Conversational Commerce FAQ
Conversational commerce is a way for businesses to sell their products or services to customers by leveraging the power of human conversation. Instead of simply selling in a transactional, impersonal manner, conversational commerce seeks to sell by informing, persuading, convincing and helping via a low-friction communication medium.
Through conversational commerce, brands leverage various mediums such as chatbots, voice assistants and messaging platforms to understand customers’ wants and needs and deliver personalised offerings at scale. They can also take customers on a conversational journey through the purchasing process to help them discover products, place orders, make payments, and even track orders – all on one familiar messaging interface. Conversational commerce also enables companies to grow their business, expand their market share, and generate more revenues.
Conversational commerce allows brands to meet customers where they are, to engage in personalised conversations along the purchase journey. They can deliver positive brand experiences that can potentially translate into more sales, revenues and profits, and garner greater customer loyalty and brand advocacy.
Instead of turning customers off with salesy or overly promotional tactics, they can engage with them in friendly, meaningful, personalised ways on messaging platforms they already use, such as WhatsApp or chatbots.
That allows the companies to open a dialogue with customers, move them down the sales funnel faster, and transform each interaction into a healthy, long-term relationship. The best way to achieve these goals is with a conversational commerce platform like Gupshup.
Conversational commerce helps brands to sell more. With a solution like Gupshup, they can also:
- Develop “chatbot shopping” to expand their market reach
- Build a direct digital connection with customers
- Engage in conversations in real-time
- Convert existing messaging workflows into conversations, and
- Create consultative and conversational online commerce experiences.
These benefits of conversational commerce are available to firms of all sizes in virtually any industry.
Mobile app-based commerce has been around for a while. However, apps have both a quantity problem and a quality problem. On the quantity side, millions of applications exist, but people download and use only a handful of them. As a result, businesses have limited opportunities to establish a shop on an app and grab the customer’s attention via their mobile device.
On the quality front, app-based experiences don’t work very well for complex products or consultative sales where customers prefer to talk with the seller before completing a purchase. Conversational commerce addresses both these challenges by helping brands connect with customers at every step of the journey in personalised, dialogue-driven ways via any messaging app.
A conversational commerce platform like Gupshup consolidates the entire customer journey on one single, seamless messaging interface. Through this interface, businesses can guide prospects and lead down the purchase funnel towards conversion, offer deals to new customers, and redress challenges for existing customers.
Thus, the conversational commerce platform provides a powerful means to boost sales, simplify transactions, and improve the commerce experience to retain customers and garner their loyalty. Plus, the platform supports messaging-based AI-powered chatbots to achieve all these benefits at scale.
A messaging-based AI-powered chatbot supports Gupshup (a conversational commerce solution). This chatbot enables businesses to converse with customers on a messaging channel or app they already use. The solution can also take any digital or physical commerce entry point, like a storefront or a website that makes it a conversation starter with QR codes or URLs.
Messaging-based marketing tools (A2P and P2P) can transform one-way transactions into rich, two-way conversations to drive demand and brand value. Commerce with Gupshup IP Messaging (GIP) ensures secure discussions for customers’ peace of mind.
The solution can integrate with leading POS systems, payment systems, CRM, ORM, social media tools, and marketing automation systems to provide all the benefits of conversational commerce in terms of increased sales, customer retention and loyalty, at scale.
