Digital assistants are beginning to dominate the eCommerce landscape. Especially as the holiday season approaches, they offer a solution to an influx of online shopper questions that can’t always be managed by physical support staff. According to one study, eCommerce revenue directly attributed to implementing a successful digital assistant is expected to surpass $140 billion worldwide by 2024.
But of course, “successful digital assistants” doesn’t mean simply adding a chatbot to your online store to capture a share and take a bite from the quickly growing revenue pie. In fact, the word chatbot itself has brought on negative connotations. This is mainly because they are viewed as intrusive and often irrelevant.
Successful digital assistants, leveraged the right way, have the potential for immense success. But to get there, they have to stay true to their name. That means offering immediate virtual assistance to current and potential customers in need of answers. To walk the line between annoying and engaging, consider these seven details that can help your online store leverage the technology successfully.
1. Avoid Intrusive Experiences
The last thing you want is for your assistant to appear as an annoyance for your user. Think of chatbots that pop up immediately, covering the rest of the more relevant content. Instead, it should appear as an available option for users who think they need it. Digital assistants should add to rather than distract from the shopping experience.
In working with our partners, we’ve found that the best spot for the assistant to “live” on the eCommerce site is in the bottom right corner. It should be clearly visible and available when needed. However, it must not disrupt the user experience in an intrusive way. Ultimately, the assistant should drive engagement and help answer audience questions. But it must also not be annoying for those who just want to be left alone.
2. Focus on Relevance Over Pushy Promotions
Many companies market their chat technology as a marketing tool. That may be technically accurate, but your audience doesn’t always see it as such. In fact, one study found that only 34% of consumers would prefer a chatbot over a human contact in an online retail situation.
The key, then, is increasing the relevance of the technology and orienting it more toward helping users. In many cases, users look for it to help. This is especially true when it appears on pages around shopping, pricing, and more. But there are some scenarios in which an assistant can help audiences find and purchase the right product. A smart digital assistant knows where it appears for the user, and can tailor its messaging to be appropriate to that context and mindset.
3. Don’t Let Your Digital Assistant Sound Too Robotic
We avoid the word chatbot because it embodies one of the worst misconceptions about digital assistants. No customer wants to talk to technology that sounds like a robot, with generic answers or awkwardly phrased sentences. Instead, it pays to humanize the experience for your audience.
That means using natural language and phrases that your audience would use and expect when talking to a “real” customer service representative. Here, an AI-enabled digital assistant can learn from your audience’s language patterns and apply those patterns to its own responses. We call it Bot EQ, or the emotional intelligence the bot uses when interacting with an audience. Dynamically shifting the tone to the user’s word patterns, from upset to happy, can go a long way toward creating a more human experience.
4. Keep Answers Short
No customer, current or prospective, wants to read a long preamble. Instead, they’re looking for short and concise answers. And they want those answers to get directly to the core of their questions. It’s a natural adjustment to make in human customer service interactions when time is literally money. However, it can be more challenging in a text-based digital environment.
Still, your database of answers needs to reflect this priority on getting to the point. When a customer wants to return a product, a single sentence and link to the returns form on your website may be all that’s needed. Keeping answers short maximizes the ability to keep your audience engaged and walk away from their brand interaction satisfied.
5. Know When To Pass It Off
Let’s be honest. Even a single-product online store cannot build technology that definitively answers all possible customer questions. The nuances of pricing, taxes, shipping, and product details can simply become too much for any technology to handle.
That’s why the key to success should never revolve around trying to solve every possible problem with your digital assistant. Instead, it’s about knowing exactly when that technology reaches its limit, and a human representative jumps in to solve the issue. Threading that needle plays to the strength of the technology, keeps your audience engaged, and still leverages the expertise of the human retail staff.
6. Use Conversations as Learning Opportunities
Every engagement with your audience can make or break a sale. But, just as importantly, it also serves as an opportunity to learn what’s going right and wrong with your digital assistant. And because it’s all text-based, reporting and transcripts allow you to understand both best practices and improvement opportunities for future interactions.
Even better: with AI-enabled technology, some of that learning can happen dynamically. Your digital assistant learns from every interaction and puts those learning into place the next time it engages in a conversation or answers a question. Reporting and analysis can still happen, but marginal improvements are happening automatically in the background.
7. Get Honest Audience Feedback
Finally, don’t underestimate the importance of hearing directly from your audience. Traditionally, marketers have leveraged surveys and interviews to learn what worked and what didn’t about a tactic, then used those learnings to make improvements to the technology over time.
The right digital assistant simplifies that process significantly. It can analyze the conversations themselves, understanding what questions might have stumped the technology or where users dropped off in the conversation. This integrated review process builds a more natural way to hear from your audience without adding a step to their process, creating dynamic insights about the success and improvement opportunities available.
Building Your Digital Assistant to Help the eCommerce Retail Journey
Successful digital assistants have immense potential within the online retail industry. But they can also help to bring the virtual user experience crashing down. The difference is in how exactly that user engagement plays out every time a potential or current customer lands on your website.
When they engage with your digital assistant, will they be positively surprised and satisfied, or annoyed? The answer to that question is directly connected to the setup of and strategy behind your technology. Getting these details right is vital to building an experience that creates customer satisfaction, reduces confusion, and builds loyalty.
Learn more about how digital assistants can work for your eCommerce business.
