Voice Assistants with Conversational Commerce
When Uber’s Chris Messina in 2015 coined the term Conversational commerce little did she know that the trend was about to take all industries by storm. Retail has been no exception as this automated experience of utilizing chats, messaging, or other languages interfaces to interact with people, brands or services have become a great sensation. This seamless conversational interface has injected new blood in mobile commerce where now people are less hesitant to buy from their smartphones.
One can say that with the advent of chatbots the retail process for consumers has become easier which is letting people use their smartphones for ordering products, making payments and contacting multiple retailers through one app. All this is being made possible by chatbots who are creating mobile a dominant channel in the omnichannel marketing, and mobile commerce is estimated to be $700 billion this year.
Converging Technologies
Conversational commerce is assorted and vivid, not restricted just to the unadorned text simplicity of chatbots as mentioned above market. Today, technology is empowering convergence of this smart assistance with the Internet of Things making it omnipresent in every household that opts for more comfortable living. It is estimated that the AI-powered speakers are expected to be present in 75 percent of U.S. households by the year 2020.
The Advantage for Consumer and Retailer
We can see that conversational commerce is bringing numerous benefits to both consumers and retailers. For the customers, it has lead to a significant reduction of cognitive load and freedom from the everyday decision-making process. This is enabled by less need for endlessly searching about something on Google while browsing and hastily choosing a product which is required from the thousands of choices available in the market. Conversational commerce can present options which are well suited to our lifestyle and can lead to satisfactory buying experience which can save consumers time. For retailers, the rise of conversational commerce is bringing with it a more meaningful interaction experience with customers and these positive conversational experience are leading to increased customer retention.
The Present of Retail
Conversational commerce is not the future but is the present and is being selected by customers at a faster rate. Any retailer or business who wants to keep pace with this change needs to find the appropriate conversational commerce solution for its own particular needs. This year has been the time when conversational commerce has overtaken the web and apps and has added a new layer in the retail experience. Experts have termed a conversational approach as more prosperous customer engagement tactics coupled with personalized shopping assistants and concierge bots answering questions, recommending items, and handling individual transactions. This personalizes the long-homogeneous digital experience at each touch point of the consumer journey.
AI Fueled extraordinary experience
With the fast adoption of Google home or Alexa and other such available devices people are more interested in shopping via voice assistance as these AI based conversational commerce methodologies can tap into the most immediate source of communication be it messaging or social media and reach the consumers most efficiently and conveniently that was previously not imaginable. Gone are those days when websites were a good way of converting sales, the e-commerce revolution has given brands an all-new and more efficient however the simple UI design is not providing many options to the retailers to transform their sales numbers. On the other hand, the apps are taking a grasp on the market and retailers have to juggle between a lot of things which can lead to more issues in returns. Conversational design can help retailer in transforming their leads into sales as it allows retailers to engage with customers in real relationship-based commerce not usually attainable through websites and apps, which are more primordial, unproductive and hard to use. Using conversational business can work wonders owing to the AI element which can break down barriers as through voice retailers can deliver a personalized message to the customers.
