Enhancing e-commerce with conversational AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants are becoming synonymous with online shopping. Many websites have some form of chatbot or conversational AI for e-commerce available for customer use. In fact, the global conversational AI market is set to be worth $13.9 billion by 2025. But what do these solutions actually do for your business?

Conversational AI solutions provide your customers with a personalized e-commerce experience without creating an additional burden for your team. They use advanced technology to make interactions smoother and reduce the costs associated with customer service.

But enhancing your e-commerce experience requires an understanding of what AI agents are, why they benefit your business, and how to use them best. Follow along as we break down some of the need-to-know information surrounding conversational AI.

How conversational AI works in e-commerce

Even if you’ve heard of conversational AI tools like chatbots before, the technology behind them may still be a mystery to your team. These solutions are driven by two core technologies: natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. The two technologies work together to help conversational AI tools understand and interpret your customers’ messages as well as your internal data to provide helpful responses.

Conversational AI tools start by taking the internal data you provide and process it using machine learning technology. Machine learning relies on algorithms to process datasets in a way that allows AI to learn, identify patterns, and make predictions. This data is the foundation for what your AI knows and how it behaves.

Once you properly train your AI, it can use NLP to take in, interpret, and find the proper response to customer inquiries. NLP uses a variety of techniques and technologies to scan your customer’s message in the blink of an eye and generate a response that best matches their needs based on the training provided by your team.

For example, a customer might send a question about your business hours to a conversational AI chatbot. Your AI solution can recognize the question being asked using NLP and find the corresponding answer in the data you used to train it through machine learning algorithms. Using these two features, it can almost instantly produce the answer your customer needs.

This combination of technologies creates an automated, high-speed, and personalized conversational experience that benefits your customers and your e-commerce business alike.

Key benefits of adopting conversational AI

Conversational AI solutions can act as digital assistants for both your business and your customers, streamlining otherwise tedious or challenging processes and increasing overall efficiency.

These solutions offer a wide range of capabilities and benefits, but the core advantages of conversational AI typically fall into a few key categories: rapid responses, enhanced shopping experiences, improved decision-making through data, and lower costs.

Instant responses

While your agents may do their best to respond as quickly as possible to every customer request, the truth is that some customers will have to wait. Customer service wait times can lead to frustration, cart abandonment, and complaints — especially since 39 percent of consumers have less patience today than they did pre-2020. That’s just one reason conversational AI tools like chatbots can be so beneficial to your online store.

If a customer has a simple issue, they can receive an immediate response from an AI assistant. This not only enhances your customer’s experience but also takes some of the pressure off your agents. With conversational AI taking the wheel on low-value, repetitive issues, your team becomes more available to handle complex inquiries with the time and attention they deserve.

Personalized shopping

A conversational AI chatbot for e-commerce can also offer your customers a customized shopping experience. By leveraging consumer data like buying habits, loyalty programs, and more, conversational AI tools can share personalized recommendations or deals with your customers. On the flip side, this same data can indicate potential upsell or cross-sell opportunities for your agents.

Aside from boosting sales, providing a more tailored shopping experience can also drive customer loyalty. Those who feel seen by your brand are more likely to become repeat customers and recommend your products to others.

Data-driven insights

Conversational AI for e-commerce is adept at collecting, analyzing, and processing customer data. As your tool interacts with customers, it collects information like purchase history, issue history, and relevant personal details. These nuggets of data are like puzzle pieces that, when put together, create a more comprehensive profile for your customers — driving key sales and marketing decisions.

The valuable insights these tools provide help take the guesswork out of planning sales, producing marketing materials, and updating your website. Conversational AI can even collect direct feedback from customers using surveys, which can highlight areas of opportunity for your team as well as areas where your brand excels.

Reduced costs

While your team members are essential to your business, conversational AI tools can help you cut back on costs associated with staffing, scaling, and efficiency. By implementing a conversational AI chatbot solution for e-commerce, your team can free up their time to focus on high-value tasks — increasing productivity and return on investment for employee time.

Conversational AI can also adapt as your business continues to grow. Rather than hiring more staff to keep up with increasing customer inquiries, conversational AI can expand its capabilities to take on the bulk of simple customer questions. This helps your brand cut back on hiring costs without sacrificing the quality of your service.

Implementation strategies for e-commerce businesses

The benefits of conversational AI are clear. But to tap into these benefits, you must know how to properly find, train, and implement AI solutions. This may sound straightforward, but there are several common pitfalls that could impact your business if you fail to follow best practices as you onboard these tools. That’s why we’ve rounded up some of our top tips to help you find and set up your ideal solution.

