Can Product Recommendation Chatbots Boost Your eCommerce Business?

‘Conversations drive sales’.

For customers to proceed to the final stage of the sales funnel, it is important to have someone who can clarify their queries, understand their preferences, guide them and recommend them the best option accordingly.

Building rapport with your prospects and showing them that you are there to help is essential to drive sales. Therefore, businesses today must tap into the digital traffic and engage with them via conversations — understanding about their preferences and recommending your solutions accordingly.

This is where product chatbots come in. Chatbots are virtual conversational assistants that act as your first line of customer support, solving your customer’s queries, knowing about their likes and dislikes, and recommending them products accordingly. This not only personalizes the experience for your customers but also reduces support costs.

Chatbots & Product Recommendation

Product chatbots engage with the audience better and as a result, attract and retain customers in the long run. Chatbots in eCommerce automate conversations, thereby eliminating the need to have a sales/customer care agent for each customer at a given time.

With product chatbots, customers and prospects can easily get their general queries answered, without having to scour through web-pages to know more about your services.

Amazon.com is a prime example of a brand which implements product recommendation and does it so well that it generates 35% of its revenue through its recommendation engine. It recommends products from different categories under the sections like “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” based on which product the customer is browsing.

Product chatbots, being the personal virtual assistants, can be leveraged to not just solve customer queries but also to make personalized recommendations by interacting with users to know more about their preferences.

An eCommerce chatbot first probes the user about the type of product they are looking for by asking a set of predefined questions. Based on the user’s response, the chatbot then fetches details from the database it’s connected to and makes suitable suggestions to the user. During the conversation, users can also get their queries solved about different recommended products through the chatbot.

Chatbots in eCommerce can also be integrated with the company’s recommendation engine to offer personalized recommendations to the users.

Chatbots function 24*7 and provide a conversational approach to the exchange of information between the customer and your business. This makes it extremely user-friendly and the least intrusive form of sales and marketing tool.

Benefits of Product Chatbot for eCommerce Businesses

As per a study by Nosto, 75% of consumers prefer brands to personalize messaging, offers, and experience. Apart from resulting in better engagement and conversion rates in the long run, here are some other advantages of implementing an eCommerce chatbot:

• Instant response to customers’ queries and FAQs

• Round-the-clock and real-time support

• Enhanced shopping experience for your customers

• Builds trust and loyalty with customers

• Better brand recognition

• Scalable support to multiple customers

• Helps you achieve better brand recognition

• Multi-lingual

• Human agents can jump in using

   

A chatbot can also be deployed on different channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, mobile app, your website, Shopify, etc so which makes it easier for you to reach out to your customers on the platform they are most active on.

Product Recommendation Chatbot – A Conversation

Let’s have a look at how the conversation with the Product Recommendation Chatbot of a wine store would look like:

Bot: Hi there, I am your personal sommelier, Max.

Are you looking for just wine, or you wish to pair it with what you are eating?

User: Yes, I’d like to pair it with food.

Bot: That’s great! What are you eating?

User: It’ll be steak and some vegetables.

Bot: Ah! Steak is best paired with red wine.

Let me pull out some options for you!…

We have the Burdizzo, the good old Chianti Classico and the Nippazano! Go ahead, choose one!

User: I’ll go with the Burdizzo!

Bot: Awesome choice! You can buy it here(link to the product).

Then the user can directly go to the product page and order the wine of their choice. This way, the user easily got the best-paired wine with their food, without having to go to different pages on the internet deciding which wine would suit steak the best.

Popular multinational clothing brand H&M’s Kik chatbot recommends their outfits based on people’s preferences like color, style, etc. Popular make-up brand Sephora also has a Kik chatbot which offers products, their reviews, tips, video clips, and tutorials based on different make-up styles.

As more and more potential customers discover your eCommerce business solely via digital space, providing effective online customer service becomes the defining factor of your sales pipeline. Offering personalized recommendations in the chatbot is being used as an effective way to drive more customers to the final stage of the sales funnel.

Check out more about WotNot’s product chatbot for eCommerce businesses to see how you can increase your brand engagement and lead generation.