How to Make the Most of Conversational Commerce Technology in 2022

Dialogue with consumers may be one of the most important aspects of modern ecommerce. Gaining insights from their experience - whether it’s happy, confusing or annoying - when dealing with your business or industry is invaluable. It’ll highlight areas that you may have missed, and help raise optimisations needed in future. It can also help inform the way people are seeking a particular product. In short, it's given online businesses much to consider about how they’re customers behave.

Modern conversational commerce technologies such as voice search, live chat and chatbots are the driving force behind this. They’re use has grown so much that they’re estimated to bring in more than $290 billion by 2025.

With the emergence of voice assistants such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa - now used by 27% of global digital users - finding information, products and businesses has never been so simple. Bolstered by COVID-19 and widespread lockdown, many consumers have now gotten used to literally not having to lift a finger for more items to be added to a virtual shopping list.

This has also provided valuable insights into how people speak about and request items. Seeing the type of queries asked and answers gained - through looking at long-tail keyword phrases and answer boxes (what an assistant reads out) - shows how a consumer requests information through speech. This conversational style can then inform how onsite content is written, not only making it more accessible, but also readily optimized for a search result answer box. Their popular uptake by Millennials also indicates that voice assistants will be a large part of ecommerce purchasing well into the future.

In regards to customer service, live chat and chatbots have revolutionized it. So much so, it now feels strange when you aren’t being pinged by a message box in the corner of a website page.

The difference between the two is that live chat is manned by staff while chatbots are programmed AI. Both have their advantages; live chat staff can give more detailed and informative answers, while Chatbots can handle a much larger amount of queries, for less cost too.

The main benefit of both is that they provide a direct line to customer assistance, meaning a consumer’s query is addressed instantly. This has been shown to be a major driver for high user satisfaction ratings.

For more information on conversational commerce technology and how to implement it properly, check out Website Builder Expert’s infographic guide on it below: