Ramp up your sales and give your customers a smooth sailing customer service experience with the use of the e-commerce chatbot app. Get acquainted with all the necessary information as to how to use a chatbot app, and the builders you can choose from. We'll throw in more information that you can use, too!
Table of Contents
What Are Chatbot Apps?
If you run a business with a website or social media presence, a chatbot is a fun and innovative way to improve your customer experience. Users can hop onto your website or their social media account and get answers to questions without requiring a human worker to reply.
The chatbot experience helps your customers get answers from your company without the added expense of a new customer service team member. With a chatbot app, you can build a responsive set of answers to common questions without any knowledge of code or the expense of hiring a developer.
Chatbots are a growing trend in AI and customer service. With a chatbot, a company can save tons of time and money by filtering frequently asked questions as well as informing potential customers about the services you offer.
In addition, chatbots can be integrated into apps for web browsers, Facebook, and smartphones to create intuitive user experiences. In this blog, we will explore some of the best chatbot apps on the market right now.
Chatbot App on Ecommerce Business
Chatbots are intelligent systems, capable of interacting by text with a user, responding to questions, giving instructions, and offering information. They are customer-service tools to complement human activity and can be particularly useful for handling simple questions and offering 24/7 emergency service.
According to Gartner, 85% of customer interactions are carried out through chatbots. What’s more, the majority of buyers prefer the ability to quickly ask questions, rather than waiting to speak with a real person – as demonstrated by Nielsen in a study revealing that 56% of online customers prefer an automated chat to a call or email.
On the other hand, chatbots are no substitute for classic customer service, and should only be used as support. Although ecommerce chatbots reduce waiting times and offer more agile resolutions to simple shopping and delivery issues, you will still need a human team to attend to more complex cases.
Chatbot software combines helpful and autonomous intelligence while training and feeding information to the system, allowing it to create logical and natural interactions. After all, a report by PwC has shown that 27% of people cannot tell whether they’re speaking with a person or a bot.
If you want to include a chatbot in your ecommerce and improve your customer service, remember that precise and organized product content is a basic requirement for these systems. Discover how the quality of product information influences the success or failure of your customer service, and request a free demo of Sales Layer to give it a try and allow your ecommerce to offer clear product information for customers and chatbots.
How to Choose the Right Chatbot?
When you decide to add a chatbot to your ecommerce, you’ll have two options from which to choose.
On the one hand, you can turn to a platform for creating your own chatbot. This will require specialist equipment and some preparation time.
Another option is to make use of an automated marketing platform, which will usually include a preconfigured chatbot system, like Hubspot. There are also specific chatbot services available for ecommerce platforms, such as shopping on Shopify, and instant-messaging services suited to companies, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram.
Main Use of Chatbot App
The first priority of any brand is to satisfy the customers that reach out to them. Customers reaching your page, app, or website have needs that should be met. Identifying such needs would help in offering them personalized services. One way to get to know a customer’s specific problem/need is by utilizing an ecommerce chatbot.
For example, if, through research, you found out that 40% of your customer base has had a quality control issue with your product, it may not be wise to change your UX to address this issue. That would be quite irrelevant. But using a chatbot to ask if the customer has had any issues with your product is more insightful when it comes to tackling the issue.
That is one use case of a chatbot in a B2B or B2C setting. Other use cases include:
1- Customer Support
Your customer may be browsing in a fast manner but not completing any actions. Or her online behavior may not fit patterns you observe with other customers. These are good clues that the customer may need support which can be offered by your chatbot.
2- Suggest products
Search results, personalized merchandising, and recommendations can help your customer find specific products. However, when your customers' online activity indicates a willingness to buy however customer is not buying, it may be a good time to probe what the customer is exactly looking for. A conversational interface allows you to ask probing questions and understand your customers’ intent better.
3- Offer discounts
Your customer may be looking for a better price because she believes she qualifies for a discount. Understanding if she falls into one of your segments qualifying for a discount and offering that discount immediately can reduce friction in buying.
4- Prevent churn
Churn prediction is one of the most important use cases for subscription-based industries. Understanding the reasons for churn and making churn reducing offers are a good fit for conversational interfaces
Chatbots Customized to Serve Specific Industries
According to studies, the top 5 industries that benefit from chatbots are real estate (28%), travel (16%), education (14%), healthcare (10%), and finance (5%). Some products are more prone to be converted into conversational interfaces while others aren’t. For example, the text is not a good interface for displaying large amounts of data. However, if you offer these services, they can be completed in a conversational interface:
5- Qualifying leads
Automotive
A significant portion of leads to car dealers come from online channels. Therefore conversion optimization is crucial for automotive companies. As a result, automotive companies are using chatbots like Kia’s Kian which can answer customers’ complex questions and dramatically increase conversions.
e-Commerce
Chatbots can add a new layer of interactivity to e-commerce, allowing customers to interact beyond menus and buttons. Major use cases of chatbots in e-commerce are:
- 6- Set price alerts: Bots that give price alerts notify when there is a change by observing the change in prices on different websites. Settings can be made according to the person and give alarm in desired situations.
- 7- Order physical goods like clothes with conversational commerce unlock more options
- 8- Buy gifts: Similar patterns in the users’ behavior can be analyzed and the product they are looking for can be recommended by chatbots. this facilitates the search for gifts.
- 9- Reserve services: Services such as personal care of dining outside can be reserved in advance for an improved customer experience that eliminates waiting.
- 10- Track orders: Order tracking, which is one of the most common features of e-commerce platforms, can be done quickly via chatbots. Tars provide a chatbot solution for payment and order tracking by integrating on e-commerce websites.
Travel
All the way from booking travel to solving travel-related problems, travel chatbots have the potential to help. New ventures like Instalocate are already making money by solving people’s travel-related problems.
11- Vacation planning: While most parts of travel bookings are already self-service, it is time-consuming to plan a vacation. Travelers need to discover the sights and experiences they would be interested in, plan an itinerary, and pick hotels to stay in based on numerous criteria from kid-friendliness to location. While these tasks are frustrating for travelers, clever chatbots can make them have much more pleasant experiences.
12- Reservations: Text-based reservation systems can be easier to use and can complement your online reservation systems. Mariott International’s chatbot is already a growing channel for reservations.
13- Queries & complaints: In the long run, it is not good for businesses to make complaints more difficult to make. It frustrates customers and deteriorates a company’s reputation. Chatbots can service most queries and complaints fast, improving the satisfaction of your most dissatisfied customers.
Finance
Some examples include Capital One’s Eno & Bank of America’s Erica, and Well Fargo’s Facebook Messenger bot. Finance chatbots have numerous use cases, for example:
14- Information service: Most banks' chatbots are capable of informing users about their balances, recent transactions, credit card payment dates, limits, and so on.
15- Investment management: Robo-advisors are getting smarter every day and will soon serve as the first level of advisor for most non-affluent customers.
16- Credit applications: Just as robot-advisor chatbots are taking over investment advisors, chatbots are also capable of collecting necessary data for credit decisions
17- Money transfer: Chatbots can easily handle money transfers via SMS, Facebook messenger, or other popular chat platforms. Western Union has a money transfer bot that enables money transfer requests through Facebook Messenger.
18- Bill payments: BillHero is an example of a bank-agnostic mobile application and it brings bill-paying capabilities via chatbots on Facebook Messenger.
Healthcare
Chatbots are a great candidate for healthcare automation, for example:
19- Handling healthcare & insurance coverage-related inquiries: Applications such as HealthJoy, HealthTap, and Your.MD helps customers navigate the complex healthcare landscape in the US.
20- Diagnosis: MedWhat and Ada Health are AI-powered chatbots that can serve as medical assistants by gathering information via conversation with the patients. It seems chatbots are on the way to becoming the first contact point in diagnostic healthcare. After the SARS CoV-2 outbreak, people have become more aware of the dangers of infection. Diagnostic bots, like telemedicine, facilitate remote diagnostics, reducing potential infections.
21- Therapy: Since therapy is almost completely text-based, it is a great area for chatbots to work in. Woebot is one of the leading chatbots, providing cognitive-behavioral therapy in the treatment of depression.
Hospitality
22- Reservations & handling menu-related questions: Chatobook aims to become OpenTable of chatbots. Beyond reservations, it can share menus and promotions, collecting feedback.
Insurance
Some of the insurance chatbot use cases include:
23- Agent inquiry handling: Allstate developed an Allstate Business Insurance expert (ABIe) to handle questions from 12K agents. Agents inquire ABIe about policy details sales quotes.
24- Customer inquiry handling: Allstate’s Allstate Business Insurance expert (ABIe) was expanded to serve end-users as well.
Media
News is one of the few fields where speed is as important as quality. And while bots certainly outmatch us in speed, they are also catching up to us in quality. News organizations in the US and China are already using chatbots to prepare lightning-fast news
25- News delivery: For example, chatbots can be built to deliver only summaries of news and share details as users ask about them. This can create an engaging news experience for busy individuals. CNN Facebook bot and NBC Politics both are example chatbots in news delivery and daily news summarization.
