Why Should You Integrate a Chatbot into Your Ecommerce Business?

Chatbots help eCommerce businesses to boost their sales, increase customer satisfaction and facilitate growth. Read this article to get to know why you might need to start using a chatbot too.

More and more eCommerce businesses integrate chatbots into their workflows. Such bots perfectly replace live customer support managers and help to boost sales. In this article, we’ll have a look at how exactly your company can benefit from chatbots. It won’t take you too much effort to build or buy this type of bot, and this investment should quickly pay off.

Benefits of Chatbots for Customer Support

Customer support consists of providing low-level, repetitive services to users. If you entrust this type of task to chatbots, your team members will be able to focus on high-priority duties. Thanks to a reasonable allocation of resources, your business will start to grow faster, and you’ll enhance the level of client satisfaction. Here are the primary advantages of employing chatbots for customer support:

• They can speak any language and attend to customers from any part of the world.
• They work 24/7 and never take holidays. Your clients won’t need to wait until a human specialist finds time to attend to them. The quicker consumers get answers to their questions, the lower your customer churn and the higher your revenue.
• Chatbots are always positively-minded. Bots won’t get angry whenever a client gets angry or tries to troll them. They will strive to provide the most accurate and exhaustive answers in any situation. They don’t mind repeating the same information repeatedly and never get stressed.
• Bots learn quickly and can become experts in any area. Once they memorize certain information, they will never forget it. They don’t make mistakes or misprints. They provide centralized support, so they don’t need to forward clients’ queries to specialists from other departments. A bot can easily handle much more significant amounts of information than a human.
• Chatbots know the client. When a person starts a dialog with the bot, the latter checks the profile of that consumer (their purchase history, demographics, preferences, and so on). The bot can provide more informative answers and generate personalized recommendations based on this data.
• Some people might feel uncomfortable when talking to a human professional. They might be introverted or not too fluent in your language. They might feel shy of the necessity of sharing sensitive information with a person. But they won’t mind revealing confidential data to a bot.

However, you shouldn’t completely get rid of your human support team. Some clients might be biased against bots. Others might have complicated questions that bots would fail to solve. Instead, Chatbots and human specialists should complement each other.

Benefits of Chatbots for Sales

You don’t necessarily need to wait until a client opens the live chat and initiates a dialog with a chatbot. Instead, your bot might behave proactively and greet each customer as soon as they visit your site. Here is what exactly chatbots can do to boost your sales:

• Help consumers search for products more naturally. The less time a client needs to spend searching for the necessary goods or services, the more likely they will be to purchase them. Looking for products based on keywords is not the only possible and not the most efficient search method. Chatbots can make this process interactive and more productive.
• Recommend products. Consumers might not be fully aware of the characteristics of the items that you sell. They might be looking for some particular product — but the bot might offer them an alternative that better meets their requirements. Chatbots can help you to promote goods. Customers can rely on them to find the best price.
• Offer personalized sales advice. As was said above, bots can access the profile of every customer and use this information to come up with customized suggestions.
• Adapt to clients’ emotions. Chatbots can detect when the user is becoming angry or impatient based on sentiment analysis techniques. The bot will strive to shorten the sales process and close the deal promptly in such a situation.
• Upsell and cross-sell based on what the client is buying. When the client purchases a specific product, the bot can offer them items that complement it or substitute it.

When the user remains inactive for a certain period of time or is about to leave the site, your chatbot might try to stop them. For example, the bot might generate a personalized offer to the client to convince them to purchase.

Additional Benefits of eCommerce Chatbots

Apart from the benefits that were listed above, chatbots can help you with the following tasks:

• Simplify the maintenance of your site. You won’t need to install plugins for product search, product recommendation, FAQs, contacting you, and so on because a single chatbot can take care of all these tasks. You won’t need to maintain each of these plugins separately, update and debug them. Such an approach should improve the overall efficiency and performance of your site.
• Make your online shop more functional and user-friendly. This is just an example of how it might work: if consumers tend to ask many questions about a specific page of the site, you might want to make the interface of this page more intuitive.
• Detect new opportunities to exploit. Sometimes, consumers would ask questions that chatbots fail to understand. For instance, they might ask about products that you don’t offer yet — and you can create such products to satisfy the demand or fine-tune the already existing ones. Or, based on people’s questions, you might want to add new pages to your FAQs section.

Every year, chatbots become more intelligent and more powerful. So the earlier you start using them, the more you’ll benefit from their further advancements.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you found this article informative, and now you better understand the advantages of chatbots for eCommerce businesses. Bots can help you increase customer satisfaction, boost your sales and improve your online business. Thanks to the affordable chatbot development cost, even small companies and startups can integrate such solutions into their workflows. Bots can take care of simple repetitive tasks while skilled human professionals will be able to focus on high-priority duties.