Ecommerce customers are changing. They expect more from companies, whether it’s an intuitive SMS service for ecommerce customer support, ultra-personalized shopping experiences, or lightning-fast delivery speeds. One of the top trends shaping the market is conversational commerce.
Today’s buyers want human relationships with online brands. They expect companies to put in more effort, proactively answering their questions, and uncovering hidden pain points. Fortunately, with conversational AI in ecommerce, business leaders can gain a competitive edge.
Embracing conversational AI for ecommerce isn’t just about building handy chatbots to support consumers 24/7 or upgrading your ecommerce marketing strategy.
It’s about taking a holistic approach to ensuring every customer gets a relevant, convenient, and consistent experience when they’re interacting with your brand.
Here, we’ll introduce you to the growing presence of conversational AI in ecommerce, the use cases it can serve, its incredible benefits, and what the future looks like for online retailers.
In this article:
What is Conversational AI in Commerce?
Let’s start simple. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is a type of artificial intelligence that can simulate authentic, human conversations. AI tools use Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning, and other advanced models to actually understand human language.
That means bots can identify the intent and focus behind customer questions, guide buyers towards the right products, and help them forge deeper connections with your company. (Check out our guide on conversational AI vs chatbots if you’re not sure about the difference between the two.)
Conversational commerce involves using conversational AI for retail interactions, alongside communication technologies, such as messaging apps, social media platforms, SMS, MMS, and so on, to create engaging, consistent customer experiences.
It’s all about connecting with customers in a deeper, more meaningful way throughout the customer journey. Notably, while conversational commerce might sound similar to “social commerce” they aren’t the same thing. Social commerce is all about buying and selling through social platforms.
Conversational commerce is about investing in real-time interactions across various channels, to increase customer loyalty and satisfaction on a broader scale.
Create ecommerce experiences that WOW.
Use Cases for Conversational AI in Ecommerce
To break things down a little further, let’s consider the types of “use cases” you can explore with ecommerce conversational AI. The applications are potentially endless, particularly as AI algorithms and tools grow more advanced, but some of the most common options include:
Transforming Customer Loyalty Programs
Success in ecommerce isn’t just about constantly earning leads. It’s about making the most of the loyal customers that constantly add to your revenue, and drive new opportunities your way. Loyal customers spend more than their peers, and can help reduce your customer acquisition costs by referring new people to your organization.
But actually making the most of your loyal customers can be tough – particularly for a growing business. Conversational AI, and an automated text messaging service or notification solution can give you an easy way to keep customers engaged.
Conversational AI ecommerce tools can scan through interactions with previous customers to identify the people with the most positive sentiment towards your brand, helping you define who should invite to join your loyalty programs. Then, these bots can automatically send messages to loyal buyers as they interact with your brand and complete certain actions.
They can send personalized “thank you” messages with rewards to customers who send new buyers your way, or share special promotions with customers who make a certain number of purchases. This helps you to consistently improve your relationships with loyal customers.
Enhancing Lead Generation
While existing customers are crucial to ecommerce success, you still need to add new leads to your pipeline regularly, so you can increase your revenue and profits. A conversational ecommerce chatbot can be an incredible tool for generating and nurturing leads.
These tools are fantastic at scouring through huge volumes of data, which means they can help you to more effectively create customer profiles, segments within an audience, and strategies for connecting with potential buyers and customers.
When a potential customer visits your website, a chatbot can identify things about them (such as how many times they’ve clicked on your site before and what pages they’ve looked at), and match them to specific customer profiles. From there, they can send conversational messages automatically to customers, introducing them to products, deals, or services they might be interested in.
Once you’ve earned customer contact details, such as their email address or phone number, the same conversational AI bot can nurture those leads with relevant content specific to their interests, carefully-timed deals, and more.
Keeping Customers Engaged and Informed
Ecommerce customers like being informed. They don’t just want to hear about your latest products and promotions. They want you to keep them up-to-date with what’s happening in your organization, and more importantly, what’s going on with their orders.
Using conversational AI in ecommerce can be an incredible way to upgrade your approach to keeping customers in the loop. You can use intelligent tools to automatically create and send transactional SMS messages to customers, confirming orders, delivery times, and more.
