Chatbots for Retailers this Holiday Season

With retailers gearing up for the holiday season, many companies are operating on their maximum capacity. With a large number of customers purchasing and ordering goods, the scene is set for brands to try innovative ways to manage their orders. This could be a great time for  brands to give Chatbots a go to manage their high flow of messages.

Since Facebook announced Chatbots at their last F8 conference many brands are exploring this opportunity to connect with their customers in the comfort of their Instant Messaging Applications. For starters, their are multiple benefits to adopting a Chatbot given that the Chatbot has been developed well and updated regularly. A Chatbot can be used in multiple ways to automate the every day process and make it more streamlined for general efficiency. Another aspect of Chatbots are that they are instantaneous and easy to use for customers.

From ordering Christmas cakes to booking tickets for your getaway, Chatbots are the perfect assistants for managing customers and directing them to payment gateways. A great example of this is a popular beverage company launching an AI bartender Chatbot that offers users recipes and instructions to make new drinks this Christmas. Another new addition to the ways a Chatbot can enhance users shopping experience is an interactive personal assistant that helps you piece an outfit together for the holidays.

Here’s a list of Chatbots that could improve the shoppers experience during the holiday season:

A Chatbot Holiday Assistant

Still don’t know what to get your family or friends this Christmas? A Chatbot could ask you multiple questions about your family and suggest unique gifts for them this season. This could also be a great way for online shopping websites to save users the time of browsing through countless items and show them the content they may be more interested in. This could increase the website’s conversion rate as the items displayed would be the ones that are specifically tailored based on the user’s needs.

A Chatbot for Holiday Travel

With travel companies and airlines competing with each other on their pricing, a holiday Chatbot could list the perfect travel plan using different websites and search engines for the most accurate results. For example if the user is looking to book two tickets for New York, the Chatbot could suggest a flight plan, hotel plan and also events that the user can go to during their stay.

A Musical Chatbot

The holiday season is more cheerful with beautiful music. This Chatbot could play your most favourite holiday music at different times of the day to get you in the mood for the season. A user could customize their playlist using the Chatbot and play it on the go.

A Party Chatbot

A Chatbot that informs you of all the exciting Holiday parties happening in and around your location. This could be interesting for party goers looking for the next destination on New Years eve too.

While many companies are already utilising Chatbots effectively for this holiday season, with the trend of conversational user interfaces only increasing, we can expect 2017 to be a year of the Chatbot revolution.

Can We Measure Analytics for Chatbots?

With marketing shifting to conversational user interfaces, Chatbots have emerged as a powerful tool for e-commerce. As companies across the board are adopting Chatbots on Instant Messaging Apps, the question of analytics has crossed every Digital Marketer’s mind. Is there a way to measure the performance of your Chatbot?

It is important to acknowledge that with Facebook’s recent update on Chatbots on Messenger, users can now rate a Chatbot and provide their reviews. However, this is only one aspect of how your business can analyze the Chatbot’s performance.  In order to evaluate the Chatbot’s performance the following metrics should be measured.

 How many users has your Chatbot interacted with?

This number is equivalent to the number of reached users in an analytics view point. It is how many users the Chatbot has established contact with. This number can be a starting point to understand the success of your chatbot. The number of users that the Chatbot reaches can help the business understand how many users have had a successful and complete interaction with the Chatbot on Messaging Applications.

How long does the user interact with your Chatbot?

Once contact has been established with the user, the questions and data points can be measured to understand how long the conversation with the user lasted and can help us understand if the Chatbot was able to maintain the communication flow. For example if the Chatbot understands 10 different “conversational flows” how far has the interaction with the Chatbot progressed and where does it tend to go down. Marketers can user this to amend the conversation to minimise the number of users stopping the conversation.

How many times does the user interact with your Chatbot?

Depending on the purpose of the Chatbot, it may be important to understand the retention aspect of the Chatbot. Do users interact with your Chatbot on a daily basis? Another metric to measure can be the number of users that have “muted” the Chatbot after the initial interaction. For example, in the case of a restaurant booking via a Chatbot is the user more likely to order through the Chatbot again or resort to traditional ways of booking. This can be helpful to measure if a Chatbot is assisting in improving the existing methods or processes for a company.

What is the Conversation Success Rate of the Chatbot?

The Conversation Success Rate, according to us at Oh My Bot ! can be measured by the resistance of communication blocks by the Chatbot. There can be some instances in the conversation where the Chatbot is unable to understand the user. Therefore, it is important to measure the number of times, the Chatbot was unable to process the information which determines how successful the conversation with the user was. For example, if a user asks the question “How old are you?” the Chatbot if not intelligent enough may reply with “I don’t understand that.” which is an obstacle while trying to maintain a successful flow of conversation with the user. These blocks can also help the Marketers train and improve the Chabot constantly.

How many leads has your Chatbot generated?

Chatbots can be an important tool for companies to generate leads as it can request users to input their contact information for the business to get back to them. Therefore, if the user is willing to provide the information to a bot it can be an effective lead generation tool which the brand can measure.

How many conversions have been made on your Chatbot?

For businesses looking to promote their website or products, the Conversion from Chatbot to sales can be measured to understand the performance and efficiency of a Chatbot. How many users clicked on the website through the Chatbot? How many users bought an item by being redirected by the Chatbot? These questions can help Marketers understand if their Chatbot strategy is effective.

While metrics and analysis of Chatbots are still in their initial stages, we can foresee different tools for Chatbot Analytics to pick up in the upcoming years of the Chatbot Revolution.