Ecommerce Chatbot Use Cases

An AI-powered chatbot offers ecommerce websites the chance to scale customer support/service while providing useful functionality such as order tracking and upselling potential

By 2023, over 70% of chatbots are estimated to be in retail

- Juniper Research

The pandemic has fuelled incredible growth in the e-commerce sector with estimated sales of $26.7 trillion in 2019. As consumers continue to move ever online, the rise in online spending has resulted in a simultaneous increase in the need to deliver matching levels of service and support - and to do so in a cost-effective and scalable manner.

Conversational AI stands to help make a significant impact on this with its ability to allow companies to deploy advanced virtual agents that do so much more than the Gen 1 chatbots popularized more than a decade ago. Thanks to advances in Machine Learning and Natural Language Understanding, the next generation of advanced virtual agents can bring many additional benefits to enterprises looking to automate service and support at scale, such as:

• Eliminate the barrier between a brand and its customers by providing instant, consistent responses 24/7
• Interface with a customer's account to suggest products and services, helping to increase sales and drive revenue
• Free up employees to focus on high-value customer interactions by automating repetitive tasks
• Deploy fully-automated omni-channel experiences for sales, service and support without tying up resources
• Create dynamic and memorable self-service interactions that bolster brand loyalty

For e-commerce enterprises in particular, conversational AI provides a number of unique use cases that can help to boost sales and drive customer engagement:

Four use cases for an e-commerce chatbot:

Promote sales and marketing campaigns

A chatbot can intelligently make recommendations to customers based on active sales and marketing campaigns. By asking questions, interfacing with a CRM system and referencing a customer's existing account, it's possible to provide personalized recommendations for products and services that customers actually want.

Resolve complaints automatically

Who likes to answer angry customers, especially if you’re giving the same answer a hundred times? Your ecommerce chatbot can give all the information your customers need to reassure them and relieve pressure from the shoulders of customer service agents.

Re-engage customers

Avoid abandoned carts by using conversational AI to remind customers that they have an unfinished order. Ecommerce chatbots can help complete lingering purchases by providing additional product information, answering questions or helping to resolve any issues a customer may encounter during the buying process.

24/7 order support

Extend your support hours to 24/7 with the help of automation. Offer automated return processes and assist customers with inquiries outside of contact center office hours so that they can keep buying your products when it suits them, not you.

47% of online shoppers are open to making purchases using a virtual agent

- Hubspot Research

Client case study: Posten

Challenge: The Norwegian postal service needed to scale customer support during the busy 2019 and 2020 holiday periods

Solution: Posten launched a chatbot on the boost.ai platform with advanced functionality including parcel tracking and the ability to change one's registered address

Results: More than 370,000 customer service inquiries successfully automated in December 2019. In December 2020, Posten's chatbot surpassed over 1 million customer interactions