When you open a website, you do see a greeting popping up on the bottom-left corner. Usually, it encourages you to start a live chat. Do you know what it is? Yes, you guessed it right, that’s what a chatbot really is. And these chatbots have really been helping ecommerce business organizations to make more money.
Let’s see how.
How are Chatbots Different from a Regular Customer Service?
One major thing you need to understand about chatbots is that you’re not talking to an actual person here. You can define a chatbot as a virtual robot or a computer program that can understand your queries and talk to you. Other customer care services involve you talking to a real person.
As an ecommerce website owner, if you want to make good use of it, you need to program it well. Yes, how you program your chatbot makes all the difference in the world to make it work for improving sales.
How Can an Ecommerce Business Make the Most Out of Chatbots?
You need to understand something here – your customer is aware that he is talking to a robot on live chat. More than that, he has used plenty of websites and knows what a chatbot is capable of doing.
Now, there are 2 types of chatbots you can make:
Rule-Based: One where the customer needs to select something specific to talk about and gets extremely specific and short answers. In short, the queries the chatbot can take are limited and the answers are always fixed. You can only use this under 2 circumstances:
- If this soon leads the customer to an actual person.
- Or, your business is of a nature that it works that way.
AI or Machine Learning Based: These are more flexible bots that function with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning. They pretty much talk like humans to you and are more flexible with their interactions. As an ecommerce website, it is ideal for you.
When you use the second type, you can have greater interactions with your customer, understand him/her and provide them with the right solutions. However, the most important aspect here is that your chatbot program should be able to understand that after a point the customer might need human interaction. The redirect to a customer care executive needs to be made right away.
How Will This End Up Benefiting Your Ecommerce Business?
With a flexible and capable chatbot, here’s how you end up making greater revenues for your business:
- You can provide 24×7 customer service that is more efficient. This is because the customer doesn’t have to even look for a number or email to talk to anyone. He can start the live chat right away. If you program it well, he’ll be redirected to a person for better help.
- The cost of setting-up a chatbot is way lesser than having way too many customer care executives for one-to-one interactions. Your team can be comparatively smaller and doesn’t have to work 24×7 either.
- Such a well-programmed chatbot will encourage you to gather more 1st-hand customer data, encourage direct sales and ensure the customer leaves satisfied with your website. This is because it can recommend correct products and provide them with direct links to boost purchases.
So, now you know as an ecommerce business website owner what chatbots are truly capable of. Would you try and incorporate them in your site?
