Traditionally consumers were persuaded through print ads to visit and purchase from brick-and-mortar stores, and enterprises capitalized on the skills of salespersons to increase the sales of the products; however, a paradigmatic shift was observed in the ’90s when e-commerce websites hijacked the conventional brick-and-mortar store mechanism and introduced online stores for running the businesses.
Contemporarily, the in-store visits are subrogated by service reviews, static products, and e-commerce shops. This subrogation has eradicated the room for having social interactions while shopping. In this digital era, the consumers with ambiguities scroll towards the next product and more convenience resulting in minimal interaction and diminished customer loyalty.
So, what can be proposed to enterprises for containing the hereunder issue? To surmount the issue, the concept of conversational commerce emerged as the remedy to lower social interactions while online shopping and rendering a conventional sales experience in the absence of a brick-and-mortar storefront.
The concept of conversational commerce
In 2015, Uber’s Chris Messina published a literary piece on Medium, in which he coined the term Conversational Commerce, the term delineates the intersection of shopping and messaging applications. Like, he introduced the trend towards conversating with businesses through chat applications such as WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Talk or through in-voice technology such as the Echo product of Amazon, which enables the interfacing with companies through voice commands.
Conversational commerce in the business landscape
To assimilate the Intel about the products, consumers can chat with the companies’ sales representatives, receive customer support, ask inquiries, obtain personalized and individual recommendations, go through the reviews, and click to buy through the domain of messaging application. By dint of conversational commerce, the consumer indulges in interaction with a chatbot, human representation, or a conglomerate of both.
In the business sphere, businesses can use chatbots to engineer an automated customer service message. Through this mechanism, companies can empower the customers to buy from their e-commerce stores without leaving the messaging application they are operating. By integrating different applications, businesses can send order confirmations through Facebook Messenger, including the shipping and delivery details. Employing chatbots can resolve the customer service challenges, dispense product recommendations, establish wishlists and engage in discourses with buyers in real-time.
Artificial intelligence’s domination in conversational commerce
Conversational commerce 2.0: Grow where commerce is already taking place
The organic growth of conversational commerce platforms can dismantle the current tracks of impossibilities and challenges of e-commerce in contemporary times. However, the growth of e-commerce is phenomenal, and the handling of e-commerce through human efforts might be a big challenge. Artificial intelligence, however, comes to the rescue in this state. Artificial intelligence brings the possibilities of integrating multiple platforms all at once and then considering the world to have cross-platform communication. Also, this tech-based idea’s basics have been dependent on dealing with speech recognition and text recognition with the e-commerce enterprises to make better customer engagement while using technology.
Reaching true potential: Integrating artificial intelligence with market intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is no way behind any other tech-concept in the world. In fact, it is one of the ideas that has begun to become the base of many of the other contemporary tech-ideas in the world. Even with many giant enterprises’ tremendous investments to get their conversation interfaces into homes, conversational commerce still seems like the next big thing, but not quite here yet.
However, the opportunities await on the other side of technology, and the only price you have to pay is to be creative and attentive to bringing out the technology. Like no one assumed, artificial intelligence would influence the market intelligence with data analysis, big data, and data science alongside implicating the marketing ideas with proficient tools.
This is also expected and awaited for conversational commerce. If the pace of development in the field continues, we are no far from having this field making the business communication as easy as you like it with all the improvisations that a business wants.
If you are attempting conversational commerce without understanding who you are talking with, you are just winging it. You are hoping to pass the Turing Test with the digital equivalent of charm and quick improvisational thinking. Real conversations come with people we know – we know things about them, and that knowledge drives a truly interactive conversation. The winners will be those best able to build sophisticated conversational AI on top of a deep well of market intelligence.
Why 2020 will be the year of transformation for the CPaaS industry
The next wave of growth for CPaaS is expected.
Given that digital transformation originated from North America and Europe, the CPaaS (Communication platform as a service) market in these regions has been stronger. It is much ahead on the maturity curve. In 2020, we expected other countries to catch up with the trend and witness multi-fold growth in demand for CPaaS solutions, driven by factors like pervasive connectivity and high digital transformation adoption rates in the region.
Enriched consumer experience with full-stack service
Across the globe, digital communications have been empowered with affordable data and cost-effective services. This year, consumers will expect significantly more than vanilla encounters when they engage with various brands.
