Chatbots are one of the best recent tools to help customers have a better overall experience with your company. The shopping season is quickly approaching, and it is time to get your chatbot ready. Here are several things that you can do to make your e-commerce chatbot rock this shopping season.
Customize For the Holiday
The first step in making your chatbot more successful this holiday season is to customize it for the season. In the off seasons, chatbots usually have a generic corporate design to them. You want your chatbot to fit in with whatever holiday shopping season is coming up. This helps put customers in a festive mood and can lead to more sales in subtle ways.
Customizing for the holidays is more than customizing the look of the interface. It is adjusting how the chatbot offers customer service. For example, the way that chatbots greet customers plays an important role in setting the tone of the interaction. You can change the possible greetings for your chatbot so that they take on a more holiday-focused vibe. It is a subtle but effective way of making customers feel like you are more invested in the holiday, which makes customers think more about their holiday preparations and purchases.
Holiday-Specific Product Recommendations
Throughout interactions with customers, chatbots have the opportunity to upsell products. Change the way that it upsells and recommends products to reflect holiday-specific options.
When you do this, focus on more than just appropriately themed items. Use your business’ performance analytics to determine which appropriate products sell well during the holiday season. Then, prioritize those products to increase sales.
For example, grilling is popular for the summer holidays. Prioritize grill recommendations for your best-performing grills. Having those grills recommended or having product accessories suggested for them can lead to an increase in sales since customers are in the mindset to shop for those holidays.
Ensure Good Customer Service
Throughout this process, it is important to make sure that your chatbot is still offering good customer service. Some companies go overboard with recommending products or getting into the season with theme changes. This can compromise customer service quality, but they are too distracted to notice.
The simplest way to fix this problem is to test your chatbot after making modifications. Have a set of scenarios and performance metrics so that you can objectively judge performance. Any time you make a big change to its functions, run the chatbot through your series of tests so that you can see if customers still have a good experience.
Include Promotional Offers
If you want your customers to spend more, then help them spend less with promotional offers. Promotions, like discounts, can inspire customers to stretch their budgets during the holiday seasons. Your chatbot is a great way of delivering those promotions to customers who shop on your website.
The key to an effective promotion is to make it worth the user’s time and attention. Many companies use chatbot popups to deliver their promotions, but this can be annoying if it happens too much or the offer is not valuable enough for customers to care.
Another way to handle promotions is by offering them to customers with customer service issues. If a customer is having an experience that is not going as well as you had planned, you may be able to improve the situation by offering an exclusive promotion for the holidays. Your chatbot just has to know who to offer it to and when to offer it.
If your chatbot recommends products, it can also upsell accessories or related products using a promotion. Customers will take notice when the product that they want comes with a half-off accessory if they buy it together. Use this to your advantage to deliver more value while improving customers’ experience.
Get Help Getting Your Chatbot Ready
Tuning up a chatbot for shopping may not be something that you have ever done before, but you need it to work. The simplest solution is to get help getting your chatbot ready with KitelyTech. At KitelyTech, we work with companies to develop their digital assets, including more effective chatbots. Call us at (800) 274-2908 for help getting ready for the season.
