How AI Chatbots Are Impacting Retail Industry?

Retail marketing has never had it this good, given the fact that this is the golden age of consumerism. It should be pointed out that given the leaps and advances in digital technology and more importantly, in the field of AI, it was expected that AI would be utilized across various industries to boost sector/company growth.

And to that end; it already is being used today across various retail industries in the form of AI chatbots.

These AI chatbots automate part of the process and happen to be consumer centric in the sense that they help to increase customer engagement which in turn drives up the sales.

These are some of the ways that AI chatbots are changing how Retail industry

1. Chatbots in retail and conversational commerce:

With most retailers going online, some of them have started using AI chatbots in order to provide their consumers with a more customized shopping experience. Of course, the large players already have started using AI chatbots a while back. From Amazon to the rest.

But what’s interesting is that the smaller retailers, in order to compete better have started to utilize AI chatbots and to use conversational commerce to drive user engagement. These AI chatbots have access to a user’s history, their past purchases, and can react and interact to messages.

In short, the main purpose of these chatbots is to engage with customers directly and to provide them with a curated shopping list of products that they would be interested in.

2. Chatbots in retail and omni channel presence:

What makes the presence of AI chatbots in retail industry invaluable is that they can interact with the end user in any platform. They can interact with the customer on Facebook, twitter, SMS and various other platforms. This should enable the retail company in question to increase its reach and attain more visibility as well.

3. Revenue:

By using AI powered chatbots, companies are bound to see their revenues grow both I the near term and the long term. As these chatbots help drive customer engagement, it should result in the customer ending up purchasing more products from the retail company.

And as a result, with more purchases being made, the profit margin should see a steady increase. It goes without saying that customer engagement is a must when it comes to selling any product online and these chatbots are truly remarkable in the sense that they can read messages, react to the same and engage with the customer head on – resulting in him placing an online order.

4. Instant notifications:

When it comes to these chatbots, you do not only have to use them to engage with a customer but you can use them to review your current stocks, to let you know when your stocks in a particular ‘in demand’ product happens to be running quite low.

These chatbots can also let you know when a particular stock is overdue from a distributor and can even review other aspects of your business so that you can stay on top of things.

5. Feedback:

What is proving to be invaluable to most of these retail companies is the fact that chatbots can provide you with valuable feedback on client interactions and on whether they are facing any issue in particular.

These chatbots are designed to read messages and moreover in case of a customer facing an issue, a notification is sent to the management highlighting the concerned issue.

By enabling quick notification, most organizations are able to resolve the issue faster and this in turn, helps to increase customer satisfaction as well.

6. Complementary services:

Let us assume that you are in retail and that you already provide requisite services through chat, that’s perfectly fine. No one is asking you to replace your personnel with an AI chatbot to handle all the client communications at your end.

Instead, you can use the chatbox to complement the client oriented services that you already provide. For example, your customer support staff can be online only during the day, in which case, you can get the AI chatbot to take over the chat functions for the night.

That way, you should be able to provide 24 hr customer support service which should again help increase customer satisfaction.

7. Training:

Chatbots are great, when it comes to repetitive tasks and reviewing the progress made which is why they make for great trainers. You can use these chatbots to deliver training to your retail employees and you can then get the chatbots to monitor their presence as well.

Apart from imparting valuable training to your employees, you can also utilize this opportunity to review and assess their profile and see if they would be a good fit for the organization.

8. Inventories:

If you are operating a huge retail store, then it is vital that you keep track of your stocks all the time.

Chatbots can help you do just that; more importantly they can also provide your sales people with valuable in store assistance by looking up a specific product and determining if it is available or not. It can also provide the sales assistant with cross sell and up sell suggestions as well.

9. Shifts:

It can be hard to micromanage the shift system especially if your staff happens to be large in number. But with chatbots, you should be able to do the same efficiently – as these chatbots can help manage the whole process.

10. Order tracking:

Chatbots can also track all your online orders as they are being processed in real time. They can double check to ensure that the product has been safely delivered without any hiccups.

These are some of the ways by which the whole retail industry is slowly but surely being changed for the better, thanks to these AI chatbots. These chatbots are essential, especially where retail industries are concerned; it is only a matter of time before other industries start utilizing the same.