Recent advancements in AI are making chatbots smarter and more human-like than ever before. As a result, customers are warming up to the idea of interacting with chatbots with 44% of respondents of the Aspect survey claiming that they would prefer to communicate with a chatbot instead of a human company representative.

As AI chatbot solutions become more available, early adoption of the chatbot technology becomes a source of competitive advantage and brand value. This article describes ways in which chatbot technology can benefit your sales via a “conversational commerce” approach.

Adding value with conversational commerce

If your company is selling products or services online, you can entrust the entire sales process -- from the initial quote to closing a deal with a customer — to a chatbot. In 2015, Chris Messina, then Developer Experience Lead at Uber, defined such an approach to e-commerce as conversational commerce.

These days, companies can integrate conversational commerce into their chatbot applications simply that excels in sales. As messenger apps are becoming more popular than social networks, integrating sales into them will expose your business to billions of users worldwide. (see the figure). 

Once the AI-enabled sales chatbot is installed, it can help customers purchase items with fewer steps than ever before. To speed up the sales process, a chatbot can mine user preferences in conversation history or refer to the user profile to get information about the customer’s location, gender or hobbies. Unlike a human expert who would have to learn this information manually, a chatbot can process user data in milliseconds, ensuring a seamless buying experience for the customer and a perfectly-matched product to his/her needs.

Conclusion

Thanks to these smart features, conversational commerce to your customers. Early adoption of chatbot technology will help you build a data-driven and innovative company that values the time of consumers and employees. And if you’re running a small company, don’t worry: with the rapid advancements in AI, chatbot solutions have become more affordable for a company of any size.