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As a retail or ecommerce owner or manager, you know how important it is to provide excellent customer service to maximize sales and keep customers coming back.
However, this can be a challenge when you're dealing with a high volume of inquiries, especially outside of regular business hours. That's where retail chatbots come in.
Let’s explore how retail chatbots can improve your sales and customer experience.
12 chatbot use cases in retail
Retail chatbots can improve customer service and boost sales by providing quick and accurate answers to common questions, handling orders and returns, and even offering personalized product recommendations based on customer preferences.
There are many examples of retail chatbots on the market, each with their own unique features and benefits. Some retail chatbot examples include Sephora's Virtual Artist, which uses AI to help customers try on makeup virtually, and H&M's Kik chatbot, which offers personalized fashion advice and style recommendations. Other retail chatbots focus on handling customer service inquiries, such as Walmart's chatbot, which can help customers track orders, find products, and get answers to frequently asked questions.
Retail AI chatbots take things further by incorporating artificial intelligence to provide even more personalized and accurate responses. These chatbots can analyze customer data to tailor product recommendations and offer more advanced problem-solving capabilities. For example, the retailer North Face uses an AI-powered chatbot to help customers find the right outdoor gear based on their preferences and location.
This trend will continue to develop, as 84% of businesses predict AI chatbots to play an even more crucial role in customer communication.
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1. Search for products
Chatbots can display a range of product options, such as the price range, features, and user comments, based on the customer's preferences about the product.
Cards and carousels can attract and engage customers with your offer.
2. Recommendations
Similarly, chatbots can help retailers increase revenue and help users discover products that fit well with their tastes.
AI assistant will suggest more similar options based on the previously browsed pages and products. This little trick can result in a significantly higher average order value.
3. Locate nearby stores
If your customers prefer to look for products online but shop in more traditional brick-and-mortar stores, they can still do so with a chatbot’s help.
By talking to a virtual assistant, they can locate nearby stores, enquire about the product's availability, and find out about opening hours. All without spending a minute of a human agent’s time!
4. Place orders and pre-orders
In retail, the shorter the route from picking a product to placing an order, the better.
Usually, a customer must add an item to a cart, continue to a checkout page, and complete the order. This path can often result in cart abandonment, as any friction can draw a customer from finishing the process.
But what if your clients could do all that within a single conversation? After a customer decides what they will buy, the chatbot will add their items to the cart and summarize the order.
5. Track packages
Customers are usually impatient when waiting for their orders to arrive. Luckily, we have that covered with our package tracking template!
With this handy option, they can check the details and status of their delivery whenever they wish.
6. Customer education
Have I mentioned that retail chatbots became increasingly popular due to their ability to provide 24/7 support? This can be done very easily with tools like FAQ widgets.
This way, customers can quickly access information about the product, the return policy, promotional campaigns, and discount coupons.
The FAQ ChatBot template lets you automate answering this sort of common support questions. You can redirect users to articles that provide more information about the topics that interest them so they don’t have to search for information on their own.
7. Support live agents
I talked a lot about the customer perspective, but what if you still use live support, too?
Live agents can also rely on the chatbot to quickly look up answers and prevent wrong information from being communicated to customers.
This way, a chatbot can act as an internal knowledge base, or even your agents’ second brain.
8. Send personalized notifications
Do you want to notify customers about new products or discounts, but they disabled browser notifications? No problem!
You can still send updates through a chatbot conversation. Our discount template, for example, is perfect for letting customers know about seasonal discounts or even collecting newsletter subscribers.
9. Manage loyalty points
Many businesses try to improve their rate of returning customers with loyalty points and reward systems. And rightly so! The problem is that to get to those points, customers often have to look up a dedicated page in their accounts. Again, this process doesn’t have to be this complicated.
A simple chatbot can inform your customers about currently available points in their credit and direct them to purchasing links or promotions where they can spend them. The bot can also remind them when they reach a certain threshold, in case they forget to check themselves!
