6 chatbots to revolutionise retail and eCommerce

Help is at hand in the shape of retail chatbots, automating time-consuming tasks like returns, payments, and even customer service training. Here are a few of the ways they can help.

1. Increase sales with an acquisition chatbot

An acquisition chatbot can exist on any number of your channels and can interact with customers who aren’t inclined to talk to a real person. You might use an acquisition chatbot as a way to start an initial conversation with new visitors, or you could use it to share useful information and production suggestions with existing customers.

Either way, it’s crucial that your acquisition chatbot offers your users value above and beyond a transactional relationship. Given this part of the process is about acquisition, make sure your initial interactions are about building brand equity and providing information rather than delivering the ‘hard sell’. Equally, context is king. Make sure your interactions are appropriately targeted for new and returning customers, offering discounts and suggested products to those that have bought from you in the past.

2. Automate returns with a returns chatbot

Returns are about making the best of a bad situation. No-one is making money from the returns process except your logistics service, but it’s important to make sure your customer comes away from the process with a good impression of your company. After all, the ideal situation after any returns process is that the customer comes back the following week and spends twice as much.

Keeping things simple here is key. A returns chatbot that can handle the full returns process including logistics, tracking, and refunds by interrogating your back end systems for information, will save your customer services team valuable time and let them focus their efforts on more important tasks.

3. Enable customers to track orders with a Where Is My Order (WISMO) chatbot

Talking of logistics, customer expectations are higher than ever and knowing where their order is comes fairly high up the list. Manually tracking individual orders over chat, email, or phone would be an enormous drain on your customer service team, but there’s a chatbot solution for that. A Where Is My Order (WISMO) chatbot can communicate with your data storage, or 3rd party courier systems to track down orders fast and then return the information on a map, or in text form if you prefer.

4. Automate FAQs with a customer service chatbot

Customer service can involve an awful lot of repetition. Chances are that a lot of customers will be asking identical questions day-in-day-out. Automating this process can save your customer service team masses of time and deliver a better, more consistent experience for your customers. A chatbot can automatically respond to frequently asked questions, scrape your website for information to answer tricky questions, and even use AI to create its own answers to customers for a more conversational experience.

5. Onboard new employees with an internal chatbot

In retail, customer service teams can have a high rate of churn. Training new team members and equipping them with all the knowledge they need to do their job can take a lot of time. A better option is to build an internal knowledge base chatbot that allows new and existing staff to find important information at the press of a button, meaning new employees can be put ‘into the field’ much sooner and reducing the line management and training time required.

6. Enable payments with a collections chatbot

Making payments simple and easy is the key to converting eCommerce customers quickly and efficiently with minimal cart abandonment. Collections chatbots provide a one-platform solution to collect payments from your customers and can be set up to accept a wide variety of payment methods.

You can also use them to convince delinquent account holders to pay up in a timely manner. If you’re struggling with credit control, a collections chatbot might be just the thing to get your customers’ payments back on track. Make it a seamless journey from message to payment, and you’re more likely to collect from busy customers who are easily sidetracked or get put off by complex payment journeys. It’s easy; just keep it simple.

Build a retail chatbot that best suits your needs

You can build any type of chatbot with our Conversational AI Cloud. Create a specific microbot, or let one smart chatbot handle multiple use cases.

If you want to find out more about how chatbots can revolutionise your retail and eCommerce business, get in touch with one of our experts or download our guide.