The popularity of online shopping continues to increase year after year, along with the demands of online shoppers. Consumers want a fast, easy, seamless shopping experience with minimal barriers or waiting times. When they have questions about products, they want fast, personalized answers.
To adapt to these consumer needs, many e-commerce brands have adopted “conversational commerce” technology. This technology uses AI communication to enhance customer interactions. Learn more about driving sales with conversational AI in online retail and how it can reshape your buyers’ experiences.
What Is Conversational Commerce?
Traditionally, the online shopping experience has been largely independent. Consumers browse from their devices, make selections, and check out without any conversation or personal interactions. This approach increases the likelihood of cart abandonment and customer confusion.
Conversational commerce improves upon this process without taking extra time, integrating chat, messaging, and other natural language interfaces into the online shopping experience. With this technology, customers can receive personalized insights and answers that lead them closer to making the right purchase.
Countless companies have already integrated conversational commerce into their shopping experiences, whether through chatbots, voice AI, or both. The data speaks for itself:
- 71% of customers expect real-time communication with the company they’re buying from.
- The conversational AI market is expected to grow 23.7% by 2030.
- 57% of customer support specialists credit AI with enhancing and personalizing a customer’s experience.
The global conversational commerce market continues to grow. Experts anticipate the market reaching a value of $34.41 billion by 2034, up by a startling 16.3% compared to 2024.
How Can Conversational AI Benefit the Online Retail Experience?
Incorporating conversational AI into your online retail experience isn’t just a fun perk. It’s a feature many customers expect from e-commerce businesses. This technology enables you to meet and exceed consumer demands. By driving sales with conversational AI in online retail, you’ll enjoy a range of benefits, such as the following:
- Enhanced customer engagement: Voice AI and chatbots let you engage customers at every stage of the shopping journey. Conversational AI can provide personalized product recommendations, add interactive content, answer specific questions about inventory, and continually engage customers to prevent cart abandonment.
- Improved customer service: One of the perks of online shopping is the ability to shop at all hours of the day, which means you must also have customer service available 24/7. With conversational AI, you can provide 24/7 assistance, addressing customer inquiries and issues promptly.
- Increased conversion rates: Waiting even five minutes to respond to a lead can result in a 10-times drop in connection rates. Leveraging conversational commerce ensures the fastest response times and streamlines the purchasing process, minimizing cart abandonment.
- Data-driven insights: With AI technology, you gain a wealth of data about customer interactions and preferences that you can use to inform marketing strategies.
Merging Online and Physical Retail Through Conversational AI
Staying organized and consistent across physical and online retail stores can be time-consuming and challenging, but conversational AI is poised to assist with this task as well. With the right AI technology, your team can save a significant amount of time while improving the customer experience across all retail channels.
- Omnichannel integration: Customers shouldn’t have a lower-quality experience online than they do in person. Conversational AI tools let you unify customer experiences across online and physical stores by offering cohesive omnichannel support.
- Personalized in-store experiences: Your in-store workers will save time by allowing AI to take over certain customer interactions. Conversational AI can analyze online customer data to provide personalized insights to customers in stores. Alternatively, customers may receive recommendations online that they can use for their next in-store shopping experiences.
- Inventory management: Managing inventory for online and physical stores can become chaotic quickly. Still, there’s nothing worse than telling a customer you have a specific item in store, only to find that it has already been sold. By tracking inventory across all channels and locations, conversational AI can alert you of issues with stock availability.
Overcoming Challenges in Implementing Conversational AI
Some e-commerce business owners remain apprehensive about implementing conversational AI tools because of the perceived challenges in this venture. Adopting new technology in business operations is always intimidating, but the right software provider can help you address and overcome these challenges:
- Data privacy concerns: Protecting customer data is of the utmost importance, impacting your business’s reputation and compliance. Without proper data management, some AI tools can put customer data at risk. You must do your due diligence to find a reliable company that uses data security protocols and understands the industry regulations you must stay compliant with. Good AI tools keep customer data behind layers of encryption and guard user access, improving upon your existing security measures.
- Maintaining human touch: Companies often fear that conversational AI will lead to robotic-sounding conversations that drive customers away. The best AI products use natural language processing (NLP) to inform customer interactions and add a human touch to conversations. These tools can hold natural conversations that many customers will not realize come from AI.
- Technical integration: You don’t want to sacrifice your existing retail infrastructure in the name of adopting conversational AI. AI developers understand this dilemma and allow for the seamless integration of their tools with existing software.
- Inaccuracies: Placing your trust in an AI tool to accurately represent your brand can be daunting. Reputable AI tools have countless checks in place to ensure the accuracy of all conversations. These tools continually review AI interactions and tailor conversations over time based on feedback and new information. With these features, you gain even more control over AI conversations than you do ones led by human employees.
Case Studies and Success Stories of Conversational AI in Online Retail
Is your company a good fit for conventional AI technology? These case studies offer actionable insights into how businesses are driving sales with conversational AI in online retail.
Retailer A: Enhancing Customer Support
Retailer A sells office equipment through brick-and-mortar stores as well as an e-commerce website. The selling process often involves speaking directly with customers about their number of employees, office layouts, and specific product needs.
While salespeople guide customers through the buying process in person, the company had trouble offering the same level of customer support online, where more and more customers preferred to browse their inventory. The company did not want to hire customer service representatives just for online sales, but using contact centers proved impersonal and ineffective. The response times were also much longer than the company would like, leading to countless dropped sales.
The retailer decided to implement conversational AI to personalize customer interactions online. Through voice AI technology, customers can chat on the phone with a human-like AI bot. The AI can assess specific customer needs and provide tailored recommendations. With these measures, the brand saw a significant reduction in response times as well as a boost in customer satisfaction.
Retailer B: Boosting Sales Through Personalized Recommendations
Retailer B is an exclusively e-commerce platform that sells beauty products. The company has a high-end inventory of makeup items but seeks to make its products accessible to beginners. However, it found that many customers were abandoning their carts because they did not know which products were necessary for their beauty goals.
As a small business, the company struggled to keep up with the demands of its customer base for fast, personalized responses to queries. On average, the company took 48 hours to respond to customer questions, by which point many customers had already moved on to another retailer.
Using conversational AI allowed Retailer B to provide prompt, personalized recommendations to customers whenever they needed them. The AI software used machine learning and past customer data to determine the right products to recommend while strategically upselling. As a result, the company saw an increase in average order values.
Future Trends in Conversational AI in Commerce
Conversational AI tools and other AI-powered solutions continue to evolve, with new features and innovations emerging frequently. Once your business adopts conversational AI, you’ll have a foot in the door to leverage future trends and technologies.
- Voice commerce: Over time, expect to see more retailers using voice-activated shopping assistants to boost customer engagement and drive more sales.
- AI-powered visual search: Customers want to find products quickly, and AI-powered visual search lets them do so. More e-commerce companies will likely adopt this feature in the coming years.
- Augmented reality (AR) shopping: Combining AI with AR offers a personalized, immersive shopping experience that attracts more leads to your business and boosts conversations.
Looking Into the Future of Retail With Conversational AI
If you want your e-commerce business to stay ahead of the curve and powerfully engage your customer base, adopting conversational AI tools can prove transformative for your business. 2X Solutions is your partner in driving sales with conversational AI in online retail. Try a demo today to learn how we can elevate your business with voice AI technology.
