7 Ways Online Businesses Should Use Ecommerce Chatbots for Customer Engagement

_{Learn how to use ecommerce chatbots for customer engagement at scale.}

The world has changed since the pandemic. Consumers are now more likely to shop online than in-store, and e-commerce sales are skyrocketing. Customers are also willing to pay a premium for personalised experiences.

With all this change, it’s easy to see why so many businesses have moved into the online space.

But what about those of us who have been around for years? Is your brand ready to make this transition? And if so, how do you make sure you don’t get lost in the crowd?

It’s easy to create a website and launch operations to support order fulfilment but what’s tough is customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. Customer engagement is the most important tool that can help brands differentiate themselves.

After all, consumers today are willing to pay a premium for personalised experiences!

eCommerce Chatbots are one of the most popular ways of boosting customer engagement, and they are changing the way companies interact with their customers. Instead of having to wait for a human representative to respond to their questions, users can now get an instant response from the ecommerce chatbot whenever they want it—day or night.

This means that your customers will no longer have to wait for an answer and can instead be served immediately by a virtual assistant, which will also improve sales metrics such as Average Order Value (AOV), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Repeat Customer Rate, etc.

In this article, we look into the various ways in which online businesses are and can leverage ecommerce chatbots for customer engagement.

Why do online businesses need ecommerce chatbots for customer engagement?

Ecommerce chatbots are the new frontier and are a must-have for online businesses. They help companies increase sales, reduce costs, and improve customer service—all through the use of natural language processing technology. They can provide customers with information about your products, answer questions about shipping, and even help you track customer satisfaction.

According to MIT Technology Review, 90% of online businesses report large improvements in the speed of complaint resolution with chatbots. Customers, too, prefer interacting with chatbots since the response is almost instant and the resolutions are faster.In fact, the percentage of consumers who feel comfortable handling an issue without a human agent is as high as 65%!

Chatbots are a necessity more than an item on the customer engagement checklist. Here’s why it is so:

Explosion in the usage of messaging apps

According to Business Insider, more than 50% of consumers prefer businesses that use chat or messaging apps. Consumers like to use chat apps for initial contact because of the quick response and no-fuss nature of it. They usually have no patience to wait for an IVR or a customer service executive putting their call on hold.

Messaging apps are what consumers use extensively in their day-to-day life while interacting with their friends and family. For the same reasons of ease and convenience, they prefer using an automated chat while interacting with a business.

Increased preference for personalised treatment

Today’s consumers are increasingly willing to pay a premium for a seamless, personalised experience. They like to be addressed by name, have their past purchase and wishlist history taken into account, and have their shopping preferences and tastes remembered.

And it’s not just about making them feel special—it makes sense for retailers to offer this kind of service because it increases loyalty and increases the likelihood of repeat purchases.

​​Epsilon research pointed out that a whopping 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalised experiences.

And ecommerce chatbots for customer engagement can help you deliver those personalised experiences to consumers in a much more reliable manner as compared to human agents.

The increasing need for prompt support

Impulse purchases made online need prompt support and resolution. And ecommerce chatbots have unmatchable speed and accuracy in the resolution of customer complaints and queries.

A study by KPMG found that 75% of customers expect brands to respond to their queries within an hour, while 24% will abandon their shopping cart if they don’t receive a response within that time frame. In fact, 60% of consumers are likely to buy from another store after failing to get help from a retailer via chat or email within two hours!

You wouldn’t want to miss that 10-second window in which a customer abandons a cart or moves to the next page. An ecommerce chatbot for customer engagement can prompt them as soon as they see them stuck in a place and can answer their questions almost instantaneously.

A businesses’ need to predict customer behaviour methodically  

Today eCommerce businesses can survive the tough and ever-growing competition by going a step forward in customer experience and engagement.

Predicting a customer’s moves and preferences can be a game-changer for eCommerce businesses, and chatbots can help do just that. They can not only methodically store data from customer interactions but can also learn from it and use it in the next interaction or while sending notifications or prompts.

For example, chatbot analytics has a component called sentiment analysis that allows it to identify keywords and evaluate the tone of the conversation.

Need for building lean and efficient teams while optimising costs

eCommerce chatbots for customer engagement bring in unmatchable operational efficiencies for online businesses. A chatbot can bring down customer servicing costs by 30-40% in most cases. Staggering, isn’t it?

With chatbot enablement, you can optimise your customer service team’s size and use that money to increase the engagement activities’ number and depth. A chatbot will reduce the precious time and money spent on a large team that needs continuous monitoring and process control.

Provide in-depth and systematic data for the analysis of consumer behaviour

While most customer service calls are recorded, analysed, and used for training purposes, the data captured isn’t comparable in quality and accuracy compared to that captured by a chatbot. A chatbot can store, synthesise and present actionable insights in an automated manner with little room for human errors or loss of information in comprehension and translation.

Different ways to use eCommerce chatbots for customer engagement

While the use of ecommerce chatbots for customer engagement should vary based on your business goals, here are some ways in which we do recommend making the most of this technology:

Automating Lead Generation

Automating lead generation is one of the most effective ways to increase your business’s efficiency. A chatbot with the right inputs can help you generate leads even while your reps are offline. They can simply greet a customer as soon as they arrive on the website and share a survey or directly collect contact information from prospects. They can then also go on to automatically qualify leads.

