Are Chatbots The Future Of Product Recommendation?
‘Conversations drive sales’. For customers to proceed to the final stage of the sales funnel, it is important to have someone who can clarify their queries, understand their preferences, guide them and recommend them the best option accordingly. Customers are also much more likely to return to a store where they are getting the maximum help in hunting the right product.
In today’s internet era, most of the people now virtually live online. Resultantly, most of your potential customers are likely to discover your business online than physically. This has led to more people interacting with businesses solely via digital space. Therefore, it has become imperative for your business to tap into the digital traffic and engage with them via conversations — understanding about their preferences and recommending your solutions accordingly.
This brings us to virtual conversational assistants, better known as chatbots. Chatbots are being increasingly implemented by businesses across all verticals to engage with the audience better and as a result, attract and retain customers in the long run. Chatbots automate conversations, thereby eliminating the need to have a sales/customer care agent for each customer at a given time. With chatbots, customers and prospects can easily get their general queries answered, without having to scour through web-pages to know more about your services.
What’s more, chatbots can also be programmed to offer personalized recommendations based on user’s likes, dislikes and chat history. Offering personalized recommendations in the chatbot can be used as an effective way to drive more customers to the final stage of the sales funnel.
Chatbots & Product Recommendation
Amazon.com is a prime example of a brand which implements product recommendation, and does it so well that it generates 35% of its revenue through its recommendation engine. As you already know, it recommends products from different categories under the sections like “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” based on which product the customer is browsing. Amazon.com uses product recommendation both on its web pages and in email campaigns.
Chatbots, being the personal virtual assistants, can be leveraged to not just solve customer queries but also to make personalized recommendations by interacting with users to know more about their preferences.
A chatbot first probes the user about the type of product they are looking for by asking a set of predefined questions. Based on the user’s response, the chatbot then fetches details from the database it’s connected to and makes suitable suggestions to the user. During the conversation, users can also get their queries solved about different recommended products through the chatbot.
Chatbots can also be integrated with the company’s recommendation engine to offer personalized recommendations to the users.
Chatbots work round the clock and provide a conversational approach to the exchange of information between the customer and your business, which makes it extremely user-friendly and the least intrusive form of sales and marketing tool.
Let’s have a look at how the conversation with the Product Recommendation Chatbot of a wine store would look like:
Bot: Hi there, I am your personal sommelier, Max.
Are you looking for just wine, or you wish to pair it with what you are eating?
User: Yes, I’d like to pair it with food.
Bot: That’s great! What are you eating?
User: It’ll be steak and some vegetables.
Bot: Ah! Steak is best paired with red wine.
Let me pull out some options for you!…
We have the Burdizzo, the good old Chianti Classico and the Nippazano! Go ahead, choose one!
User: I’ll go with the Burdizzo!
Bot: Awesome choice! You can buy it here(link to the product).
Then the user can directly go to the product page and order the wine of their choice. This way, the user easily got the best-paired wine with their food, without having to go to different pages on the internet deciding which wine would suit steak the best.
Popular multinational clothing brand H&M’s Kik chatbot recommends their outfits based on people’s preferences like color, style, etc. Popular make-up brand Sephora also has a Kik chatbot which offers products, their reviews, tips, video clips and tutorials based on different make-up styles.
We, at WotNot, understand that each business is different. We design the best-in-class chatbots to suit your business needs. Have a look at our 16 tailor-made templates which have been designed keeping in mind different business scenarios. What’s more, experience the product recommendation template here for FREE!
