be supported by the use of Chatbot from Aerie, a lingerie brand that talks to the customers and engage them not just to buy but also to play around with options available. The lingerie can be chosen according to the mood or follow a gamified option, either “This” or “That”.

Process Orders

Chatbots are meant to process the order rightly in an e-commerce store. Chatbots can be used for order processing by requesting the name of the customer, telephone number, email, payment option, and shipping address within the messenger.

After getting the details, either it can redirect to the checkout page on retailer’s website or finalising the checkout within the messenger. To make the order processing convenient in the future, the chatbot saves the data, resulting in smooth and quick checkout.

Proposing Holiday Gift Guides

When it comes to giving a gift to loved ones, the most difficult part is to make the choice. In other words, you almost get out of ideas. However, with the help of chatbots, running out of gift ideas will be the thing of the past. The chatbot suggests gifts based on customer’s hobbies, recent purchase or taste. Chatbots will not let the customers exit the store or move to another store because of the choices offered by it.

Conclusion

Chatbots are the need of the time, along with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Statistics and studies have shown a great potential of chatbots in retail, banking and manufacturing industries. The deployment of technology is the need of the time and without it, you might be nowhere in the competition.