The most important thing is now how people interact with your brand through e-commerce. The best way to help people online is quickly becoming to use a virtual shopping assistant. Let’s learn more about this cool new thing.
What is a “Virtual Shopping Assistant” (VSA)?
A chatbot that talks directly to online shoppers is all that makes up a virtual shopping assistant. These assistants use a combination of machine learning and language processing to understand what people are asking and give them the best answer.
As these virtual assistants talk to more customers, they learn more about their likes and dislikes and how they talk, which makes the bot more successful over time.
Also, AI technology has gotten better, which has made virtual shopping assistants more useful. At the moment, they can answer up to 80% of the most common questions, and 34% of online customers prefer them to human customer service reps.
There are different kinds of shopping helpers that you can use online. Chatbots, Widgets, Popups, Conversational AI,… are some of them.
How do online shopping helpers work?
At first glance, it’s easy to see how a virtual shopping assistant works. Before interacting with an assistant, a user must go to a brand’s website or social media page.
Digital shopping assistants are often used on retail websites. When a new person comes to the website, these helpers immediately greet them through a chat box, giving them advice and telling them about any deals that are going on. The potential customer can then type into the chat box to ask questions or get suggestions, and the assistant will respond within seconds.
Why Choose an Online Shopping Helper?
There are more than 9 million eCommerce shops, according to recent data on online shopping. The online retail market is very competitive right now, and companies do everything they can to get new customers. Some of the best ways to get a competitive edge are to get customers more involved with artificial intelligence, virtual shopping assistants, and chatbots.
Improving the way customers browse and get around the store
A website that doesn’t have any interactive content might be hard to use and boring. When customers use virtual assistants, they can find what they want faster. It’s also a lot more fun, and getting help in real time might change their buying decisions.
Getting fewer customers to abandon their shopping carts
Most of the time, if a customer sends a message to a shop and doesn’t get a quick or immediate response, they will go to another page to look for similar products. This means that a lot of people won’t buy from the shop.
Customers who want to shop at any time, like a virtual shopping system, are best served by a system that lets them do so. Your customers want to be able to help themselves online and get quick answers to any questions they have. Chatbots might be able to answer these basic questions at any time, whereas you might have to click on a message that says you won’t be available until the morning.
Online shopping assistants that are powered by AI could help reduce the number of shopping carts that are left empty. They do this by making it easy for customers to ask questions about items and pay for them. They may also help keep customers interested in your business by giving them personalized offers.
Using cross-selling to make more money
eCommerce chatbots are a great way to boost your conversion rate because they automate the process of cross-selling and upselling. Customers might be given suggestions for things to buy based on what they’ve bought or looked at before. When a buyer buys a new pair of shoes, for example, a virtual shopping assistant that is powered by artificial intelligence may suggest pants that go with the shoes.
Savings on Customer Service and Marketing Costs
You can create a virtual assistant to answer frequently asked questions or keep track of purchases without having to answer each question individually. This could cut down on the need for customer service reps and help customers find the information they need without having to call your business. Also, chatbot marketing has a great return on investment (ROI) and may lower the cost of getting new clients.
Using the Clients’ Preferred Channels to Talk to Them
Now, it’s the customers’ job to stay in touch with businesses, not the other way around. It’s a great idea to give customers a consistent, omnichannel experience on all channels. Customers can get in touch with businesses in many ways, such as by phone, email, social media, or chatbots. Customers may be happier with a business if it gives them a lot of ways to talk to them and ways to get services.
Improved the efficiency of lead collection and qualification
It’s hard to sell things to people who are coming for the first time. It is important for eCommerce businesses to increase sales by creating leads and keeping in touch with them. Website visitors who talk to shopping assistants may give you good leads. They may also tag customers who go to sites for certain products.
Virtual retail chatbots have a lot of potential to increase sales and conversions. This is not a secret. But you might be surprised to find out how many big businesses already use them. If you want to join them, here are some suggestions for how to add AI chat to the web pages of your online store.
How to Use Virtual Shop Assistant to Increase Sales
Retail managers need to know how to use a chatbot to its full potential as a virtual shopper’s friend. These personal helpers have many different skills. Because of this, merchants may want to use them in a number of different ways.
Chatbots can do a number of important things to become virtual shopping assistants, such as:
Answer the questions that people often ask.
One of the most common ways that virtual shopping assistants are used is to answer questions from customers.
Several companies hire virtual assistants to answer the most common questions about their business and its products. This is kind of like having a living FAQ page. For the vast majority of businesses, this means answering questions about shipping costs, turnaround times, and how to get your money back. If a brand has stores, people will always want to know where they are and what hours they are open.
Virtual shopping assistants can be set up to answer a number of questions about a certain product. These include things like the size or information about a warranty.
Provide Order Details
People want to know when something they buy online will arrive more than anything else. You could send this information to them by email, or you could give it to them through a helper. This makes things easier for customers and keeps them on the website longer, so they might buy something else.
With a virtual shopping assistant, brands can tell their customers when their package will arrive and give them other useful information about their order, like tracking information. Also, some virtual assistants have a feature that automatically updates the order status. This helps the seller run their online store.
Offer suggestions for products
Virtual shopping assistants can also be used to suggest products to customers based on their needs, behavior, or personal preferences. You can have an assistant find out more about the type of product a customer wants, and then you can change the products you suggest to meet the customer’s needs.
You can also set up virtual shopping assistants to tell you what to buy. Using information about the shopper’s current needs, past behavior, and preferences, virtual shopping assistants can show the shopper one or more product options that are likely to meet his or her needs.
Giving customers the ability to find the best solution to their problems as quickly as possible could make a huge difference in the quality of their experience.
Give out coupons and discounts.
When a customer gets a discount, they are always happy. Virtual shopping assistants can see what products a customer is looking at on their screen. When it’s appropriate, the salesperson will tell the customer about all the deals that are available for a certain product. Now comes the part where the virtual assistant has an effect on how leads are made.
The only thing the customer has to do to get the discount code is type their email address into the chatbox. The buyer can quickly finish the transaction by using the promo code at checkout and doing so in a few seconds. The same options are also available to customers who are on the checkout page. Any special card offers or package deals that the virtual shopping assistant finds are shared with the customer.
When people sign up for memberships at stores, they get special deals and other perks. After you enter your login information, the virtual assistant will show you deals that are only available to members. The user doesn’t have to leave the site they are on to use any of these options. One way the virtual shopping assistant helps get more leads and improve conversion rates is by letting people know about these discounts. A key performance indicator (KPI) for most businesses is how long people stay in the store.
Send reminders for carts that were abandoned
Most of the time, customers don’t finish their online shopping carts before they check out. You can make more money for your business by getting some of these carts back with the help of a virtual shopping assistant.
Depending on where you put your virtual assistant, it can remind or suggest to shoppers what they left in their carts when they return to your website or social media pages. These kinds of reminders about empty carts work better than emails about open carts, with conversion rates that are up to 33% higher.
Last Words
Online businesses really need to add virtual shopping assistants to their sites in the 21st century. They are an AI solution for retail that is cheap and gives organizations a lot of benefits. Customers like how these digital shopping companions make shopping easier and more personalized for them.
Due to how popular they are getting, virtual assistants are quickly becoming more of a necessity on eCommerce sites than a bonus. To get the benefits of AI in retail, businesses need to spend money on the right digital solution. Customers will come back if they like what their virtual store assistant does for them. On dropship-empire Blog, you can find more eCommerce guides and marketing tips.