Is Conversational Commerce the Future of eCommerce?

There’s a shift happening in the digital world. Even though email marketing is considered to be the mainstay medium to communicate with shoppers in e-commerce, gradually, it’s being replaced by messaging apps. One of the reasons for this shift is conversational commerce. Messaging apps allow two-way communication enabling brands to personalize their services and build relationships with their customers.

What’s Conversational Commerce

It is a convergence of messaging apps and shopping experience. According to Chris Messina, “Conversational commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization, and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare.”

To explain it in detail, conversational commerce is about empowering shoppers with the ability to interact with brands through messaging apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Facebook Messenger and WeChat to name a few. Along with these chat apps, Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Amazon Echo are empowered with conversational commerce capabilities through voice commands.

The mainstream adoption of enterprise chatbots has made it easy for businesses to provide a personalized shopping experience to visitors without requiring additional manpower or pushing exorbitant infrastructure investments.

Also Read: How to use data to increase brand appeal
 

Role of Conversational Commerce in Buyer’s Journey
 

The buyer’s journey consists of the following 5 stages. Let’s take a look at how conversational commerce can play an important role in the buyer’s journey.

Awareness

In this stage, the shopper recognizes a need for a product. You can create awareness by sending relevant content to your target audience with the help of a chatbot. To do this, whenever a user lands on your online store, ask them to connect with the user on Facebook Messenger with the help of the Facebook Messenger Checkbox.

Once you get the permission to send messages, you can start sending them product recommendations, offers, discounts and other relevant content.

So, instead of waiting for the user to input their email at the end of the buying process, you initiate the communication during the first step of the buyer’s journey.

Research

The consumer starts looking for products that would satisfy their need. From the conversational commerce perspective, you can look at this stage as the in-store assistance. Whenever you go to a brick-and-mortar store, the sales person will get to know more about what you’re looking for by asking questions.

You can replicate the similar experience on your e-commerce store with the help of live chat. For live chat, you can either invest in a team of real people or build a chatbot. Chatbots can throw in recommendations based on the user’s past purchases, FAQs, browsing etc. thus automating the entire stage.

Consideration

After doing the initial research, the shopper has shortlisted a few products to choose from, reaching the consideration stage. For this stage, you can equip the chatbot to answer product or category specific questions. For example, if a shopper is looking to buy leather shoes, they might ask a question like, “Is the leather real or faux?” The chatbot can answer such questions to help users make the right decision to make the purchase.

Purchase

Once the shopper makes the decision to buy the product, chatbots can engage with the buyer by keeping them updated on the status of their order. Also keep them in the loop with order confirmation, shipping, and delivery details.

After the shipment is delivered, thank them for shopping with you, and be open for feedback and query resolution, if any.

Post-Purchase Evaluation

During the post-purchase evaluation stage, the buyer assesses the value, quality, utility etc. of the product. An e-commerce business can ask for the customer feedback with the help of a chatbot to know about the customer’s experience and the likelihood of re-purchase.

If you sell FMCG products, you can prompt them to reorder the same products after a certain time period.

There’s no doubt that conversational commerce is going to get an even wider adoption in the coming time. With Amazon Echo helping Amazon Prime members to make purchases just with a voice command, and several new chatbots cropping up every day, we can say that the future has already arrived.