Telcos-CPaaS partnership to rewrite a few scripts
As customers explore contemporary platforms for real-time interactions, narrate OTT platforms that provide more flexibility and features at a reasonable cost. Their interaction with conventional telephony services such as SMSs and voice services is expected to reduce dramatically. Telecom companies will face setbacks to bridge the problem and stay relevant; telecoms will partner with significant CpaaS providers and provide solutions on their personalized network to exploit their existing data centers and infrastructures, resulting in new and lucrative revenue streams.
AI will be the pivotal influence.
To strengthen the systems, CpaaS solutions employ Machine Learning (ML), Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and so forth to forecast and contemplate the stability and quality of the services that can highlight the abnormal behavioral patterns before they proliferate into principal anomalies. Another business proceeding that can immensely benefit from the inculcating of AI would be capacity planning. Organizations generally depend on scientific data from identical projects to establish future resource compulsions. With AI’s help, companies can appraise the data patterns through metrics of usage, region, and many other psychographic segments. This aids the companies to construct alternate capacity and envisage server downtimes. Ultimately, the use of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality can help organizations to create enriching experiences. These experiences will revolutionize several industries’ operations.
The pervasive displacement to person-to-device from person-to-person
With the snowballing of IoT (IoT), digital communications in 2020 will potentially germinate from individuals communicating with each other to connected devices as the central platform. Smart devices have been accumulating data for a long period; brands have been speculating how to put the data into efficient usage. CpaaS will displace the person-to-person interaction into person-to-device by making communications smarter by bringing in the communication layer-on, which will enable in reaching the right audience without much social intervention. Conclusively, it is evident that different brands will search for CpaaS solutions to bring a differentiating competitive edge to their interface and make their platform consumer-friendly and expect to achieve a larger sum of market share by increasing sales.
Reinforcing conversational commerce platforms to a customer engagement strategic planning
Here are some tips for delivering an influential and enlightening conversational commerce experience:
- Endorse diverse conversational channels: Where an e-commerce site is a full-fledge shop for all customers diverse channels such as Google RCS, Apple Business Chat, and Facebook Messenger help to extend your reach, consider these multiple conversational channels as mobile salespeople. They will help meet new clientele where they are already existing instead of waiting for them to reach out to your website. Endorsement of these channels is just the initiation of the lucrative conversational commerce journey with speech and text recognition possibilities.
- Be certain to refrain from data silos. All seldom, web, commerce, customer, and conversion data exist in disparate systems making it strenuous to see the explicit customer journey. By breaking down and disseminating the data silos, companies can comprehend both the experience and individual consumers at a macro level to assist in informed strategy shifting.
- Lastly, don’t be intimidated by the chatbots. While some organizations are establishing a hardline on capitalizing bots for conversational commerce, chatbots render support to brands’ clientele rapidly and beyond the normal business hours. Those still skeptical about artificial intelligence and chatbots developed with Natural Language Processing can fathom the intent of clients’ questions – no wonder the syntax of the question – makes the process of interacting with chatbot prompt, effortless, and effective more than ever. Moreover, AI-supported assistants are also guiding the agents behind the scenes by steadily feeding them required information and recommendations to facilitate a real-time experience in real-time.
Conzia is a Berlin-based startup. At Conzia, we are establishing a Communications Platform as a Service. Our Platform is user-friendly and flexible enough to integrate 40 plus other messaging CRMs, APIs, CMSs, and Marketplaces, thus offering a collated solution for unified and exemplary customer support.
Conzia aims to facilitate consumer support teams by managing their conversational commerce and providing them with one platform for managing billions of customer conversations. Conzia offers Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), AI-powered chatbots for engaging and interactive conversational commerce, and reliable real-time reporting and data analytics.
With Conzia, customers can easily manage their conversational commerce on various messaging applications, including Telegram, Viber, WeChat, SMS, WhatsApp, and many others, via a single platform. AI-powered chatbots facilitate the customers by reducing the workload of the customer support team as 50% of your customer inquiries are automatically responded via chatbots that can amplify customer satisfaction and lower the workload of agents in your customer support team; thus, with Conzia’s conversational commerce solution, you can have happy employees, satisfied customers, and higher sales.
Conzia’s powerful AI and Data Analytics Tools will provide your customer support team real-time updates about the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) related to response time, agent workload, customer satisfaction, and many others. Conzia will help you in proliferating your returns on investments by rendering optimized conversational commerce solutions.