You can even use the same conversational bots to keep customers up-to-date about things like:
- Products they’re interested in coming back in stock.
- Shipping delays or problems with production.
- Reminders about upcoming deals or events.
The great thing about conversational commerce is you don’t have to rely on just “blasting” one-way messages at huge groups of customers. If you invest in 2-way SMS marketing tools, customers can respond to these messages with questions they might have about things like return policies or delays. This helps boost the relationship buyers have with your brand.
Optimizing Customer Support
The rise of conversational intelligence is one of the main reasons why AI customer support tools have become so popular in recent years. Today’s consumers shop on ecommerce platforms 24/7, and they expect to get answers to any questions they have at all times too.
Embracing conversational AI for customer service means you can deliver this always-on support. Customers can speak to bots to get insights into products and services that might be relevant to them or deals that they could take advantage of.
After a sale, your conversational ecommerce chatbot or virtual assistant can continue to deliver ongoing assistance. It could automatically send articles and self-help resources to new buyers to help them make the most of their new product.
You can also make this bot available on multiple channels, from social media to your website and to SMS, to help customers troubleshoot problems and ask questions about exchanges, refunds, and more. Conversational AI tools can even use insights into customers throughout the customer journey to identify opportunities for growth.
For instance, if a customer asks a question about the best skincare product for their needs, your bot could suggest various “package options” over time and even remind customers to re-purchase products after a certain period.
Collecting Insights and Customer Feedback
The ecommerce industry is constantly evolving alongside customer preferences. The only way to make sure you’re developing the right products, investing in the right customer service strategies, and building effective promotional SMS campaigns, is to get to know your audience.
Once again, using conversational AI for ecommerce can work wonders here. An AI tool can automatically ask customers questions about the experience they’ve had with your business. They can find out what customers like and dislike about shopping experiences, analyze their sentiment through conversations, and share surveys with your most valuable buyers.
The same tool can use its machine learning and NLP capabilities to dive into the data you collect and surface patterns, trends, and insights you can use to upgrade your strategy. They can even pinpoint the ideal reviews you might want to showcase on your website, social campaigns, and product pages.
Examples of Ecommerce Conversational AI Strategies
Conversational AI might be a relatively “new” concept in today’s world, but countless companies are already using conversational commerce to increase sales, customer satisfaction, and business efficiency. Here are a few examples of how market-leading companies leverage conversational AI in ecommerce to achieve incredible results.
Sephora: Personal Shopping Assistants for Everyone
French beauty giant Sephora is one of the most innovative companies in the cosmetic industries. For years, this company has been investing in artificial intelligence for customer service, sales strategies, and even marketing campaigns.
The company’s conversational ecommerce chatbot (the Sephora virtual artist), is a great example of how ecommerce companies can use AI to enhance the shopping journey. This assistant can analyze each customer’s specific journey with a company, and use data to make tailored recommendations on products that might suit their skin type, preferences, and goals.
With conversational AI, Sephora gives every online shopper their own “personal shopper” that can guide them to the right products, remind them to stock up on their favorites, and more – increasing sales, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
Walmart: Making Orders Effortless
Walmart is another early adopter of conversational AI for ecommerce. This company doesn’t just embed AI into its website with handy chatbots that can answer customer questions. It uses cutting-edge conversational tools to enhance customer shopping experiences in other ways.
For instance, the voice-activated intelligent virtual agent allows customers to add products to their cart, ask for personalized recommendations, and reorder their favorite items using voice commands.
By harnessing artificial intelligence, Walmart has made the shopping process simpler for its customers and strengthened its competitive edge in the retail landscape.
1-800 Flowers: Increasing Customer Engagement
1-800 Flowers uses conversational AI in ecommerce in a multitude of different ways. First, the company has an incredible AI-powered chatbot that can simplify the shopping experience with personalized product suggestions based on conversations with buyers.
Secondly, the firm also uses AI technology to learn more about their customer segments and create more compelling campaigns for marketing and sales strategies. On top of that, 1-800 flowers gives customers access to their AI tools to help them personalize their orders.
