How Chat-Based Conversational Commerce Impacts Customer Experience

Conversational commerce, often referred to as chat-based commerce, leverages automated conversations and advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning to enhance the online shopping experience.

This means your business can now engage with customers in real-time, giving them personalized support and recommendations throughout their shopping journey.

AI-based commerce is quickly becoming the preferred method of customer support, overtaking traditional phone, email, and in-person services. Used correctly, it gives your customers unmatched convenience while giving you efficiency and access to detailed analytics that conventional methods cannot provide.

Here’s how your enterprise can leverage conversational commerce to vastly improve customer experience (and achieve your business goals).

Personalize The Shopping Experience/Enhance Customer Insights

Conversational commerce can help you tailor your product recommendations during the online shopping experience. Here are two ways to do that:

AI-Driven Suggestions: By analyzing customer data and browsing history, AI can offer personalized product recommendations, making it easier for customers to find what they need. Custom Messaging: Automated chatbots can customize messages and offers based on individual customer preferences and behavior, creating a more relevant shopping experience.

Conversational AI tools can track and analyze customer interactions, providing valuable insights into their preferences and buying patterns. This data helps businesses refine their marketing strategies and improve personalization.

How does Robusta help its partners accomplish this?

Khaled Hesham is AI Manager here at Robusta Technology Group. He has a strong background in software engineering and AI management and has honed skills in full stack development, ecommerce, and embedded systems.

Khaled helps RTG’s partners develop customized conversational commerce tools, starting with a basic offering that includes integration with your product catalog. It includes the full ecommerce cycle, suggesting product comparisons, offering more product info, answering FAQs, and helping to complete orders.

“The bot remembers addresses, phone numbers and other information so you don’t have to start from the beginning every time,” Khaled says.

Easy integration with platforms such as Magento gives enhanced security measures; API integration with sales databases streamlines the buying process.

The system also offers seamless payment integration with your current payment vendor and integrates with voice at basic level. For example, your customers can send a voice message to the bot and offer an immediate response via WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram or whatever messaging platform your company uses.

##Enhanced Engagement & Problem Resolution

RTG is working to improve its chat-based conversational commerce offerings to further improve the customer experience. This includes a dashboard that will show an overview of chatbox interactions, help with complaint resolution and more. RTG can even build AI chatbots with the functionality you want, such as integration with user history and order history to personalize online shopping.

Khaled says RTG is also leveraging ChatGTP to work within the “conversational flow.”

RTG’s AI solutions are ideal not only for ecommerce clients but also for any online vendor.

“It’s not just a support app,” Khaled says. He says you have to make conversational commerce its own channel. While messaging platforms have shopping capabilities build-in, they have limitations (such as the number of products you can offer).

“We built our own channel that integrates with Shopify and Magento (among other major platforms),” Khaled says. RTG’s tools track the status of an order, allow you to edit or cancel an order and provide FAQ responses and other support capabilities.

Indeed, 24/7 instant assistance is something consumers have come to expect. RTG-powered chatbots work around the clock, ensuring that customers can get help whenever they need it, without having to wait for business hours.

Automated systems can also handle multiple queries simultaneously, providing instant responses to common questions and issues, reducing wait times and enhancing satisfaction.

“If you talk to a human agent and the company doesn’t have enough people, you could be waiting for a long time,” Khaled explains. To scale, you have to hire more people—unless you leverage conversational commerce solutions to augment your capabilities.

Chatbots ensure a consistent level of service by reducing the variability in customer support experiences.

“This is one of the most important aspects, because you always get a consistent answer,” Khaled says. Individual support agents will give different answers, while the AI offers a consistent way of handling each problem.

If a chatbot cannot resolve an issue, it can seamlessly escalate the conversation to a human agent, ensuring that complex problems are addressed promptly.

What is the best way for conversational commerce to work with human customer support (for example, in the case of an escalation)?

“You can train the AI to handle escalations (you can detect customer frustration in a number of ways) or you can make the AI respond to specific issues (such as missing items in a delivery),” Khaled explains. “In a more sophisticated case, you would direct them to a live support agent. But we’re dealing with sales AI, so the user is asking questions that the chat can normally handle.”

The goal is to achieve human-like responses and to ask the right questions to guide the buying process. If you’re shopping for a television, you wouldn’t walk into the shop and say “I want a TV” only for the salesperson to show you 100 products. Instead, the person helping you asks the right questions to narrow down your selection and make the buying process easier.

Smart AI chat solutions do exactly that, allowing customers to interact with a brand through natural language conversations and making the shopping experience more engaging and intuitive.

“If you need a product but don’t know exactly what you need (as with the TV example), you can provide details about your budget, about the ongoing support you need, etc,” says Khaled. “You don’t have to go back and forth all over the website to get those answers.” Instead, the AI provides an interface to record your search and make it easier to find the right product.

Streamlined Purchasing & Post-Purchase Relationship-Building

Chatbots can facilitate transactions within the chat interface, allowing customers to make purchases without being redirected to different pages or platforms. They also allow customers to track their orders and receive updates directly through the chat, providing a convenient and cohesive experience.

“If you don’t have online payment integrated yet, we can offer this as well,” Khaled says.

And what’s even better than a sale? A repeat sale.

That’s why post-purchase engagement is so important. After a purchase, chatbots can send personalized follow-up messages to thank customers, request feedback, or offer related product suggestions. Chatbots can even manage loyalty programs, track points, and notify customers about rewards and exclusive offers, encouraging repeat business.

Khaled says RTG can build these kinds of post-sale functionalities into customized conversational commerce offerings. Additional features are always possible (and necessary), because out-of-box Magento and Shopify features don’t always give you everything your business needs.

Additional Features To Consider

We’ve talked about AI Chat, but what are some of the other features we expect to see from conversational commerce in the months and years to come? They include:

Real-Time Feedback: Conversational tools can collect feedback in real-time, allowing businesses to quickly address any issues and continuously improve the customer experience. Actionable Insights: The data collected from customer interactions can be analyzed to gain insights into customer satisfaction and areas for improvement. Multi-Language Support: Chatbots can support multiple languages, making it easier for businesses to cater to a global audience and ensuring that language barriers do not hinder the shopping experience. Inclusive Design: Conversational interfaces can be designed to be accessible to people with disabilities, ensuring that all customers can engage with the brand comfortably. Voice Commerce: Integrating voice assistants into conversational commerce allows customers to interact using voice commands, making the shopping process more accessible and convenient, particularly for those who prefer or require hands-free interaction.

The Takeaway

At its core, conversational commerce redefines customer engagement by offering a real-time conversational experience. It allows customers to ask questions and receive immediate responses.

Businesses can present options, automated recommendations, and personalized offers instantly. Leveraging artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and bots, they ensure faster response times and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Chat-based commerce enhances the customer experience by providing personalized, efficient, and engaging interactions. By leveraging AI and machine learning, Robusta Technology Group can help your business offer tailored recommendations, instant support, and seamless transactions, ultimately driving customer satisfaction and loyalty. As the technology continues to evolve, the impact of conversational commerce on customer experience will only grow, making it an essential component of modern e-commerce strategies.

In Egypt and throughout the region, AI is integrating more and more with ecommerce. RTG’s solution, coupled with our ecommerce experience, gives an integrated way to deliver the right products to your customers.