Conversational Commerce

What is conversational commerce?

Conversational commerce is the fusion of e-commerce and customer conversations with the intent to create a seamless purchasing experience for customers. Brands use chatbots, voice assistants, and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Alexa, and more to offer real-time assistance to customers, creating a personalized experience through the sales funnel.

Conversational commerce bridges the gap between customers and brands by enabling customers to receive instant support and make better purchase decisions. It also helps brands serve their customers quicker and better while discovering more opportunities to sell their products and services.

How does conversational commerce work?

Conversational commerce allows you to have a personalized one-on-one interaction with customers at every step of their journey, resulting in quicker purchases while reducing the sales cycle.

Conversational commerce can aid the five stages of the customer journey and ensure customer satisfaction:

1. Awareness

Most customers face various barriers at this stage of their journey and seek professional help, so they begin a dialog with the brand through live chat, chatbots, social media, etc. Brands must understand their queries and provide the best solution available with minimal delay.

2. Consideration

Customers know about your brand at this stage but wish to learn more, and compare your products and services with your competitors. Through personalized conversations, you can convince those customers to choose your brand over your competitors.

3. Decision

Customers are ready to purchase at this stage, but they may have doubts about the quality of your products and services, refund policies, support, and more. By sharing social proof and testimonials during 1:1 conversations, you can build trust and convince them to purchase your product. You can also provide them quick links to your refund and other policies, helping them navigate the purchase cycle through real-time responses.

4. Retention

Retention is crucial to ensure that customers keep doing business with you and establish their trust in your brand and product. Engaging customers, seeking feedback, and informing them about your new and upcoming products and offers can help improve your retention rate.

5. Advocacy

Continue the conversation with your customers by requesting testimonials, product reviews, and surprise them with exceptional offers which show your brand cares about them, thereby strengthening customer loyalty. Some of these customers may become brand advocates and bring in revenue through word-of-mouth marketing.

Learn more: 4 Key Considerations for Your Conversational Commerce Platform

Types of conversational commerce

There are four significant types of conversational commerce:

1. Live chat

Live chats are available on company websites and applications, allowing customers to communicate with a human agent or bot in real-time. Brands can keep visitors engaged by offering quick assistance via live chat with the intent to sell.

An example of a live chat:

2. Messaging apps

Millions of people use messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ, and Telegram. Brands leverage these messaging channels to engage with their customers proactively. These apps also make it easy for customers to share media files associated with their queries allowing brands to offer better assistance. Due to the rising popularity of such applications, some brands have started embedding them on their websites.

3. Chatbots

Powered by AI, chatbots allow brands to automate conversations with their customers and reduce the need for human agents. Optimized chatbots provide friendly responses to common support questions, including product, pricing, availability, and more. You can deploy chatbots on live chat and messaging applications.

An example of a chatbot:

4. Voice assistants

Customers can voice their queries and receive resolutions from brands via voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and more. Voice commerce is an emerging tech that poses a “significant challenge” according to 77% of marketers because its implementation is tedious and resource-heavy. But, 87% of managers believe it can become a "powerful marketing, sales, and distribution channel" as voice assistants progressively mediate marketing interactions resulting in faster deals.

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What are the benefits of conversational commerce?

Conversational commerce can benefit your brand in the following ways:

1. Reduce cart abandonment

According to recent studies, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.82%. Communicating proactively with your customers and sending occasional reminders related to the products in their carts creates opportunities to close those sales and reduce your cart abandonment rate.

2. Improve sales velocity

74% of consumers will message a business to make a purchase. Needless to say, you should never keep a customer waiting and route them to the sales team immediately. Using unified messaging platforms, you can seamlessly transfer conversations back and forth between teams to speed customer resolutions and sales.

3. Collect valuable feedback

Diligent analysis of every customer interaction allows brands to zero in on customers' common pain points, fix them, and improve their experiences. Furthermore, requesting feedback at the end of every interaction helps you gather insights to ensure a consistent customer experience across touchpoints in the future.

4. Discover upselling and cross-selling opportunities

Customer interactions uncover upselling and cross-selling opportunities that can further improve your sales velocity and reduce the costs of converting a new lead. Recommending other products, promo codes, and offers based on previous purchases and conversations enables you to deliver a personalized experience that influences the purchase decision of 86% of consumers.

5. Encourage brand loyalty

Creating a seamless customer journey by providing personalized and proactive assistance leaves a solid first impression of your brand. Offering consistent assistance beyond the purchase cycle bolsters customer experience and cultivates the first impression into brand loyalty.

Sprinklr named a leader in The Forrester Wave, Sales Social Engagement Solutions, Q1 2021

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Turn your social into revenue drivers with Sprinklr Conversational Commerce

72 trillion messages are sent across digital channels daily, and for brands to track them all is next to impossible without the help of modern technology.

Sprinklr’s conversational commerce platform can help you meet customers on the 30+ modern channels, build strong 1:1 relationships, and convert these conversations into sales through the following features:

Seamless omnichannel commerce

Drive up to 185% more revenue with seamless omnichannel commerce. Sprinklr’s unified platform enables complete conversational journeys across the 30+ messaging, live chat, social, and app channels your customers prefer — helping you create premium commerce experiences at every touchpoint on their journey.

Personalized customer experience

Create personalized CX that makes customers 80% more likely to convert. Activate seamless end-to-end experiences, from awareness campaigns on paid media to proactive, cross-channel engagement that recommends the right products and services — sparking customer desire, building relationships, and delivering the value that turns prospects into revenue-driving customers.

AI-powered bots and sales support

Reduce CX costs by 40-60% with AI-powered bots and sales support. Scale global engagement efforts efficiently by leveraging industry-leading AI across multiple languages to detect customer intent, power conversational bots, and arm your sales specialists with relevant real-time data.