Chatbots in retail: nine companies using AI to boost customer experience

Messaging apps aren’t just a quick fad—more and more businesses are integrating chatbots to serve their customers in the long-term. Adding messaging app technology to your business now will allow you to support your buyers efficiently and personally instead of falling behind your competitors’ levels of service. Chatbots are becoming a key part of running a successful ecommerce store. With retailers increasingly investing in the tech and consumers using (and expecting) it more and more, there is no question that ecommerce chatbots are moving toward ubiquity.

You can easily edit any of our retail chatbot examples without needing any special tech skills or coding skills. Try this today on your website, online store, or social media channel. Not only can it dramatically increase your sales, but it can also get you more email newsletter sign-ups.

Best Practices for Your Retail Bot Success

And all this may happen without leaving the chatbot window on your phone. Apart from Facebook Messenger, Masha.ai is present across different popular communication apps. Kik and Sephora virtual assistants are the finest examples of how eCommerce companies will benefit from AI chatbots.

By engaging customers with personalized recommendations, targeted promotions, and time-sensitive deals, ecommerce bots serve as a driving force behind making a sale happen. The ‘Purchase order form’ template automates your customers’ order process. In other words, you will get more sales with a simple conversational design! The chatbot can give info about your products more simply and quickly, with detailed prices. There are a number of ecommerce businesses that build chatbots from scratch. But that means added time and resources to implement a chatbot on each channel before you actually begin using it.

Collect customer feedback

What’s more interesting is that if a user fails to complete the process, the Messenger bot is triggered to retarget them offering additional assistance after 24 hours. Ralph the Gift Bot, LEGO’s Facebook Messenger bot is a fine example of how personalisation works wonders on chat-based eCommerce. Ralph helps users narrow down their gift search through a beautiful conversation design that seamlessly navigates them to the right choice.

See where your business stands compared to 1,000+ e-stores in different industries. Have you ever wondered how to effectively reach out to the Z Generation? Generation Z considers email to be an outdated method of communication – Gen Z members are 3 times more willing to open chat messages, pushed out by notification. Inviting more new customers to your eCommerce sites is now possible with Chatfuel.

Your customers can connect with the bot to find out how much they owe and use it to process a secure payment. For service-oriented retail businesses, chatbots are a great way to help your clients find a branch near them. A retail banking chatbot can offer nearby suggestions to current customers looking for somewhere to go get cash or deposit a check in person.

Some ecommerce chatbots, like Heyday, do this in multiple languages. H&M, the clothing retailer, has developed an eCommerce chatbot called the H&M Virtual Assistant that uses NLP to understand and respond to customer inquiries. This chatbot can provide product recommendations, help customers find specific items, and assist with the online shopping process.

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Unlike some of the other bots in this list, the Insomnobot-3000 is a purely customer engagement bot with no direct sales directives. That said, this chatbot did bring thousands of valuable warm leads to the business for retargeting. T-Mobile is no stranger to conversational AI and was recently one of the first major telecom companies to launch Google RCS on their devices. Meet Tinka, T-Mobile Austria’s customer service chatbot that has been providing digital assistance to users on their website and Facebook Messenger since 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Each of these comes with product recommendations that the customer can shop for without leaving Kik. The experience aims to mimic the way the shopper might chat with their friends about products and advice. Sephora’s chatbot is not designed to deal with customer’s queries, but instead provides customers with other opportunities like the ability to book a makeover by simply clicking on ‘Book a Makeover’. By tracking customer data, AI tools can customize responses to each individual user. For instance, retail chatbots can create personalized recommendations based on a customer’s past behavior.

Best ecommerce chatbot examples

They’re proving especially useful to companies in the eCommerce sector, to allow customers to interact with a brand on their own terms, thereby reducing abandoned carts’ incidences. No coding knowledge is required; you simply select an appropriate template and add elements to match your individual requirements. It’s also possible to start from scratch and build a totally custom eCommerce chatbot.

The Messenger bot also provided a look at the behind the scenes at the fashion show getting shoppers up close and personal with models like Gigi Hadid. In fashion, combining eCommerce chatbot platforms with experiential shopping can generate huge returns on investment. From upstarts to some of the most established brands, eCommerce companies have launched chatbots to alleviate friction at various parts of the customer experience.

Double-sided messages improve the acceptance of chatbots

AI chatbots for e-commerce can figure out where prospective customers are in the sales funnels through information collected during conversations. Due to this, businesses can decide on the best ways to convert them into paying customers. A bot could push notifications about new product releases and offers based on the customer’s preferences.

No longer just florists, automation and innovation has resulted into the company transforming into a ecommerce company, with 88% of its business residing online. Shoppers can browse through a collection products and finish the purchase journey without ever leaving the messenger. The HPE Career Bot is a chatbot used by IT giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise to convert job seekers on their site into applicants.

• The results speak volumes – in 2020 alone, BLU was instrumental in generating over $100M in revenue.
• It’s a good example of using a bot to do the hard work for customers e.g. find products that match their criteria.
• They can handle a large volume of requests all day long without getting tired or overwhelmed, and they’re available day or night — so human customer service reps don’t have to be.

In October 2016, e-commerce retailer eBay released its Facebook Messenger chatbot ShopBot. EBay first started using chatbot technology by piloting a simple Facebook Messenger tool that reminds bidders 15 minutes before an auction listing is about to end. After this initial success, eBay expanded the ShopBot, which now understands what users are looking for by processing their text messages and images to find the best match. Since then, the chatbot has been praised for its excellent contextual understanding and machine learning abilities as well as its use of friendly language. Reportedly, ShopBot users are nearly three times more likely to ask questions about specific products than those browsing eBay’s inventory.

DeSerres is one of the most prominent art and leisure supply chains in Canada. They saw a huge growth in demand during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020. This also led to increases in customer service requests and product questions. They us ite to handle FAQs, order tracking, product questions, and other simple queries 24/7.

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