Chatbots in Ecommerce: How to Deliver Instant, Personalized Service to Online Shoppers

Chatbots in Ecommerce: How to Deliver Instant, Personalized Service to Online Shoppers

Traditionally, getting answers to frequently asked questions would mean navigating to a FAQ page where the most common inquires and their answers are laid out. While this approach does work if you have a handful of questions, it is far too tedious for an in-depth Q&A.

Management of question and answer data also requires someone with CMS knowledge to add and edit content when required. This listing also needs formatting and some knowledge of CSS and correct styles.

Customers also prefer calling or chatting with a real person rather than reading pages of information — they want relevant information as fast as possible. A possible alternative is having live agents ready to answer questions, but that also means training and maintaining this live agent work force. This adds to the total operational costs without a major benefit.

Hitachi Solutions has the answer. Our Ecommerce chatbot will minimize management costs and provide a more personalized experience to the customer via a virtual assistant. No more having to staff a call center or constantly update your FAQ section – our chatbot does all of this for you.

What is a Chatbot and How do They Work?

A chatbot or virtual assistant can answer common customer questions or provide information for direct contact of correct customer care departments. They can also be programmed to respond with predetermined messages based on the wording of questions from the customer. Customers can setup custom question and answer pairs that can be used to run the chatbot engine.

Why Should Retailers Use Chatbots?

There are many benefits to using a chatbot. They save time, money, and create a personalized experience for your customers. Beyond that, many companies are seeing additional upside to the implementation of a virtual assistant, such as:

  • Reach people where they are
    • Because of the ease of integration, chatbots can virtually be plugged into any Hitachi Solutions ecommerce platform. The chatbot can run on a desktop browser or any mobile device.
    • Messaging app usage is growing fast. Facebook noticed a 3x jump in number of bots from last year, proving that consumers are adapting to the technology faster than ever.
  • Important Point: It’s this second area that potentially holds the greatest value for retailers. The use of messaging apps has grown exponentially in recent years, and according to Business Insider,now surpasses social media use. In contrast, a study by comScore has shown that people typically only use three apps frequently, while Localytics found that almost one in four users abandon an app after only one use. As such, developing a dedicated app for your brand may not be the most profitable digital exercise. Messaging apps are where your customers already are. Chatbots can help you tap into this active audience, letting them shop, receive recommendations and even pay without leaving the messaging app.
  • Provide personalized and better customer service
    • Based on the data collected by the chatbot and the logged information for the customer, chatbots can provide information about pending orders, shipment delays, and any promotions tailored to the customer’s order history.
  • Further promote a brand
    • Interacting with the customer allows chat bots to promote and share additional information about the brand and ongoing initiatives. This could be campaigns, offers or even upcoming sales the customers may be interested in.
  • Enables frictionless shopping
    • Currently the average bounce rate on an ecommerce platform is around 40%. Most of the frustration comes from lack of information or navigational issues. The information might be on the website, but hidden under layers of pages. Chatbots can alleviate this frustration.

How Can You Get Started Using Chatbots? Programming a Chatbot in Hitachi Solutions Ecommerce

Let’s look into how you can set up the chatbot with minimal steps.

  1. Setting up the FAQ knowledge base

Converting your current FAQ page into a knowledge base is very easy. You can either upload the Q&A pair (Supported formats are .tsv, .pdf, .doc, .docx, .xlsx, each under 2MB. You can upload up to five files containing questions and answers in sequence.) or manually create them.

Once the knowledge base has been setup, it can be uploaded at qnamaker.ai and expose your Q&A service.

That is it, your FAQ’s service can now be configured on Hitachi Ecommerce to be used as virtual chatbot.

The knowledge based can be edited /expanded or even replaced. The chat logs can also be downloaded for further analysis and to improve the content based on the unanswered questions.

Want to know more about Hitachi Solutions Ecommerce? Visit our website to start a conversation with our team today!

Interested in learning more about how to apply top ecommerce trends on your site? Join us on October 30th at 11am for our webinar!

Topic: Become More Agile and Intuitive With Hitachi Solutions Ecommerce

Speaker: Jason Dias

Date & Time: Tuesday October 30th, 11am

Register Now!