For instance, the AI chatbots can help customers to create personalized poems to add to cards they’re sending to their loved ones for specific occasions.
The Benefits of Conversational AI for Ecommerce
Based on all the use cases for conversational AI ecommerce tools we’ve covered so far, the benefits of embracing this technology might be obvious already. But if you’re still on the fence about using conversational AI for SMS personalization, sales, marketing, or customer service, let’s break the benefits down even further.
Improved Efficiency and Productivity
One of the main reasons companies in every industry, including ecommerce, are embracing conversational AI, is that it can streamline and simplify a wide range of processes, making teams more efficient and productive. There’s a lot of repetitive work to be done in the ecommerce space, from verifying customer details to finding tracking information.
Ecommerce conversational AI tools reduce the burden. They can automate the identification and verification process, scan through data to find useful information for customers, and even quickly update customer profiles with information from SMS or email marketing apps.
Conversational AI tools can even streamline the follow-up process, automatically sending messages to customers based on triggers, like delivering text reminders for appointments or upcoming promotions, or reminding customers to repurchase a subscription. This means human teams can focus more of their time on more valuable, creative tasks.
Better Customer Experiences
Around 88% of customers say they’d pay more for an excellent experience. However, keeping up with evolving customer expectations for quick, consistent, personalized, and omnichannel support can be complicated. Using conversational AI in ecommerce is an incredible way to enhance customer experiences, without the headaches.
As mentioned above, with an AI SMS feature or chatbot, you can give your customers 24/7 access to support on multiple channels. Within seconds, a bot can answer all of the questions your customers might have and help them identify the right products for their needs.
AI bots can easily adapt to different customer languages too, making it easy for you to deliver consistent service to global customers, as your ecommerce companies grow. Plus, if you’re using SMS for business customer service, you can use AI to deliver more proactive support too.
For instance, your AI tools can immediately detect when specific customers might face delays in delivery times and reach out with insights into when they can expect their order – before they need to contact a customer service team.
Personalization at Scale
More than 71% of customers expect constant personalization from brands, and 76% say they’re frustrated enough to switch to another company if they don’t get it. But personalizing every interaction is difficult, particularly when you have thousands or millions of buyers.
Ecommerce conversational AI tools can turbocharge personalization in various ways. They can analyze market and customer data to improve your segmentation efforts and act as personalized assistants to customers when they visit your online store. These tools can even deliver personalized product recommendations and offers to specific buyers.
Beyond that, conversational AI makes it easy to increase the personalized nature of your sales and marketing campaigns. For instance, with SMS CRM integrations bots can automatically embed information like a customer’s name, or data about previous purchases into marketing campaigns, helping you to suggest more relevant products to your customers.
This opportunity to personalize interactions with customers at scale doesn’t just lead to higher customer satisfaction rates, it can significantly increase conversions too.
Streamlined Shopping Experiences
The ecommerce buyer journey can include various steps, from initial awareness to purchase - and even advocacy. Conversational AI in ecommerce can guide your customers through each one of these steps. An AI agent can identify a new customer when they visit your website and introduce them to your top-selling products or ask them questions about what they’re looking for.
It can help you to nurture your customers more effectively, by asking them to opt-in to your marketing list in exchange for an offer. When customers are searching for specific products, the AI tool can guide them towards options and deals. Some bots can even add items to carts and help customers complete a purchase.
After a sale, an AI tool can leverage business texting features to send that customer useful tips, guides, and onboarding resources. It can follow up and ask how happy a customer is with a product, and answer any troubleshooting questions they might have. These tools can even invite customers to join loyalty or referral programs based on their level of engagement.
The overall result is a more streamlined, personal shopping experience from start to finish, that boosts a customer’s loyalty towards your brand.
Enhanced Business Insights
Any ecommerce company knows that data-driven decisions are the key to growth. Conversational AI tools are fantastic at scouring through vast amounts of data, from records of previous interactions with customers, to website analytics and more.
With conversational AI for ecommerce, you can quickly identify customer preferences and trends, predicting future trends so you can update your conversational marketing strategy, or choose the most appealing products to add to sales events.
