JD Duarte

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Jose Duarte discusses the advantages of using chatbots in an eCommerce platform

Investing in chatbot development and integration may seem overwhelming for eCommerce platforms. However, the truth is that not integrating the technology can be more costly. Jose Duarte, an entrepreneur and eCommerce expert from Costa Rica, explains the benefits small and medium-sized eCommerce companies can obtain from implementing chatbot technology.

An employee stays productive for 5-6 hours a day. However, a chatbot stays that way for 24 hours, without slowing down. Most entrepreneurs would like to keep their platform or business open 24/7, but are unable to materialize the idea due to the associated upfront costs. Introducing additional shifts means having to hire, train and manage more employees. Fortunately, the chatbot takes away some of those issues. Businesses can serve their customers and other stakeholders without running low and without the need for additional costs.

Reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC) is one of the key challenges for any business, and even more so when it comes to small and medium-sized businesses. States Duarte, “A chatbot can make a big difference. It can handle your sales operation and significantly reduce the cost of acquiring your customers. The chatbot can accept and process hundreds of requests at once. Chatbot’s query handling capability depends on the chatbot platform you use. For example, a chatbot created with IBM Watson can process 500 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of one million books, per second. Therefore, you can handle any number of queries your customers may have.”

Customer satisfaction is just a survival concept, while Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the real recipe for thriving. NPS not only evaluates customer satisfaction and overall customer relationships, but also connects it to revenue growth. It detects customer sentiment and loyalty by looking for an answer to a question, such as how likely you are to recommend your business to your friends and family. Offering your business app for free is a wonderful strategy, but winning through in-app purchases is not a bad idea.

As chatbots become popular as a customer engagement platform, it’s a good idea to integrate it with your business app or launch it as a standalone app to drive your in-app sales. Spontaneity and intelligence make them do their job in the best way possible. However, before embarking on the development of chatbot, understand the prices or other types of expectations that your buyer people tend to have. Analyze the process/purchase cycle of your products/services.

Improving engagement and customer satisfaction is a significant way to increase the retention rate and contain the dropout rate; fortunately, chatbots can do reasonably well. Asserts Duarte, “ROI is directly proportional to customer retention and abandonment rate. It decreases as your customers leave your network and increase when you manage to retain them. However, for your chatbot to be able to do so, you need to infuse it with the desired intelligence. Therefore, the need is for a well-connected, AI-enabled chatbot that can understand what your customers expect and what makes them think indifferent to their business.”

With their counterparts and large companies competing to keep most of the market in the spotlight it has become essential for small and medium-sized enterprises. By offering new experiences to your customers with technologies as recent as a chatbot, you make your leads and customers feel up-to-date and deal better. It also helps improve business outcomes, including increased revenue and market position, because people love to interact with new platforms. So, by designing an engaging chatbot platform, you can drive your business effort from sales and marketing to brand awareness and hire new employees.

Customers love personalized experiences everywhere, and the companies they deliver make a good profit; fortunately, chatbots are a great way to deliver that. Chatbots can read human intent thanks to built-in artificial intelligence, as well as retrieve and analyze previous conversations to deliver a more personalized experience to consumers. The personalized experience translates into a better commitment to customers, which is critical to driving acquisition and customer satisfaction.

Decoding customer behavior and predicting market trends is a necessity to gain an advantage over the competition. With increased competition in the market, it has become essential for companies to gain business intelligence (BI) and develop their modus operandi and innovate their products and services to better meet customer demand. Interestingly, they need business intelligence not only accurately but also at the right time. It’s a relief that chatbots equipped with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques can do a big favor. If you want to get the most out of your BI, you should consider creating your chatbot using the right chatbot platforms. Also, configure it to track specific events or actions that users perform in the chatbot.

In short, chatbots are being made to alleviate the pain industries face today. The purpose of chatbots is to support and scale business teams in their customer relationships. You could live in any important chat app like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, text messages, etc. Chatbots may seem like a futuristic idea, but according to Global Web Index statistics, 75% of Internet users are said to be adopting one or more messaging platforms. This means you can hardly move forward with an app, but you still have a great chance of integrating your chatbot with one of these platforms.