According to Statista, the global market of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in retail was evaluated at about $3 billion in 2019. By 2027, the market for AI in retail is expected to continue its exponential growth and reach $23 billion. This goes in line with the overall expansion of AI across different industries and geographies – perhaps, in five-ten years, there will be hardly any area of our life not augmented by the use of AI technology.
When it comes to retail and e-commerce, AI applications are numerous: from pre-sale consulting and automated marketing campaigns to order confirmation and processing and customer support — these are just a few ways how conversational AI can power up your business. Today, we’ll have a look at some of the most common and efficient use cases.
Sales and marketing
With conversational AI, you’ll be able to enhance customer engagement by adopting a highly-personalized approach and automating communication throughout funnel stages. Moreover, AI solutions enable multichannel interaction with clients – including special offers and updates, cross-selling and upselling, collecting feedback, and more.
Example: One of our clients is a large online store selling clothes and shoes. They needed to motivate inactive clients who hadn’t made any orders for some time. To bring them back, the client launched an awareness campaign about forthcoming Black Friday discounts.
With the Neuro.net virtual agent, it took only 2 hours to call 30,000 clients (as compared to 2 days if performed by human agents), and the conversion rate amounted to 8% (versus 6% when done by humans).
Order processing and tracking
Another way to use conversational AI is automating the entire purchase flow — from confirming the order and negotiating shipment date and details to updating the client on the status of delivery and dealing with returns.
Both voicebots and chatbots can be used to inform customers, making the whole process more convenient for them. Your employees will no longer need to spend time on routine operations since conversational AI can easily take over these tasks.
Example: One of our customers, an online store, needed to optimize the order storage period at pick-up points since some orders were picked up after the storage period had expired. To do so, they used voice agents to call clients and remind them that their storage period is about to expire. This helped solve the problem, with 85% of customers collecting the package within two days.
Surveys and polls
Collecting customer feedback through regular polls is a great way to reveal weak points and figure out what can be improved. With conversational AI, you can conduct surveys or polls as often as you need, for example, every three months or after each customer interaction. AI automation enables you to reach out to thousands of customers and speed up your survey by up to three times!
Example: An electronic devices online store needed to contact their customers after each purchase to conduct an NPS poll and measure the quality of service using the 1-10 scale. Besides being much faster, virtual agents also performed better than humans in doing this task – 68% of customers completed the poll as compared to 65% when reached by human agents.
Customer service
One of the most effective applications of conversational AI is using it in contact centers to deal with customer incoming requests. Virtual agents are available round the clock, can speak many languages, are always in a good mood, and can be easily scaled up, which makes them an ideal solution for customer service.
Besides, a voice agent can respond to incoming requests much faster than a human manager, making customer service much more efficient and resulting in an improved user experience.
Example: One of our clients needed to automate the contact center to handle the increased number of incoming calls. After deploying the Neuro.net solution for contact centers, 85% of requests were successfully solved by the virtual agents, which helped the client to significantly increase the contact center capacity and efficiency.
Final thoughts
If you’re in the retail or e-commerce business, consider taking advantage of cutting-edge conversational AI technology. Virtual agents can be a great solution for many everyday tasks, from confirming orders and reaching out to customers to providing excellent customer service – while allowing you to cut costs and increase the efficiency of operations.
