7 Chatbot Use Cases In Retail

Chatbots are machines that are capable of understanding customer queries and giving customers answers automatically. Retail businesses can benefit from smart chatbots as they automate their business. Through providing instantaneous answers, using less human resources and increasing self-service levels, chatbots benefit retail companies by making their customer support more efficient. Below we have listed the top chatbot use cases in retail.


Top Chatbot Use Cases In Retail 

1. Reduces Customer Service Agent Workload

When customers come to the retail company website, the chatbot can have a conversation with customers without engaging the customer support agents. This means that chatbots can build a positive experience for customers and establish trust by answering common FAQs. As chatbots conduct more conversations, the amount of work for customer service agents decreases.


To measure this there are in general 4 metrics you should keep an eye on when developing your chatbot in customer support. The average deflection rates by using chatbots hover around 50%. This translates into reducing customer service agents’ workload by 50%. And when you train and build your chatbot over time, the self-service rates can reach 65% and more. 


2. Higher Customer Happiness Score

Customer happiness is important for retail companies. In today’s world of high competition, companies are eager to differentiate and good customer service is one way to stand out from the crowd. 


The main reason for increased customer happiness is that the retail chatbot can give customers quick answers. The AI bot can answer customers in less than a second, meaning there is no waiting time. When a customer usually contacts a business they are either put on hold in the call center or their email gets a response in 4 days. 


Immediate answer from the bot increases customer happiness because the customer feels that their problem is being dealt with immediately. This increases trust in the company and increases loyalty.



3. Customers Get Answers Instantly

Messaging is the fastest growing channel for customer communications and live chat on websites offers customers a convenient way to reach companies. However, availability of human agents is often an issue and customers despise waiting in queues. 


As such retail companies opt for chatbot because they can answer customer questions in less than a second. 


Chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants bring efficiencies to customer service departments because customer service chatbots can answer questions immediately and in multiple languages. This is one of the best chatbot use cases in retail.



4. Give People Messaging Options They Are Looking For

WhatsApp and Messenger are highly used across the globe as they are fast and succinct. Expectations from messaging with friends is carried over to the experience customers are expecting from businesses.


Customers expect businesses to respond to their queries in minutes (not hours or days) and providing live chat on a retail company’s website is a step in that direction. What is even more powerful is linking automated AI based chatbots into the live chat so that customers need not wait in queues for human agents to chat with them. 



5. Personalization

Integrating AI based chatbots into existing back office systems means that the bot can do the bulk of the work for the customer service teams. By using easy to use APIs for authenticating the customer, the automated live chat systems provide personalized information about things like invoice payments, order status, available discounts, any trouble with specific services or products used. This translates into specific answers for customers and reduced human agent need

6. Insights


One of the main issues with the traditional business intelligence solutions is that the data on voice based customer service is locked inside the system as audio files where insight is difficult to gather. With chatbots the data is already in text format and using either the chatbot software vendor’s analytics or business intelligence tools it is possible to discover valuable insights. 


Conversations with chatbots have rich content such as info on customer behavior, preference for products, feedback and highlights about common issues with using services. By categorizing customer queries and looking at the topics in-depth, the chatbot can unlock new business opportunities for retail businesses.




7. Increase Sales

Increasing sales is one crucial use case for chatbots in the retail industry. Through learning what customers want to buy the AI bots in customer service can upsell and cross-sell products and services. For example, when there is a user that asks about roaming fees from its telecom provider and is satisfied with the answer, the bot can suggest purchasing a new phone that comes discounted with a data plan. 


Retail businesses can use similar logic as well to upsell and cross-sell their products and services.




Conclusion

There are several use cases for chatbots in the retail industry. Chatbot increases the customer experience and satisfaction while it saves business costs. Such bots integrate well with companies’ websites and are an excellent way to achieve the goal of providing a personal experience to the customers 24/7 instantaneously. 


If you are looking for AI chatbots for your customer service, then feel free to sign-up for an account with alphachat.ai In just 5 minutes you can get your own natural language understanding AI chatbot that you can connect with your website.