Conversational Commerce - Definition, Examples, Use Cases & More

With technology advancing each day, e-commerce landscape is shifting towards innovative ways of communicating with customers and closing sales. Small businesses may struggle to catch up as there's so much information and data overload. Today, we are introducing a relatively new branch of e-commerce known as conversational commerce. In addition to helping, you provide customer service round the clock, conversational commerce can empower you to close critical sales in an automated manner. Read on to know more.

What is conversational commerce?

Conversational commerce is a new form of e-commerce which enables businesses to get in touch with customers directly through text and/or voice messages. How do we achieve this? Using different automation tools - messaging apps and chatbots – can help businesses deliver quality services by answering customers’ questions in real-time.

Why is conversational commerce important?

With the world moving faster than ever, real-time communication has become crucial to provide a satisfactory customer experience. When customers have questions about a specific product or issues with an order, it’s best to resolve it as soon as possible. With every passing minute of unresolved issues, customers’ attention and likelihood to convert can decrease.

According to HubSpot, more than 70% of people are willing to use messaging apps to get customer assistance, thus, showing customers’ increasing desire to solve their problems quickly. Further, research conducted by Juniper forecasted retail sales from chatbot-based interactions may reach $112 billion by 2023.

Chatbots can also alleviate the burden of hiring additional customer service personnel to resolve simple issues while providing a faster customer experience. Overall, you can become more cost effective by keeping your team lean.

How can you implement conversational commerce for your business?

1. Answering queries 24/7

Source: Sleekflow chatbot UI

As you can see above, SleekFlow (a leading conversational commerce tool) has set automated messages for certain keywords. For example, if the customer's message mentions "promotions", an automated message shows information about how to use voucher codes. You can create these simple automations within minutes to enable live chats, allowing your business to resolve your customers’ queries 24/7.

Another example would be the Facebook Messenger chatbot’s “always-on accessibility” can improve customer experience by reducing waiting time for query solving. 

You can opt to delegate frequently asked questions to the chatbots, thus providing customers with the option to quickly sort out small queries or get in touch with someone from the customer service team. 2. Lead generation

Lookalike audience Chatbots collect data on customer demographics, interactions and queries, product information, and more. For example, Facebook chatbot acquires data from interactions with customers. Once you set criteria for certain goal, you can use this data to generate a lookalike audience on Facebook and run ads to acquire new customers. You can also develop new marketing campaigns using the data collected on what your customers are looking for on your website.

3. Generate sales

Source: Sleekflow

With the correct conversational commerce tools, you can provide customized service for each customer. It can drive sales by pushing notifications on mobile phones, sending personalized texts, offering customized product suggestions in the chat, or a promo code to trigger purchases. As seen in service provided by Sleekflow, it builds on the strengths of your platform, enabling you to streamline your workflow --- helping you to power up your services. Chatbots can also store user interactions to provide personalized suggestions and anticipate new products that customers will like.

There you have it! A customizable, intuitive automation tool is a must-have for your customer service team. In fact, all CL1CK users can get 10% off for the first three months on SleekFlow, an industry leading conversational commerce tool. With automated customer service and personalised recommendations, SleekFlow’s chatbot is a superb add-on to CL1CK’s analytics dashboard. Be sure to check that out!