Ecommerce Customer Retention with AI Chatbots – Strategies You Need

Understanding the essentials of a winning customer retention strategy is not rocket science. Unfortunately, few eCommerce businesses realise that having loyal customers is their best bet for rapid growth.

Customer retention has become a vital part of eCommerce sales. And if you fail at satisfying your customers, it won’t take too long for them to move on to your competitors in search of better options.

Start thinking of customer retention as a continuous process rather than a one-time goal. In this fast and upgraded digital world, your customers expect hyper-personalised experiences that save them time and effort.

So, what can help you reach this milestone faster? The answer is AI.

In this article, we show you actionable ways in which AI can build you an optimised system to foster customer retention.

The 7 Ecommerce Customer Retention strategies using AI

Speaking of AI, do you know the number of chatbots surrounding us on average?

Apart from the big leagues such as Siri and Alexa, there’s a high chance you’ve interacted with a bot over the last week without realising it.

Around-the-clock support provided by AI chatbots makes them the most sought-after medium for eCommerce communication.

As per Business Insider, 40% of users prefer interacting with bots over humans. And we believe this percentage will only rise considering how powerful AI has proven to be.

So, how can AI chatbots help to deliver incredible experiences and retain your valuable customers? Here are seven ways:

1. Gain a deeper customer understanding

There are never two or more undifferentiated customers and behaviours. Similarly, their browsing patterns and preferences could be poles apart.

An AI chatbot’s data-driven insights lay a foundation for understanding deeper customer-related nuances such as their purchase patterns, behaviours, and more.

But why do these matter in context to customer retention?

Suppose you’re a fashion retail eCommerce company; your top-quality items tend to go out of stock quickly. So, that’s when having a clear insight into your customers’ preferences can help you manage your inventory.

This way, fewer customers are quitting your site to search for similar options elsewhere.

Are many customers voicing concerns over an item?

AI chatbots store every detail of your customer questions so that you’re on your toes to improve your products and ensure such issues never repeat.

2. More content personalization

Well-curated, customer-oriented content drives more traffic to your sites than usual. Chatbots are part of many businesses’ content marketing strategy that focuses on curating hyper-relevant, personalised content for each customer.

Personalization also promotes user re-engagement with your brand, as chatbots help analyse buyer personas and organise content accordingly.

Also, using this information, you can upsell your products or offer customised discounts to your customers.

Here’s a noteworthy example of Urban Gabru, a men’s grooming and personal care brand:

Potential users are redirected to take a product quiz or can write about their specific concerns. And with the help of a human-like AI chatbot, the system understands their exact query and recommends suitable products.

This helped users speed up their decision-making process and the brand to upsell its products.

Get hyper-personalised with AI

3. Make purchasing simpler

You can tap into your chatbot’s full potential and smoothen purchasing routes. For instance, having a payment or a product search link within a chatbot response lays out a clear pathway for faster customer decision-making.

Chatbots can also educate your customers by providing product recommendations based on specific inputs, comparing product features, leading them back to your online store, and more.

Read more about using conversational commerce for sales and marketing here.

4. Go native with multilingual chatbots

Want a promising tip that helps you relate to your customers better? Deploy your chatbots in your customers’ native languages.

Why is this necessary? Because adequate communication is key to improving sales, and English is not the first language of most users worldwide.

By going local, you ensure their concerns are not just met, but the solutions you provide are understood with clarity.

This leads your customers to build a trustworthy relationship with your brand’s image and eventually become loyal buyers.

Here’s how RedBus caters to a broader group of customers by asking its users to select their preferred language:

With conversational commerce AI chatbot solutions like LimeChat, deploying multi-lingual chatbots is easy for ecommerce businesses.

You can build it all into the system, from popular languages to custom speak and additional vocabulary for a more localised experience for online shoppers.

Book a demo of LimeChat to know more.

5. Requesting customer feedback

Actionable feedback is underrated. Most eCommerce firms overlook the power of feedback or shy away from it.

The goal of using chatbots is to provide a fantastic experience for your customers, leading to better customer retention numbers. And the best way to support this vision is by regularly asking for customer feedback.

Doing so makes customer retention easier, as now you know what your customers like or dislike.

Take a look at how top 20 leading retailers use conversational commerce to engage their customers here.

6. Answer customer queries instantly

Your chatbots must be functioning 24/7 and can answer every basic query your customer might have.

