Why is omnichannel changing retail?
Today, there is increasing talk about omnichannel as the real challenge facing the retail world is to offer consumers a seamless shopping experience. With the powerful advent of e-commerce in retail, offering a new sales channel has become a focal point in the strategies of every retail company, and soon “contaminations” between the online and physical store shopping experiences began. The combinations became multiple, and consequently, retailers had to adapt, starting to propose solutions, such as e-commerce chatbots, capable of adapting to this new type of shopper who moves quickly, agilely, and frequently between online and offline.
How to differentiate in the market?
In this sense, the e-commerce vision that the company wants to adopt becomes fundamental, as managing an endless stream of consumers simultaneously is particularly challenging. There are various factors at play today: the shopping experience becomes one of the main choice drivers, and some factors in particular outline the strategy to be adopted. In fact, today, the online purchasing process must be necessarily superior to or equal to that in the physical store, with all the advantages that entails, often linked to practically immediate customer assistance. But it’s not always possible to provide customer service that responds accurately and quickly to the numerous requests from users intent on choosing the trendy product that they will probably want to return due to a size or color error, testing the integrated services that often become signs of distinctiveness in the market.
Is the Chatbot the solution for retail?
A distinctive solution can be represented by the e-commerce virtual assistant, a software capable of answering customer questions 24×7 and especially multilingual to meet the demands of an increasingly broad customer base. Moreover, by interacting in natural language thanks to artificial intelligence, the user will have the sensation of speaking with the same store assistant capable of providing 360-degree support; this means that the consumer can be followed throughout the purchasing process by an AI chatbot that can, in zero time, respond to their needs. In fact, there are multiple and strategic use cases for chatbots in retail:
- Suggesting related or complementary products to those in the shopping cart;
- Based on the user’s preferences obtained from previous purchases made on the site, directing them to the best-selling products in the market according to their tastes;
- Handling a refund or return of a specific item directly;
- Confirming orders and tracking shipments, obtaining status updates with a simple question.
The chatbot as a valuable data source
But above all, it’s a valuable data source The most important plus of the e-commerce chatbot is the ability to archive all conversations with customers, which nowadays become valuable data and relevant information for setting various sales strategies.
Companies increasingly need to learn to read and analyze data from various business touchpoints to enhance their decision-making processes and unlock business value. Blue BI, as an expert in Business Intelligence & Data Analytics, can help you not only to implement a chatbot within your company but also to gain valuable insights from the data at your disposal. Contact us to learn more!
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