How Chatbots Empower Retail and eCommerce Businesses

Innovative retail and e-commerce businesses are starting to see the benefits of embracing chatbots into their sales processes. These businesses realize that there is room for improvement with traditional online shopping. Providing an intuitive way to place orders and make inquiries is vital for improving the customer experience. Chatbots help achieve this by bringing AI to the messaging experience and enabling customers to make orders entirely through chat. Chatbots are empowering consumers to interact with businesses in a natural, personalized, and scalable way.

First benefits of using Chatbot: Make the best use of Natural Language 

Getting consumers to pull out their credit cards and purchase is becoming more and more difficult. Businesses need to make the purchase process as smooth and pleasant as possible to take a customer through to the sale. Nowadays, texting and instant messaging are the lifeblood of conversation, overtaking the email and phone interactions of the past. 

Chatbots in years gone by were limited in their functionality, having more in common with telephone automated attendants, “For sales, press 1, for customer service, press 2, etc.” than what we see nowadays. Modern chatbots allow customers to place orders and ask questions using natural language with the chatbot doing the heavy lifting of interpreting their intent. One example is the Live Chat boxes that now appear on many websites, inviting you in with questions like, “How can I help you today?” or “Is there anything we can help you with?” And businesses can tailor that experience.

Second benefits of using Chatbot: Provide Personalized Shopping Experience

Savvy retail and e-commerce businesses realize that embracing an omnichannel marketing strategy to meet customers where they are is a no-brainer. Chatbots can bolster this experience as each interaction helps to provide a more personal touch. The wider variety of inputs a chatbot understands, the better it responds, and this impacts the perceived experience on the customer end.

In contained conversations, with fewer conversation paths to follow, providing an appropriate response at the right time is relatively simple, for example, “Do you have any questions about our pricing?” on a pricing page. When the exchange broadens, the chatbot must deliver answers that flow from the rest of the conversation and build on previous replies and inputs. One example is taking a food order where the bot can not only take the main order, but can then ask followup questions about toppings or other extras. In the best case scenario, the bot will mimic a real person so well it will be as good as chatting to the person at the store. And by keeping customers in the bot chat for longer, they can avoid passing to a live operator. 

Third benefits of using Chatbot: Scale Support and Save Time 

A real-life person is the most “natural” responder to a chat but the hardest element to scale. With increased customer support and chat requests, it becomes increasingly difficult for human operators to respond quickly and effectively. Human operators are best for complex situations that require more detailed input than replying to direct questions and passing through a conversational flow. For a chatbot to be most effective, it needs to respond to the widest range of language possible, ideally guiding the customer through to the end of their chat session. Dialogflow, a part of Google Cloud Contact Center AI, is the ideal solution for this.

Build your Chatbot with Google Dialogflow

Dialogflow is the natural language understanding platform used to build chatbots on Google Cloud. Dialogflow lets you deliver more natural customer experiences with virtual agents that support multi-turn conversations with supplemental questions, using the same deep learning technologies that power Google Assistant. Dialogflow also reduces development time with a visual builder and prebuilt agents that can be deployed across many digital channels. Finally, Dialogflow is intuitive to use and easy to scale.

Google Cloud Case Study: Domino’s

Domino’s is a pizza restaurant chain found in many countries around the world. They were an early innovator with a simple ordering bot named “Dom” available online through their online apps. To innovate and keep pace with changing customer behavior, they were an early adopter of natural language understanding and machine learning. Conversations can go in so many directions when ordering off their menu, so they needed to account for all those options. Dialogflow allowed them to move quickly and exceed every milestone or goal, and it was really easy to train their teams on people and easy to use. Using Dialogflow has put them ahead of customers’ expectations, and now they can make necessary adjustments.

Optimise your business with Google Cloud and CloudMile

Google Cloud platform’s Dialogflow is the first choice for organizations to stay ahead of the competition with chatbots that are easy to develop, provide a better customer experience, and prioritize contact center staff for more complex activities. 

CloudMile, Google Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) has been empowering businesses to accelerate digital transformation through cloud technology and machine learning. Partnering with CloudMile, you can make the best use of cloud resources and shorten the time to business success! 

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