Considering different time zones and a worldwide customer base, chatbots come to your rescue and provide round-the-clock customer support while responding to queries within mere seconds.

Ensure your chatbot is loaded with your customers’ FAQs. Chatbots guarantee instant responses that boost your customer retention and acquisition rates.

Customer retention with AI chatbots – Optimised customer support

Here’s a perfect example of India’s first men’s digital health clinic – Man Matters, which resolved over 70% of queries within a minute.

What did they do differently?

Using an AI chatbot, they could personalise each user’s questions based on their interaction history. This, along with automation, caused a significant reduction in their first response rates from 20 minutes to 3 seconds.

7. Integrate your loyalty programs and chatbots

Humans love rewards or discounts that save them money.

If there’s a close contender, apart from providing quick, non-stop support to please your customers, it’s offering exclusive rewards. And you can further use it to your benefit by integrating chatbots into your loyalty programs.

How do they work? For example, train your chatbot to ask your customer to refer a friend. In turn, reward them with a discount post a successful referral.

Also, drop in a thank you note after every purchase or inquiry. This propels your customers to keep coming back to your online store due to your ease of conversation.

Here’s how the online beauty store MyGlamm included its referral program into its chatbot:

Now that you have a clear idea of executing a winning eCommerce customer retention strategy using AI chatbots, let’s look at the more prominent role AI plays in achieving the above seven strategies.

Why do you need AI to boost your customer retention rate?

Every eCommerce brand’s successful customer retention strategy offers an out-of-this-world customer experience (CX) — for its existing and potential customers.

But the question is, how do you go about this in reality?

For starters, most brands worked at improving their website response rates and offered top-quality products. But this was not enough.

Modern customers expect an enhanced overall customer experience. This is where AI steps in.

Here’s how AI works to execute the 7 strategies:

Actionable, data-driven insights with AI tools:

Every eCommerce business has an insane amount of customer data at its disposal. But not every brand uses them efficiently to drive more sales.

Powerful AI tools analyse your customer-related data in-depth, form user patterns, and create personalised interactions that could fasten a buyer’s journey. For instance, you could use an AI tool to customise every user’s content and provide recommendations of products or services they are most likely to purchase.

Predict customer behaviour:

Every customer has a unique buying pattern. AI tools can pinpoint specific patterns your customers follow and predict their next steps. Based on this prediction, you can alter your content or messaging and eventually improve your retention rates.

Automate workflows:

Let’s face it. With the ongoing technological advancements, many companies still put their employees through routine manual tasks which could be easily automated.

Especially with customer support, AI chatbots, for example, are much more capable than an average support specialist. Because with such bots, you can attend to your customers regardless of their time zone and let your employees work on more critical tasks that would benefit your business growth and overall productivity.

Puts your customer first:

AI provides centre stage for your customers and helps you make key customer-centric business decisions. Most brands fail to maintain a personal touch with every customer.

AI tools support you in sustaining an excellent customer relationship by providing valuable customer insights and statistics and helping you carve out unique interactive strategies.

Master personalization:

To achieve peak customer experience, AI can help you tailor experiences by segmenting your customers based on their psychological profiles, geographic locations, buyer personas, personal preferences, browsing styles, and many more.

By doing so, you accomplish two things: customers spend more time on your onsite sites, and you drive more revenue through your loyal customers.

Optimised customer support:

On-point customer support clearly indicates that your customer retention strategy is on the right track. Unlike events where customers have no choice but to wait for the next available agent to resolve their query, AI chatbots ensure zero to least waiting times and offer non-stop support.

Well-optimised, automated customer support is a perfect combination of AI and CX working towards boosting your retention rates, and there are no two ways to do this.

The Bottom Line – Implementing AI for Ecommerce Customer Retention

AI for customer retention is the most intelligent move you could take to improve your ROI, create brand awareness, and build a customer-aligned process to foster loyalty.  

But does this mean you solely work towards streamlining your workflows that benefit your profitability alone? The answer is no. Make your customer the hero of your retention strategy and build a strong interpersonal relationship. Enhance their experience while they interact, decide, purchase, or engage with your brand in any form.

And a crucial step you can take to accomplish this is using AI chatbots.

LimeChat helps to build an intuitive and interactive automated chatbot system driven by the power of AI. It focuses on personalising your customer experiences and winning-back users by keeping them thoroughly engaged through smart conversations.

Amplify your eCommerce sales two-fold. Book a free demo today!