What can a chatbot do in e-commerce?
A chatbot can be used in all kinds of areas – from customer service and staff organization to healthcare. A chatbot is versatile and can be tailored specifically to your company's needs.
A chatbot has one of its biggest impacts in e-commerce. It becomes an interface between your support and your customers. In this article, you'll learn exactly how a chatbot in e-commerce can help you.
We always say that chatbots with generative AI can automate your customer service and help your company save working time and increase sales. But what exactly can such a chatbot do?
Order tracking
"Where's my package?" is probably one of the most common questions your customer service gets. It's not hard to answer, but it still takes an enormous amount of time, especially when your customer service team has to look up the order status manually each time. You can save all that time if the chatbot takes over the status queries and helps your customers easily.
Product advice
Many providers now include a product advisor in their chatbot offering. It can recommend products to your customers and find the right items for their requirements. In the conversation, the chatbot also has the opportunity for cross-selling and upselling. By recommending related or complementary products or pointing to an item that may be more expensive but suits the customer's needs even better, you can increase your revenue almost on the side.
Help at checkout
A customer has chosen a product and put it in the cart, and then the checkout process is so confusing that she gives up and doesn't buy anything after all. Nobody in an e-commerce company wants this to happen, but unfortunately it keeps happening. With an AI chatbot, you can guide your customers through checkout and so make sure the sale is completed. After all, the shopping experience should be as pleasant as possible!
Promote offers and discounts
Is a discount campaign running? Is the item the customer put in her cart currently on offer in combination with another item? For cross-selling and upselling, your chatbot can make your customers aware of such promotions. But don't overdo it – a chatbot tasked with promoting a campaign at all costs quickly gets on many customers' nerves. A good balance is the key to success.
Change customer data/delivery address
Just like order status queries, customer data or a delivery address can be changed quickly. Here too, your chatbot can save you time and update your customers' data for them. A built-in security check or customers logging in to your website ensures that data stays protected and your customers feel safe.
A better customer experience
With an omnichannel approach, your chatbot can make sure your customers get a seamless shopping experience – whether they're forwarded from Instagram to your website or from your website to your customer service. Customer information is always available to everyone, so customers don't have to repeat themselves.
But that's not the only way the customer experience is improved. AI chatbots no longer have to sound emotionless and robotic. You can make the chatbot a voice of your company, with precise guidelines on how it should address people and which phrases it should use. If you want to know how to find the perfect chatbot for your company, read our blog article here.
Seasonal peaks in inquiries
Whether it's the holiday season, the summer season or other periods of increased demand, a chatbot makes sure your customers are looked after, no matter how many inquiries your e-commerce company receives. That also protects your employees from too much stress and, in the worst case, burnout. In many cases, it even makes hiring extra staff just for these periods unnecessary. That means all inquiries that still reach your employees are answered by experts, not by seasonal staff who may not yet know all the tricks and answers.
You can read about what you can do to get through peak season relaxed in our whitepaper Stress-free customer service in peak season 2024. Stress-free customer service in peak season 2024
Feedback that doesn't end up in the trash
Do you sometimes wonder whether feedback really reaches your service agents? A chatbot handles that itself. It collects feedback from your customers and learns from it. That also means: the longer your chatbot runs, the better it gets. You can't always say that about human employees.
A chatbot is of no use to your customer service?
When you think of chatbots, you may still picture rule-based chatbots that answer slowly and hold robotic conversations. Not to mention that a single typo is enough to get no answer or a bad one.
Rest assured, rule-based chatbots are no longer the standard. Today there are next-generation chatbots with AI!
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A conversation with an AI chatbot should feel completely natural; it can respond to different customers and give each one personalized answers. AI-powered chatbots are also expected to have a certain tolerance for errors. That means the chatbot understands the question and gives a suitable answer even with small spelling and grammar mistakes.
How does chatbot implementation work?
E-commerce or not, implementing a chatbot always works the same way:
Onboarding
First comes onboarding with your provider. You clarify what expectations you have of your chatbot, what information it needs to know and how it should speak and behave toward your customers. Once that's settled, you move on to training. Here your chatbot learns to answer specific questions and increases its recognition rate – and with it the automation rate – step by step.
The chatbot launch
Once all that's done, your chatbot is ready to launch. Whether on your website, via WhatsApp or on other social media channels – as soon as your chatbot is online, it can be integrated into your customer service right away.
Optimize your e-commerce chatbot
Now it's time to optimize! Your customers use the chatbot and feed it real chat examples and unpredictable grammatical challenges. Over time, your chatbot recognizes more and more keywords and can help your customers quickly, accurately and personally.
Different chatbot providers, different services
Every beginning is hard – but not with every chatbot provider. With some, setup can take weeks, and without coding experience, implementing the chatbot becomes a test of your frustration tolerance. With other providers, you don't have to code yourself because they do it for you, but then you don't always have direct access to your chatbot and have to go through the provider for every adjustment.
Your chatbot provider melibo
At melibo, you get a no-code platform. With proper onboarding, you can train and customize your chatbot yourself. Our developers take care of building the chatbot and show you how to add information and keep optimizing your chatbot. Once it's been fed all the information, your chatbot can be launched directly on your chosen platform. No-code platform
Will AI replace me in customer service?
Some chatbots will try to automate everything. But there will always be cases that need a human eye to resolve. For optimal customer service, the goal should never be for the chatbot to replace all your service agents. Rather, it should be seen as support for your agents that makes them even more efficient. For exactly the cases where the chatbot gets stuck, you need smart human handover. Ideally, the chatbot can pass on the information it has already gathered to the service agents so customers don't have to repeat themselves.
Does your company work with an email support ticket system?
If your company receives most of its support requests by email, melibo's Ticket Automation is probably the right tool for you. Ticket Automation can answer a large share of your inquiries automatically and forward more complex ones directly to the right support agents through smart ticket routing, making the best use of each agent's expertise. The built-in AI can also give your agents suggested answers, further reducing the handling time of individual support requests. You get faster service, consistent communication and an evenly loaded customer service team. If you can't quite picture what Ticket Automation is yet, watch the webinar on the topic: our CTO Jonas explains everything you need to know about melibo's Ticket Automation with practical examples.
Success in e-commerce with chatbots
When your chatbot answers all recurring inquiries, your customer service team has more time for more demanding and, above all, revenue-generating inquiries. Answering those also becomes more efficient: the chatbot can collect customer data (name, location, purchase history, etc.) so your employees can help right away.
With a chatbot, your company not only has 24/7 support – your support is also instantly available in several languages. A special bonus for international companies. So we say goodbye to language barriers and hello to international customers! Do it like our customer print24 and roll out your chatbot on different country-specific websites in all languages. print24
By interacting proactively with your customers, your chatbot removes obstacles and ensures a coherent, pleasant shopping experience. It can even remind your customers of items left in their cart or guide them straight through checkout. Either way, no sale gets stuck halfway. This is an especially important feature during peak season.
As you know from big retailers, a chatbot can show how much more needs to be added for free shipping or which products go with what's already in the cart. There may even be bundle deals it can recommend. The better your chatbot knows your customers, the more personalized and relevant its product suggestions become, and the more likely your customers are to buy several products from you and become regular customers.