Resolving customer concerns quickly and reducing drop-offs

When you’re running an eCommerce business, it can be tough to keep up with the sheer volume of customer queries and complaints.

Customer representatives have invincible human limitations when it comes to responding to a deluge of customer queries and complaints. On the other hand, ecommerce chatbots can handle large volumes of queries and complaints systematically – simultaneously. The flow, once set, is something a chatbot won’t budge from, and all your customers will get a standard yet personalised flow.

This is great for two reasons: First, it prevents last-minute drop-offs due to the frustration of not getting a timely answer to a question. For example, if a customer trying to look for the exact exchange eligibility time period is more likely to make the purchase if their question is answered in that instant.

Second, standardisation helps you achieve greater efficiency—you don’t need as many people on staff answering questions because your chatbot can do it all at once.

Facilitating seamless navigation through the product catalogue

Ecommerce chatbots for customer engagement make it easier for customers to navigate your product catalogue, increasing the likelihood that they’ll make a purchase.

Using natural language processing (NLP) technology, chatbots can understand the context of what the user is asking for and serve up relevant results. This makes it easy for users to find exactly what they’re looking for without going through menus or sifting through pages of search results.

Moreover, ecommerce chatbots can help customers find instant answers by helping them sift through FAQs quickly. They can simply type in a question and get an answer or exact link to the kind of product or service request they are looking for. This also increases conversion rates while minimising drop-offs.

Personalised experience based on past data for each customer

An ecommerce chatbot’s ability to store a customer’s past preferences and record purchase behaviours make them a perfect match for providing hyper-personalised experiences that can be ultra-engaging.

For example, ecommerce chatbots can share newly launched products and key discount deals right before closing the conversation. These recommendations would ideally be based on the past purchase history of the customer, making them highly relevant.

This is what is known as behavioural targeting in marketing speak. Behavioural targeting focuses on understanding your customers through their actions and then delivering content that is aligned with their interests and needs.

However, it’s not enough to simply know what they are interested in; you also need to understand how they behave over time so that you can influence future behaviour through targeted messaging (e.g., discounts). For this process to succeed, behavioural targeting requires extensive data collection about customers and sophisticated analytics capabilities capable of extracting meaningful insights from all that data.

Keeping customers hooked smartly during the interaction

Ecommerce chatbots for customer engagement can quickly respond to customers based on the request and tonality. They can change the tone, responses, and even the language and offers based on the interaction after some amount of learning.

The algorithm that programs the chatbots to learn from interactions and use them to better future interactions ensures that chatbots take into account the customer’s feelings while responding. So what may look like a very monotonous and banal conversation can actually be much more meaningful, contextual, and dynamic!

Maximising cross-selling opportunities

Ecommerce chatbots for customer engagement can maximise cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. A regular customer executive may be able to raise a ticket and provide a resolution to a customer’s satisfaction, but they can’t pitch any new products without sounding too pushy.

Ecommerce chatbots, on the other hand, can present products that are similar to what customers first came looking for or products related to what they’ve purchased. When a chatbot throws up options, a customer is less likely to perceive it as a pushy-sales pitch, which is usually the feeling of a human sales representative. A chatbot can elicit a very objective response from your customers when presenting them with more options to augment their purchase.

This gives them an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell based on their previous purchase history or preferences, which is something that human sales representatives cannot do efficiently as they would have no prior knowledge of the customer’s preferences until they ask questions.

Processing refunds, coupons, returns & exchanges at lightning speed

When it comes to processing refunds, coupons, returns & exchanges, processing speed is everything. It’s not just about closing requests at lightning speed—it’s about maximising customer satisfaction.

Chatbots can handle mundane yet very critical service requests like placing and processing returns, exchange requests, or answering questions on conditions on redemption of certain coupons. They not only close these service requests at lightning-fast speed but can also maximise customer satisfaction way better than the human agent channel.

Boost your ecommerce customer engagement with chatbots

Customer engagement is the future of successful ecommerce businesses. And ecommerce chatbots for customer engagement are the way to make this success possible in an ever-expanding digital landscape.

Ecommerce chatbots can help you provide better service, reduce the amount of time you spend on certain tasks, and increase your revenue by infusing context and personalization into conversations with consumers.

But it’s important to note that these capabilities only come from using the right kind of chatbot. If you use a generic one, it won’t be able to address your customers’ needs as effectively or efficiently as a custom-built one could.

So, if you’re looking to make your customer communication more effective—and reap all the benefits that come along with it—make sure you’re using an eCommerce chatbot that can understand what your customers need and respond accordingly.

LimeChat’s AI chatbot can help you boost your customer engagement and lower your costs by automating repetitive tasks like customer service and marketing so that you can focus on higher-value work.

Our AI-powered chatbots are designed to be flexible and adaptable—they’ll grow with your business, providing customers with the best experience possible while they’re on your website or app. You can use our pre-built templates and add-ons to get started right away, or you can create your own custom chatbot from scratch.

Book a free demo today!