Identify key use cases

You can integrate conversational AI solutions into your e-commerce business in a number of ways. Figuring out which use cases will provide the most return on your investment is key to maximizing the value of these solutions for both your team and your customers.

If you’re having trouble keeping your response times down, say, you may want to find an AI tool geared toward customer service. Likewise, if you’re looking for a way to increase sales or drive upselling, consider a more sales-oriented option. Many conversational AI solutions will have features that can fit into several different categories, so make sure you choose an AI partner that fits your needs.

Ensure seamless integration

One of the most attractive aspects of conversational AI for e-commerce is its ability to reduce manual work. However, if you invest in an AI tool that doesn’t integrate well with the rest of your tech stack, you may be left with more work than you started with. AI tools that don’t seamlessly integrate with your customer relationship management or customer service software will force you to manually transfer data and awkwardly juggle tools — adding friction to your workflow and increasing the potential for human error.

That’s why it’s so important to take your current tools into account when choosing your AI solution. Integrating conversational AI into your existing tech stack will drive results across the board. The data and features provided by conversational AI can increase the value of your existing tools and reduce the work required from your team.

Monitor performance

Conversational AI is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. While it might drive some results on its own, you’ll be leaving money on the table if you don’t continuously improve it. Think of AI the same way you would any member of your team; by monitoring your AI tool’s performance just like theirs, you can identify areas of opportunity to improve functionality and increase its value to your operation.

For example, you may find that your AI isn’t answering frequently asked questions as smoothly as your customers expect. To remedy this, you can continue training your AI to improve on any problem areas you observe with customer communications. The key word here is “observe”; you can’t identify issues if you don’t monitor your tool’s performance over time.

Partner with the right solution

How your team uses conversational AI is one major piece of the puzzle when it comes to AI success in e-commerce. The other is choosing the right solution to begin with. When searching for the best AI tool for your particular business, consider the breadth of features available, ease of use, and value for your investment. Some solutions may have one or two of these elements, but a few AI partners have all three — like Jotform AI Agents.

Jotform AI Agents offers all the benefits of a top-tier conversational AI solution without the staggering price point or learning curve. These custom-made AI agents offer your customers a personalized conversational experience that drives their on-site satisfaction and answers their questions.

What’s more, Jotform AI Agents are a no-code, user-friendly solution that can be easily trained using internal data, outside URLs, or even hands-on conversations. They allow you to connect with customers efficiently, collect valuable data, and improve your e-commerce experience.

Getting started with this conversational AI chatbot solution for e-commerce is as simple as a few clicks:

1. Build your AI bot from scratch in the Jotform AI Chatbot builder.
2. Teach your AI how to interact with customers using simple training methods.
3. Add your own personal flair. Customize your brand colors, avatar, speaking style, and more.

If you’re looking for an even easier way to get started with Jotform AI Agents, you can also choose a premade conversational AI chatbot from one of more than 7,000 free agent templates. Jotform even has dedicated e-commerce AI agent templates that can be tailored to fit your needs.

The future of conversational AI

Although it may seem like the future is already here, solutions like conversational AI for e-commerce still have a long way to go. The development of new technologies and advancements in the AI space may lead to exciting new possibilities for these solutions, like

• Upcoming digital tools: The introduction of new technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and voice biometric technology may change how customers experience your online store. AI tools may soon offer AR experiences for customers looking to see what a product would look like in their home or on their body. Meanwhile, AI integrated with voice biometric technology can simplify logins or recommendations by recognizing a shopper’s voice, increasing security and efficiency.
• Evolution of machine learning: As machine learning becomes more advanced, conversational AI solutions may become more capable of replicating human conversations. Through advanced natural language processing, these solutions might even be able to engage in sentiment analysis to generate empathetic, appropriate responses to customer issues.
• Multimodal AI solutions: Currently, many conversational AI solutions can only interpret typed-out messages from your customers. However, the future of these solutions could prove more expansive. Multimodal AI allows tools to process multiple input types (like text, images, voice, etc.) simultaneously to expand their response capabilities. While this technology isn’t common yet, it could be in the near future.

To rise above the competition, keep informed about upcoming changes in the world of AI. Subscribing to resources like the Jotform AI Agents Podcast or AI automation blogs can help you stay tuned in to the latest and greatest in conversational AI for e-commerce.

Elevate your e-commerce with Jotform AI Agents

The reality of the e-commerce industry is that AI tools are here to stay, and choosing to adopt these solutions could be the edge you need over the competition. No matter which tool you choose, conversational AI for e-commerce has the potential to take your business to the next level.

From reducing your costs to elevating efficiency, these AI solutions are sure to increase both your customer and team member satisfaction. Finding the right partner, like Jotform AI Agents, is an important first step in your process. Take the time to investigate advanced AI solutions and find the right one for you.