Conversational commerce, also known as chat commerce, is a new way, using which the online retailers are unleashing the potential of conversation to sell their products and services. The conversational experience is delivered to the potential customer through a chatbot, a chat box, application or through a messaging platform. Conversational commerce uses popular messaging channels to communicate with users and does not require them to download additional apps.
The retailers are building a conversational commerce solution to digitize the business operation in every aspect of the business including marketing, commerce and support.
This type of commerce helps in building brand loyalty by measuring customer responses to products in real-time and involves technology, which improves the consumer experience and adds benefits for the retailers.
To get insights on this further, IMAGES Group organized CMO Townhall presented by Gupshup, powered by Internet Commerce Summit.
Speakers
- Aruna Jathar, Chief Marketing Officer, TenderCuts
- Amar Preet Singh, Co-Founder & COO, Neemans
- Deepanshu Manchanda, Founder & CEO, ZappFresh
- Madhur Acharya, VP E-Commerce Marketing, WOW Skin Science
- Manikanta Yadavalli, VP – Growth, Trell
- Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan- VP Marketing, Gupshup
Moderated by : Siju Narayan, Chief Experience Officer , RexEmptor Consult LLP
Conversational commerce as a revenue channel
Many brands are using live-chat or in-app features to connect with the customers and offer them a personalized experience. The brands are using this technique to create high conversion in sales.
Aruna Jathar told us about this, “From conversation to conversion that’s what companies do over the period of time and conversational commerce has changed drastically. Earlier, there were physical conversations and today India being at the technology helmet and now it is about getting the customer or being available to the customer where they want it.”
He further added, “Enabling more technology really helps customers to have more choices and give them e-commerce platform available 24*7 which can be a clip of technology and now the overall approach has changed.”
Manikanta Yadavalli highlighted the brand strategies, “We’re trying to do the trial part and if you see our journey from the past couple of years. We’re trying to build a very close and clear community or lifestyle community where we are bringing experts like influencers or creators who have expertise in the domain of their personal space. We’re providing it to the relevant audience by taking their whole entire journey whether it might be related to a specific brand or a specific product explaining how exactly the product works, explaining them in terms of grooming themselves or helping them in terms of adding some value to their lifestyle.”
Yadavalli further added into this, “We’re helping them in terms of educating the customer by giving them a direct contact or a personalized reference to them in terms of how this product has helped a particular person and through this we try to build more of a personalization thing and then can taking a personalized decision when buying a product.”
Adoption of Conversational Commerce
The brands are opting the conversational commerce route by offering guided selling to its customers, advancement in artificial intelligence to offering up-selling and cross selling to its customers. Madhur Acharya when asked about the adoption of this model, he replied “ What makes us different from the entire segment is that we’re personal care segment and the consumer is also seeking for tips about something that he/she’s applying on the body and it’s very important for them to know which product will not spoil their hair and skin and we are very particular about it. Our customer really needs something and we organized a survey in small batches and about 45 people have invested that they want to use the conversation marketing channels from WOW to discuss the advice they seek and know what can be a regime which can be followed.”
Acharya also added that, “We’re offering customers with a real-time solution and conversational marketing has improved my business overall, helped me to improve my product through real-time feedback and also helped me to reduce my customer acquisition cost. Through this we’ll surely get some ROI if not now in future and this is what we have been doing with the other funnel.”
Watch the full discussion here –