26- Run surveys to collect public opinion
Real Estate
Real estate chatbots can be used for:
27- Lead qualification: Qualifying leads take significant time in B2C businesses that rely on personal contact. Chatbots such as Apartment Ocean greet potential clients and understand their level of interest, helping human agents prioritize who they will serve. Roof.AI is a chatbot platform that helps to create communication between real estate businesses and their customers via social media. It provides connecting, shortlisting, and scheduling by using an AI-powered chatbot.
Other Products
- Information services:
- 28- Provide simple information services like weather
- 29- Give context-dependent advice on topics like what to wear, makeup
- Productivity:
- 30- Schedule meetings
- HR
- 31- Recruiting chatbots allow the HR team to automate the communication with job applicants.
- 32- Onboarding chatbots answer new employees’ questions and facilitate the on-boarding process
Pros and Cons of Using a Chatbot App
In the current customer-centric world, keeping the customers happy is one of the major concerns of businesses. Providing 24*7 customer support increases costs multifold.
To ensure a seamless two-way conversation and to provide a uniform experience to all customers, companies are exploring various options which include AI, more specifically chatbots.
Chatbots usage has witnessed a tremendous surge lately because the millennial generation prefers texting over voice communication.
Hence, they find interacting with chatbots convenient over talking to a human. Chatbots have also managed to bring the lagging in reply substantially down by providing quicker resolutions as well.
Yet, it is not a perfect system. Using natural language processing (NLP) while designing chatbots has made them more human-like.
Let's dive in deeper.
Pros
1. Faster Customer Service
It is no secret that chatbots provide faster replies as well as a quicker resolution to the customer.
This reduces the waiting delay, and the customer hence receives quicker service, thus improving his overall experience.
2. Higher Customer Satisfaction
With quick resolutions to queries, chatbots have recorded a higher satisfaction of service when interacting with customers.
It is not a 100% success rate, but the numbers are certainly promising for companies to explore further with chatbots.
3. Reduction in Costs of Human Resources
Handling individual customer queries on a large scale requires huge manpower, and that brings its costs along with it.
With chatbots, a single bot instance can handle multiple instances of human interactions and hence reduces the need for manpower substantially.
4. Varied Applications and Industries
Chatbots have lots of applications in many industries if we dig deep into them and understand the scope.
Hence it is a good option for companies to have their own chatbot to handle the customers as well as use chatbots for many other varied applications.
Cons
1. The Extent of Resolving Queries
One of the major drawbacks of chatbots is the number of queries they can resolve. At a certain point in time, it will have to connect to an actual human to resolve the issues.
They also have limited replies and solutions which can leave a customer unsatisfied.
2. Cannot Handle Angry Customers Subtly
Some customers are unable to find the solution that they want and neither are able to connect to a human executive since they did not input the right command.
Some customers are unable to find the solution that they want and neither are able to connect to a human executive since they did not input the right command.
This can result in a bad experience for the customer, and the company could lose customers as well as revenue due to an incompetent chatbot.
3. Higher Complexity Results in Higher Costs
Chatbots come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and their cost also varies accordingly.
It is imperative to understand that a well-designed chatbot that can handle more tasks than others will also cost higher. So this pushes the investment of the company in the chatbot further.
4. Not Suitable for All Businesses and Applications
Chatbots are effective in many industries and for varied applications, but they cannot handle all of them.
Now, there are certain services like hospitals, fire brigades, and the police that require immediate responses. In such cases, investment in chatbots might not yield any sustainable advantage.
5. Do not Provide Accurate Solutions Always
Chatbot App on Messenger
A chatbot is a piece of automated messaging software that uses artificial intelligence to converse with people.
A Facebook Messenger bot is a chatbot that lives within Facebook Messenger, meaning it converses with some of the 1.3 billion people who use Facebook Messenger every month.
Chatbots can be programmed to understand questions, provide answers, and execute tasks. They can provide a customized online shopping experience and even make sales.
Your Facebook chatbot can also follow up with people who abandon the conversational commerce process, like in this message Joybird’s bot sent 24 hours after completing the sofa-style quiz.
Examples of Chatbots Apps\
These are just a few of the plenty samples you can see of what an e-commerce chabot looks like. It focuses on gaining more sales than just getting more leads. You can browse for more samples online to be an inspiration for what kind of chatbot you are going to create for your buyers in the future.
