Consumers Are Embracing Conversational Commerce, Are You?

Conversational commerce has led to a paradigm shift in the e-commerce business structure over the last few years. Even though we are still at the very beginning stage of conversational commerce, the extraordinary rapid adoption of conversational AI has enabled an entirely new way for brands to build lasting and valuable customer relationships. These customer relationships will efficiently broaden across the regular customers' relationship lifecycle with brands - resulting in a new and more spontaneous way for consumers to engage with brands.

On top of this, pandemic accelerated a spike in the number of brands incorporating conversational commerce with an omnichannel approach due to its promising nature of delivering experiences that intelligently meet the demands and engage customers emotionally, anytime, anywhere. It's safe to say that the past year has been an assertive year for conversational commerce as more and more businesses navigate their way through automated customer journeys, omnichannel marketing campaigns, and customer data platforms.

The consumer, on the other hand, is connected in a multitude of channels, allowing retailers to go boundary-less and extend their availability beyond their store/website. The consumers are absolutely all-in for such a rich dialog as it involves a personalized and human-like experience. While, for brands, it presents an opportunity for increased contextual understanding and empathy so that they can develop trust, relevancy, and loyalty.  A report from the Digital Transformation Institute underlines that customers are already eager to interact this way and are ready to share important information if the value is returned from the brand's end.  

In a nutshell, conversational commerce is a phenomenal opportunity for businesses to deliver superior customer experiences and establish valuable customer relationships with greater intimacy to propel brand engagement.

How Brands Can Make The Best Out of Conversational Commerce?

More than 2 billion conversations exchanges with brands happen via Facebook Messenger alone on a monthly basis. It's evident that the process of information exchange with a brand is seamless and opportunities for conversational commerce are endless. However, brands who are bombarded with queries can easily get overwhelmed - and the struggle to respond to both text and voice queries with a personal touch, adds more to it.  That's when you turn to conversational commerce to lift the process up.

Using Messaging To Build Relationships

When it comes to messaging, we have come a long way with nearly two-thirds of the world's population using text messaging for regular communication. Indeed, it's become the norm for how people communicate. But the story is completely different when it is about using messaging as one way to communicate with your customers. It's still a relatively new notion for most businesses.

As of 2021, nearly 53.9% of U.S. retail eCommerce is projected to be generated through different mobile channels. Messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat, now have over 5 billion monthly active users. As business professionals, it's solely up to us to choose the way we want to use building strong customer relationships, but messaging for sure, is the fastest of them all to reach out to your customers at their preferred channel.

A HubSpot report reveals that around 71% of people are inclined to use messaging apps to get personalized customer assistance — many of whom want to get their product-related queries or issues solved on an immediate basis. Retail sales from chatbot-based interactions are also anticipated to surpass $112 billion by 2023 based on a measure by Juniper Research.

For sure, timing is everything. Many industry giants adopted conversational commerce way back in time. Over the 2010s, Facebook had a hard time sorting its chatbot offerings: After bringing business chatbots to the center of Facebook Messenger in 2016, Facebook hid the chatbots tab view in the app in 2020 by discarding the Discover tab.

Fast-forwarding it to now, pandemic-related shutdowns accelerated the change in how consumers order, shop, and eat, making them more comfortable with a range of mobile messaging solutions.

It’s therefore crucial for any marketing channel to be able to recite the language of the consumer and convey the memo of the brand. By 2025, it’s portended that nearly 72.6% of users will be using the internet solely through their smartphones, highlighting the urgency of mobile-friendly communication solutions for brands.

CM.com's Mobile Marketing Cloud is an effective omnichannel customer engagement solution that can enable businesses to reach customers at their preferred channels, empowering them to deliver a seamless user experience and ultimately increase their conversion and engagement.

The future of conversational commerce

According to the forecasts, conversational commerce is going to skyrocket and attain significant growth in the next few years. Gartner's research assesses that by 2022, 70% of customer exchanges will entangle next-gen technologies, such as machine learning (ML) applications, chatbots, and mobile messaging.

Sales made via conversational commerce channels like chatbots, digital voice assistants, and messaging will flourish more than seven-fold from $41 billion in 2021 to $290 billion by 2025, unfolds Juniper Research.

Though buyers might expect a few more interactions with a company before purchasing apparel and jewelry off via chat or voice, conversational commerce does extend the convenience of enabling customers to instantly order products they don’t need to have a look at, such as cleaning items or groceries or to reorder items they have already purchased once.

Conversational commerce is already ubiquitous in many countries, thanks to the staggeringly prominent social media apps, which enable consumers to finish off regular tasks like booking appointments, shopping online, hailing cabs, and paying rent & bills, as well as message friends and family.

The modern era of communication expects intimate and personalized conversations with brands. Conversational commerce is the bullet train ticket that will help you outperform your consumer's expectations. Embark on this journey and enjoy the ride!

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Written By - Chameli Kuduva, Founder - SaaS Insider