10. Manage complaints
No one likes to engage with angry customers. If only there was a way to avoid that.
Luckily, you can also delegate this unpleasant task to chatbots. They can register online complaints, ask about the incident details, and promptly respond to relieve upset clients immediately.
11. Collect customer feedback
Chatbots can directly ask the customer questions to analyze consumer behavioral patterns and enhance the shopping experience.
Adding a customer satisfaction widget to your website is one way to do this. It allows customers to rate your services and leave their feedback every time they finish a chat with a human agent.
12. Monitor user sentiment
Natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies can analyze all customer conversations to analyze their levels of satisfaction without asking them to fill out surveys. This way, you can omit the steps I mentioned before and gather valuable data without distracting customers from their shopping experience.
A combination of technology in retail chatbot software
In addition to chatbots, other technologies such as AI, robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent automation, web crawling, and analytics can also benefit the retail industry.
Combining these technologies can enable brand endorsement by customizing shopping experiences, data, and prediction-driven merchandise and promotions, and managing a higher volume of orders simultaneously.
However, to reap the benefits of AI technologies, especially chatbots, a high level of training and testing is required to recognize the user's intent and provide them with proper responses. Otherwise, retail bots may say unacceptable things or not take no for an answer, which could drive customers away from the brand.
If you’re interested in this topic, we have a dedicated lesson on how to test your chatbot the right way.
Retail chatbot examples
Many retail chatbots are on the market, but I believe our ChatBot solution is the best. Its AI-powered technology can quickly and accurately answer customer questions, handle orders and returns, and offer personalized product recommendations. Plus, it's easy to set up and requires no coding.
ChatBot
ChatBot is one of the best retail chatbot examples and the number one solution for building conversational retail chatbots without coding. You can easily set up your own AI assistant, use a drag-and-drop builder, and choose from many templates to make it easy to create a chatbot that can answer customer questions, handle orders and returns, and offer personalized product recommendations.
Plus, the platform integrates with LiveChat, so customers can seamlessly transition to a human agent if needed. For its ease of use, it ranks amongst the best retail chatbots.
AlphaChat
AlphaChat is another great option for retail chatbots, offering advanced features such as authentication, APIs, and intelligent routing. Their built-in Natural Language Understanding technology allows businesses to train virtual assistants to understand customer queries and provide accurate responses. They also offer industry templates for retail and ecommerce businesses.
Outgrow
Outgrow is a unique product that allows businesses to create interactive content, including chatbots and quizzes, to turn chatbot users into leads. Their customizable widgets and analytics make it easy to track engagement and optimize content for maximum results.
Chatfuel and Manychat
Chatfuel and ManyChat are both popular options for building chatbots on Facebook Messenger and Instagram. They offer templates and integrations with Facebook products and lead qualification and CRM integrations to help businesses drive sales and engage with customers.
Drift
Drift is a chatbot builder focused on conversational sales and marketing for real estate businesses. Their lead generation and visitor insights features help businesses capture leads from their website and convert them into paying customers. Retail chatbots like this are tools for sales teams, unlike retail bots that handle order management and customer satisfaction.
Smartloop
Smartloop is another excellent option for building lead generation and sales chatbots on Facebook Messenger. Retail bots for social media are more popular chatbot solutions for customer service. Their lead re-engagement feature allows businesses to follow up with customers interested in their products or services.
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Guide customers through the buying process with ChatBot!
Chatbots provide a cost-effective and efficient way to handle customer inquiries. Retail chatbots can help businesses increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
With many retail chatbot examples and software options available, you will find something that fits your business
If you want to kickstart your sales immediately, you can rely on a single template. At ChatBot, we have an ecommerce template that covers key tasks:
- promoting special offers,
- adding items to cart,
- processing orders,
- providing 24/7 support.
All you need is a ChatBot account, which you can set up in seconds and enjoy a free 14-day trial. Start a free ChatBot trial now!
