AI-Backed Conversational Commerce: Hype or Reality

Conversational commerce is the new buzzword in town and many organizations are adopting it as a part of their marketing, sales, and customer care activities.

Conversational commerce refers to E-commerce and is concerned with the deployment of chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces to interact with people, brands, and bots. In 2011, Gartner had predicted, “By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the business without interacting with a human.” Such predictions are proving true as we opt to use an ATM rather than visit the bank to avoid unnecessary human interaction. Conversational commerce is an AI-infused technology that helps humans to interact with machines more naturally and conversationally. A recent Facebook studyrevealed that 53% of consumers are more likely to shop with a business they can message to. This highlights that conversational commerce is providing consumers with more convenience while buying products and also encouraging organizations to shift from traditional marketing styles and to improve their marketing tactics.

Conversational Commerce: From Hype to Reality

Humans prefer to express their desire for a particular product in their natural language. Conversational commerce technology allows brands to interact with their customers on their choice of platform. This technique helps enhance customer experience and enables brands to connect with their customers on a much deeper level, which improves customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Progress in AI technology has changed the current design of conversational interfaces and provided end-to-end learnability and flexibility with response generation. Moreover, SDK is delivered to customers who are willing to start with advanced dialog flows. For instance, conversational workflows, in online retail, begin on the website and need to be further handled through messaging interfaces. Furthermore, conversational platforms include event processing and triggering features that initiate conversations with users instead of waiting for them to start it, such as telling customers that the product they are interested in is out of stock and notifying them as soon as the product is available. Sometimes there arises a situation, where customers try to compound things in a sentence, for instance, “I loved this dress but will it suit me?” This compound sentence says that the customer is willing to buy the dress and at the same time is confused whether the dress will look good on her or not. Understanding such compound sentences is important to keep customers satisfied.

Conversational Commerce: What Lies Ahead

With further advances in AI technology, the use of chatbots and other conversational channels will proliferate. Already, there are startup teams who are teaching chatbots real empathy: KOKO is working to create a chatbot that can respond to any kinds of emotion, diverse set of questions, and will understand the difference between a curt or angry response or a casual or unfazed response. Furthermore, increasing customer’s trust in new payment technologies and mobile payment solutions will show both businesses and customers the real use of conversational commerce. Even if industries are not willing to utilize a chatbot today or in the future, they must start interacting with their customers over conversational channels.

The world loves a good conversation, and with advances in AI, conversational commerce is opening up ways for businesses to interact with their customers directly and more conversationally, providing them with a more meaningful and natural experience.