A robust and well attended chat program will contribute to growth by increasing conversion and potentially reducing drop offs during the purchase journey and reducing cart abandonment.
Chat is a real-time customer support tool providing customers a way to ask questions quickly for making purchase decisions while on your website or in the app.
Benefits of chat support include real-time assistance, improved customer engagement and reduced response time. These benefits provide customers a higher sense of trust in the care a company provides to its patrons.
Live chat can also be an effective product recommendation tool in ecommerce and is certainly an area where generative AI models will shine more in the future.
There are two main types of chat applications for websites, live chat and chatbots.
Live chat
Live chat allows customers to communicate with a human customer service representative in real-time through a chat window on the company's website or mobile app.
Live chat support needs to be reliable and robust. It can be provided by your own team or outsourced to other companies reducing the requirements from your team. In either case a planned and well documented program needs to be developed with proper training and anyone engaging customers with chat.
Chatbots
Chatbots use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide automated responses to customers' inquiries. Chatbots provide automated answers to questions and in their current state are rather limited in utility. They are inherently less expensive and time consuming to purchase and maintain but still require tracking to ensure they are providing value to customers.
Key differences between live chat and chatbots include Real-time vs Automated, higher level of Personalization with live chat, product complexity where human experts can have more natural conversations with customers, availability and cost where chatbots can be available 24x7 and at no additional cost.
As a rule it is better to not offer chat capability to users than providing incomplete, low response or unprepared answers via chat.
A hybrid model can also be used where the conversation can be started with an AI powered chatbot and offer a human live chat option if the user is not happy with or can not find the information they need from the chatbot.
Chatbots and Generative AI
Chatbots and support are arguably one of the more profoundly improved capabilities from the advances in Generative AI.
As product managers we will play a key role in understanding how the new capabilities will help your organization, find and evaluate options to recommend, implement and track as well as an increased level of understanding about generative AI models, tools and capabilities.
Product managers will need to become much more informed about AI in the future.
As generative AI technology advances, chatbots are likely to improve in several ways including Natural Language Understanding (NLU), contextual understanding, conversational flow, personalization, handling ambiguity, reducing repetition and learning from user feedback.
In addition multimodal capabilities will be improved by the ability of AI agents to handle not just text but also other modalities such as images, audio, and video.
Emotional Intelligence and empathy is another promising area for improving chatbot effectiveness in helping humans along their shopping journey.
Generative AI and Shipping agents will likely have the most profound impact on retail and shopping experience.
As Bill Gates predicted in 2023, in the future people will not go to search engines and Amazon for shopping. A big, and controversial (controversial because nobody knows how AI chatbots and agents will actually evolve in the future), prediction but important nonetheless