AI tools can help you identify the best time to use SMS for business messaging, ensuring you can reach your customers when they’re most likely to make a purchase. They can even help you identify gaps in your customer service strategy by analyzing customer feedback, reviews, and sentiment.
The data you gather from your AI bots can even go beyond helping you improve marketing, sales, and service strategies. Cutting-edge AI tools can also help you stay one step ahead of potential security threats, by identifying anomalies in customer behavior that might indicate a risk of fraud.
Best Practices for Conversational AI in Ecommerce
Obviously, there are a lot of great benefits to using conversational AI ecommerce tools. However, there are still challenges to overcome if you want to ensure you’re getting the best results. Whether you’re using AI in the telecom industry, fashion landscape, or retail space, here are some key best practices to keep in mind.
1. Prioritize Integrations
Conversational AI in ecommerce works best when your intelligent tools are closely connected with the apps and platforms you’re already using. Ensure you can connect your AI tools with data sources, such as your CRM platforms, customer data platforms, and knowledge bases.
You’ll also need to ensure your solution integrates seamlessly with your communication channels, from social media and messaging apps, to SMS and MMS platforms. Leveraging other integrations, like connections with your business collaboration, project management, and productivity tools can be extremely helpful too – ensuring all of your employees can make the most of your new tech.
2. Customize Your AI Solution
Conversational AI algorithms are becoming increasingly sophisticated, meaning many bots can have extremely engaging and humanized conversations with customers. However, your bots will always perform better if they’re fine-tuned to match your brand and your customer’s needs.
Customize your AI technology with templates and guidelines that help it to emulate your brand voice. Make sure it’s using the same consistent language in all of your text message signatures, social media messages, and marketing campaigns.
Commit to ongoing training, providing your bots with up-to-date information about customer trends, behaviors, and expectations, so it can evolve over time.
3. Commit to Compliance
Finally, remember that ecommerce conversational AI tools handle a lot of personal customer data, so ensuring you remain compliant with data privacy and security regulations is crucial. Be cautious about the amount of sensitive data you share with AI tools, and implement strict guardrails for how they should communicate with customers.
Additionally, ensure your bots are complying with marketing and sales standards. For instance, you can’t use AI text messages for lead generation before you’ve actually got permission to contact your potential customers. Our SMS opt-in and opt-out guide should help you to reduce your risk of non-compliance with TCPA, CAN-SPAM, and other marketing guidelines.
Make sure you’re monitoring your bots for any signs of potential issues with security standards too. For instance, monitor your AI-powered SMS marketing for B2B and B2C campaigns for signs of AI hallucinations, bias, or discrimination.
Create ecommerce experiences that WOW.
The Future of Conversational AI for Ecommerce
The potential for conversational AI in ecommerce is phenomenal, and it’s only continuing to grow. Conversational AI tools are becoming increasingly more effective at understanding human language – navigating nuances like accents in voice calls, and complex requests with ease thanks to large language models. These tools are also becoming more creative.
The integration of conversational and generative AI means that modern conversational ecommerce chatbots are more effective at creating content for customers that specifically resonates with their unique needs and expectations.
Plus, conversational AI tools are becoming more flexible, integrating with various platforms and tools, so that companies can use these apps alongside SMS blast features, customer service apps, and sales strategies to transform endless business processes.
The important thing to remember is that while the potential for conversational AI is great, there are still risks and limitations to overcome. The key to success is finding the right balance, between AI automation and efficiency, and human input. Conversational AI should never replace your human professionals in sales, marketing or customer service.
Instead, this technology should augment and improve the capabilities of your existing team. Tap into conversational AI to transform ecommerce, but keep humans in the loop.
Bring Conversational AI to Ecommerce with Clerk Chat
Ready to give your business a competitive edge with conversational AI in ecommerce? All you really need is the right strategy, and some cutting-edge technology.
Clerk Chat offers guidance with implementing conversational commerce, including tips on how to send mass text messages with AI to guides on personalization. Our intelligent platform streamlines the process of message-based campaigns, with templates, automation, and of course, customizable - and conversational - AI.
Discover how you can upgrade customer experiences, improve business efficiency, and take your ecommerce sales to the next level with Clerk Chat today.
