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Conversational Commerce: How brands can make mobile relevant to the shopping experience

This post was updated on January 3, 2017.conversational_commerce

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve all heard the incredible statistics around growth in mobility. With mobile devices now outnumbering the people who use them, many retailers and brands are making significant investments to keep pace with customers’ demands for mobile features and offer that seamless experience throughout their desired shopping journey.

However, for all their effort to enhance their mobile capabilities, the reality is that offering a truly relevant mobile experience is easier said than done, and for many retailers and brands the results have been disappointing.

So why is this?

A big reason is the mobile interface itself and how all of us as consumers use our smartphones. Trying to create a similar experience to the desktop, with a point-and-click menu navigation opening different small screens, is not the natural way people use their device. Research shows that while customers may start the initial search process on their phone, they finish it off on a bigger screen via their desktop or tablet.

The other challenge is the format. A large portion of a brand’s mobility experience is currently offered in the form of an app, spending a considerable amount of time and money to develop. But with the sheer volume of apps out there—more than 4 million in the top two app stores alone—it shouldn’t come as a surprise that branded app usage is poor.

The good news is that with today’s technology advances, there are new options to make mobile a truly relevant platform, one that’s valuable for both the consumer and the brand. Enter conversational commerce.

Conversation as a platform

You probably have heard about conversational commerce, where conversation in the form of chat, messaging, or other natural language is used as a platform to interact with and provide services to someone. The concept of voice interface to computers certainly isn’t new (think Star Trek.) But what is changing the opportunity and relevance of conversation as a platform is the significant advancements in AI and machine learning.

With them, we can now have a conversation with a computer or phone and experience intelligent interactions and responses—the most powerful aspect is that it’s happening in the context of a situation. Just a couple years ago, the experience was frustrating at best.

Brands can now take these advanced conversational services and offer them in a way that’s natural to the mobile experience—through messaging. Just think of the billions of texts sent across messaging apps and SMS every hour. Messaging apps are also used nine times a day versus twice daily for the average app, according to a study by Flurry Analytics.

These chatbot software programs integrated into a consumer’s preferred messaging app are faster to build, cost less, and can offer a more seamless and frictionless experience, since shoppers can engage with brands in a variety of ways without ever having to leave the app and open a different screen.

The chatbot’s ability to combine differing data sources and use contextual data also empowers it to provide the right help in the right context. What comes back is truly relevant and personal for the shopper helping drive more transactions, increase basket size, and reduce abandoned carts.

For the brand, this also helps increase usage which increases customer insights through the tele metrics from that interaction, helping the chatbot continue to learn and provide deeper personalization and richer experiences during the next interaction. Both the consumer and brand can now win in so many ways!

Imagine the future with chatbots

While chatbots are still in their infancy, many are calling them the future of m-commerce. And many brands and retailers are seeing the opportunity and testing their capabilities. In the video below, you can watch my real conversation with Hipmunk, a travel assistant chatbot as I asked it to help me plan a beach getaway for Christmas.

In addition to travel assistants, I see many valuable scenarios for retailers and brands. Certainly things like customer service and call center support, but also more sophisticated scenarios like a virtual concierge for hotels, a personal shopper in a specialty retail environment, or a recipe or dinner planning assistant in the grocery store.

In this concept video with The Body Shop, you can see a futuristic, but completely achievable, scenario of what’s possible with conversational commerce, where Microsoft Cortana acts as an assistant to help interact with various bots to help a consumer shop for cosmetics, find and place an order with their favorite brand, suggest other products, schedule an in-store appointment at the makeup counter, and even arrange for an Uber to pick her up. All done in the shopper’s preferred messaging program, without ever having to change apps or screens.

The technology framework

Conversations as a platform and intelligent digital assistants is something Microsoft sees as very relevant for the future of productivity. At our BUILD conference for developers, we released the Microsoft Bot Framework, providing just what developers need to build and connect intelligent bots that interact in more contextual and natural ways, including in communications and social platforms—text/sms, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, Slack, Skype, and other popular services.

The Bot Framework is part of the Cortana Intelligence Suite, which makes it easy to integrate with Azure Services in the cloud and take advantage of machine learning and predictive analytics tools to achieve those personal and relevant experiences that retailers and brands are looking to deliver.

In order to make it easier to get started creating a bot, Microsoft has gone even further, recently releasing Azure Bot Service, the first public cloud bot-service powered by the Bot Framework and serverless compute in Microsoft Azure. With the Azure Bot Service, developers can accelerate building intelligent bots using Microsoft Cognitive Services by working in an integrated developer experience designed for bot development with out-of-the-box templates such as the basic bot, Language Understanding Intelligent Service bot, form bot, and proactive bot.

Another exciting new release is the latest addition to Microsoft Cognitive Services: QnA Maker. QnA Maker is a free, easy-to-use, REST API- and web-based service that trains AI to respond to users’ questions in a more natural, conversational way. To test it out, I decided to build a concept chatbot for L’Oreal. I used no coding and I talk more about how I did it here.

Our partner Plexure is also doing some interesting work with chatbots, helping retailers with a physical presence build and use intelligent chat bot engagement to direct customers from a digital channel into a store, offering a seamless and personalized customer experience while helping increase store visits. You can watch their video here.

I’m excited about today’s opportunities to use conversation as a platform to make the mobile experience more relevant and valuable for both consumers and brands. If you’re heading to the National Retail Federation’s Big Show 2017 this month, make sure to visit us at the Microsoft Booth (#2803). Here you will be able to see for yourself how chatbots can enable retailers to better engage with customers during their shopping journey. 

LinkedIn: ShiSh Shridhar
Twitter:
@5h15h