Everything you need to know about conversational commerce

Today, brands are looking for ways to scale automated customer communication while retaining the human touch. Creating conversational experiences helps brands meet modern customer expectations on the one hand, while providing instant customer satisfaction on the other. For example, chatbots can provide customers with instant answers, resulting in customer satisfaction.

The goal is to create convenient and personalized interactions that guide customers through their journey. It allows brands to add a human touch to digital communications and helps build a stronger relationship with customers by making shopping easier than ever.

For conversational commerce to be successful, it has to be personal. 71% of customers expect relevant personalized communications from brands and get frustrated when they don’t receive it. McKinsey research has found that personalization directly impacts your bottom line:

Customers seek conversational experiences. They expect the convenience and comfort of conversing with brands through their favorite chat apps from any location. Implementing conversational commerce use cases is not only beneficial for your customers but comes with massive business benefits for your brand.

By adopting omnichannel solutions, businesses can boost conversion rates by:

Discover which chat apps individual customers engage most over, and use them for marketing, sales and support services. Being where your customers are will allow you to offer convenient support leading to happier customers. Converting leads is never easy but offering a wide range of use cases on communication channels they love will improve their experience during the consideration stage and lead them to convert more often.

Keeping engagement going with your customers is the best way to help reduce the rate of cart abandonment. By keeping the conversation active, brands incentivize customers to complete their purchase by:

Use an omnichannel customer engagement solution to create workflows that will send the right messages to the right people at the right time. Tools with event-triggered notifications can help you engage with customers who abandon carts by allowing you to send reminder messages and follow up with enticing discounts to promote the sale.

The best way to increase customer loyalty is to build a strong relationship with your customers. That means that they need to have a good understanding of who you are as a brand and feel confident that you will deliver on your promises.

Building customer loyalty is about nurturing a relationship by constantly engaging with customers and ensuring they don’t forget about your brand. You can achieve this by:

Craft a self-service chatbot to offer customers always-on service to increase their loyalty to your brand. You can design the chatbot to send automatic responses to FAQs or status updates and avoid long waiting queues for call centers.

Using your customers’ favorite chat apps as a sales channel is a great way to promote your products. By using what you know about their past behaviors and interests, you can send relevant products and services or upgrades on plans or memberships that you know meet their needs.

Customers spend approximately 38 minutes a day on WhatsApp, which means your marketing messages will get the visibility they need in order to have an impact when sent on the right channel.

To successfully cross sell and upsell try sending:

A customer data platform is essential for collecting data and learning all you can about your customers. All your customers’ information and past behaviors will be stored in one place where a detailed profile is created and gives you better insights into their shopping habits. Once you understand your customers and their needs, you can send the right messages and improve the chances of completing the sale.

Customer support agents are often answering high volume, low value questions. You can help your contact center agents focus on more complex, rewarding tasks by adding a chatbot to your communication stack

A virtual assistant is also available 24/7 so customers don’t have to call during certain hours or wait in long queues to speak with an agent. Your chatbot can also help customers:

Although chatbots can handle a wide range of inquiries, live support agents are still necessary in order to offer impeccable service. By integrating a cloud contact center solution, you can give support agents the right tools to efficiently resolve any issues that a chatbot cannot.

Customer service chatbots can be designed to understand when it’s time to transfer the customer to a live agent. Agents can then take over the conversation and have a full view of past interactions. This reduces the need for customers to repeat themselves, improving experience. It also helps agents improve efficiency while increasing their sense of accomplishment by giving them more rewarding tasks.

Learn about some of the most popular ways brands choose to connect with customers and craft conversational experiences that lead to greater sales.

Social media profiles are a must have for businesses that want to share information with customers and add valuable touch points to their journeys.

Take Instagram for example. Customers can learn about who you are as a brand by reading your posts, browsing your products and sending direct messages to your business within the social media app.

This all makes social media a great starting point for any business to begin adopting conversational commerce practices in order to increase engagement and conversion rates.

Customer expectations have changed drastically over the past few years. They are no longer willing to wait for responses and get frustrated with having to repeat themselves to support agents on the same issue.

By deploying a chatbot, your brand can streamline conversational services such as:

What’s more, you will speed up customer support queues leading to fast resolution. This will increase customer and employee satisfaction and help you cut costs on call centers.

When customers are navigating your website, live chat is an ideal tool for fast responses and immediate resolution for queries. You can help customers avoid having to make phone calls or leaving your site because they can’t be bothered to search for the answers they are curious about.

You can use a chatbot or live agents to manage the live chats, and converse with multiple customers at once. Send product recommendations based on what information they share with you to walk them through the sales journey all on your website.

Integrating conversations into every stage of the customer journey will help boost overall experience with your brand. From onboarding to re-engagement, you can craft conversations that will walk your customers through their entire journey:

You can start designing conversational commerce experiences as customers are discovering your brand and products. Collect leads with click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook or Instagram and allow them to opt into notifications from you for promotional offers. If your channel of choice is Google’s Business Messages, allow customers to open a conversation with you over Google Maps or even directly on your website.

Having multiple entry points and allowing your customers to initiate the conversation is an excellent way to collect leads, inform potential buyers of your services and start a conversational experience that they are in control of.

Now that you have an open conversation with your customer, you can continue sending relevant and meaningful messages that can help guide them through the sales funnel.

Take advantage of rich media features on chat apps to enrich the conversational experience. Send product catalogs over WhatsApp to allow customers to browse products and read details right in the chat app. Use list messages on Apple Messages for Business so customers skim through products, pick appointment times or find store locations.

Completing a purchase through conversational commerce has never been more efficient. Gone are the days of opening multiple web pages or switching apps to complete a purchase. Now customers can pay right in the chat app.

On Apple Messages for Business and coming soon to WhatsApp, customers can complete payments within the conversation. This makes finalizing a sale easier than ever because customers can browse products, choose what to purchase and complete the purchase without ever exiting the conversation with your brand.

After purchase, your conversation shouldn’t die out. Make sure you continue to chat with customers to increase retention and encourage them to repurchase with you.

By sending delivery status updates, and e-receipts on chat apps, you can continue the conversation after they’ve completed the payment. Then collect feedback from them right in the chat with easy reply buttons for fast responses.

You can loop their journey back to purchase by sending promotional messages, time sensitive deals or loyalty point updates that encourage them to browse your products and make another purchase.