Chatbot Builders and Cookies
What Are Cookies?
An HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's computer by the user's web browser while the user is browsing.
Total Chatbots and many other Internet merchants use cookies to enable user-specific functionalities. A Chatbot is using cookies to keep an alive user session. We will not use cookies to track user activities.
A cookie is a file that is downloaded to the User's computer when accessing certain websites, such as this one. Cookies allow these websites, among other things, to store and retrieve information about the User's browsing habits or those of their equipment and, depending on the information they contain and the way they use their equipment, they can be used to recognize the User.
In addition to using the configuration panel made available to the User, they can allow, block or eliminate the cookies installed on their equipment by configuring the browser options installed on their computer.
If the User does not want their data to be collected with Google Analytics, they can install a disabling plugin for browsers.
The fact of blocking the installation of the analytics feature and cookies described in this policy does not prevent the effective use of the Website by the User.
Best Ecommerce Chatbot Tools
We got you covered if you are still confused about what the best chatbot builder you're going to use is. Below is the list of the top builders where chatbots can be created.
1) TruVISIBILITY
TruVISIBILITY's suite of AI-driven, easy-to-use tools is designed best for small and mid-sized businesses who want to create and deliver their marketing message just like a Fortune 500 company.
- No coding skills needed
- No technology background required
- And it's free to start using the tools
Stop wasting time, money, and effort on routine tasks a Chatbot could do - 24/7, 365 days a year. They offer their users a convenient way of chatbot creation without the need of paying too much for the premium features.
Their AI-driven Chatbot app to create and launch conversational chatbots easily. No coding skills are needed.
And if you've never done this before, choose one of our Ready-To-Go Chatbot Templates to modify for your specific needs.
2) ManyChat
ManyChat is popular with bot enthusiasts for its fast and simple Facebook Messenger bots. It is ideal for users starting out, as it includes a free account that offers best-unlimited broadcasts, two sequences, and some layers of customization. It offers a free account permitting interactions with 1,000 contacts. The paid account starts at $15 per month and scales with the number of users.
The biggest downside of ManyChat is that it is limited to the Facebook messenger platform. However, Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular destinations for bots. Facebook has more than 2.91 billion monthly active users, so odds are your customers are already there as daily users.
3) HubSpot
Formerly known as Motion.ai, HubSpot Chatbot Builder integrates with Facebook Messenger, Slack, SMS, Gmail, and the web, making it a versatile and flexible AI chatbot platform. It is geared toward visual workers, as the backend platform is built on a flowchart-style setup.
If you are a project manager, you will read this platform easily and be familiar with the source from the start. HubSpot is a content marketing company, and it is best optimized to help you do things like qualify leads, book client meetings, and respond to a growing customer base without hiring more to manage your store.
4) SAP
Recast.AI was scooped up by SAP, one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world, and it morphed into SAP Conversational AI with the change. This bot is all about enterprise-level reporting and analytics on top of the platform to build and integrate your bot.
SAP’s bot builder gives you connections to just about every chat platform you would want. These include Facebook, Skype, Slack, Telegram, Kik, and others. It offers extensive developer resources and flexibility to meet virtually any use case. With their pricing that is not heavy on your pocket.
5) Chatbot
A site with arguably the best name for chatbots tool, ChatBot helps you build bots to automate your customer service needs. It integrates with a range of tools including Facebook, LinkedIn, MailChimp, Skype, Slack, Kik, Twitter, and LiveChat. Accounts are free for a 14-day trial and then start at $50 per month for 1,000 conversations.
Integrating with Chat.io gives your bot superpowers. These include 24/7 customer service, spam filters, and automatic responses for programmable use cases. If someone gets stuck, you can transfer a chat to a human on the fly. This requires an external account.
If you want help getting started, Chatbot.com offers an expert marketplace with partners you can hire to help you build and optimize your chatbot. Many apps make a do-it-yourself chatbot easy enough. However, knowing you can bring in an expert gives you a backup plan if all doesn’t go as well as expected.
Quick Recap
Your buyers are more likely to complete a purchase after experiencing a smooth inquiry and interaction with your ecommerce chatbot. The products that the chatbot introduces to your users or buyers are very good for your marketing campaigns
Users go to your ecommerce website to do some shopping. No matter what the value of the products you sell, if your buyers have seen your potential and your growth during the times, you'll definitely make a sale.
Every chabot is different and will give different experiences to your buyers and that is why it is necessary to know the element and features of the builder where you create these chatbots.
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