What is conversational commerce? Basically it is a system of trade where the interaction between parties takes place through normal everyday communication methods like: talking, body language, facial expression, etc… This is not uncommon in everyday business situations. For example: If you are ordering at a restaurant, you wouldn’t talk to the person next to you in Spanish, but would instead talk to them in English. This is because the language you use is naturally more comfortable with you than the one in Spanish. And also, the person who was speaking in Spanish would probably be able to understand you better because you were able to speak their language.
Conversational commerce is basically e-commerce performed through different means of human interaction and using technologies like: web 2.0, social media, speech recognition, artificial intelligence and text message technology. The basic model for this entire process is the same: the customer needs to be able to understand what is being said to them in order to give their approval and to ensure that they feel good about the transaction. The second phase of a conversational commerce system is for the interaction to take place at a higher level of conversational competence.
One of the best ways to facilitate this conversational commerce model is to have an app on your website or in your mobile app. There are actually many ways to do this. You can have a bot on Twitter, an internal bot in your company, a Facebook Messenger bot, an SMS bot, and so forth. These are all used to pull together the various channels for interaction that can occur throughout the course of your day. The best part is that there is no need to hire a massive team of IT people to build these apps.
The key to a successful conversational commerce system is to identify your customers, and then to construct a path that will get them from their current state (i.e., having bought something off of Amazon or from someone on Twitter), to being able to ask questions of the seller. Once you do that, you have taken the first step on your customer journey. The next step is to engage the customer in a way that they would not be able to without using your app. This can take the form of an on-site chat, phone call, or virtual shopping cart. Either way, this will ensure a smooth customer journey and increase conversion rates, both through natural and controlled viral spread.
The other thing that you need to be able to do well is to be able to engage with your customers on a more fundamental level. You cannot just throw up a website, write a few blog posts about your products and stick them on the Internet. These are not places where your customers get to ask you a bunch of questions, answer them in a bunch of different ways, or even get to tell you why they bought from you in the first place. Instead, online retailers need to do more than create a corporate identity, or a mascot – these are lifeless and ineffective at generating interest in your brand and, as a result, ultimately in your products and services. By giving your customers some more things to talk about besides the products themselves, you give them something more to identify with as they go along their online shopping journey.
One way that you can do this is by encouraging your customers to leave reviews on the various products you sell. These reviews, in turn, will generate traffic for you, since people are naturally going to want to hear what other buyers think about a product before they make that purchase. This is how conversational commerce strategies like Cart Abandonment Prevention ( CARP) get you customers to actually leave the carts after they have been clicking for a while, or leaving their check-out information for future use.
Of course, there is much more to conversational commerce than just preventing customers from jumping ships after a few messages. After all, if you are really serious about making money through the power of the conversational commerce strategy, then you will have to get creative when it comes to the ways you actually implement it. Fortunately, we have the power of messaging apps like We chat and Weshu to help you get creative and drive sales.
First of all, remember that you cannot put a price tag on fun. The power of Conversational AI commerce allows online retailers to make their customers as much of a part of the process as possible. As you may have figured out by now, it’s hard to engage your audience without having any communication with them; the best way to make your customers a part of the process is to let them participate through a form of dialogue. If you use Weshu or We chat commerce, then you will be able to add a little bit of fun to your conversations with your customers. This will allow you to turn what would have been a sales decline into an opportunity to show your customers that you care about them, and make them a potential part of your business.