Big businesses have increasingly looked online to engage with their customers, provide information about their products and services, offer support, and allow customers to order products and services from their eCommerce Store. These Businesses typically use a Mobile App or their Website but are increasingly using Messaging Apps (e.g., WhatsApp) or Voice Assistants (e.g., Amazon Echo) as another channel to engage with their customers. This is called Conversational Commerce and contrary to perception small businesses can also benefit. Want to learn more, please read on.
What is Conversational Commerce?
Uber's Chris Messina in a Medium post in 2015 coined the term Conversational Commerce, as he thought it would become the “primary way in which people transact on their mobile devices”. Conversational commerce is any means of communication using conversational channels such as live chat support, engagement using messaging apps and/or voice assistants. These channels are augmented with technology to allow a more seamless and natural conversation between a business and their customers. For example, voice assistants use speech recognition to better understand the speaker and use speaker recognition to identify the speaker using biometrics and provide speaker contextual response. Messaging Apps are enhanced through natural language processing and artificial intelligence in chat bots to train them and provide a more appropriate response.
Over three-quarters (78 percent) of shoppers reported they would like the ability to securely message with any business, and 74 percent said they are more likely to do business with a company if they could message rather than call them1
1 AgilityPR based on survey by Liveperson in December 2021
Benefits of Conversational Commerce for Small Business?
Small businesses can benefit from conversational commerce in many ways from customer support to allowing customers to order products and services. We detail the main ways conversational commerce helps small businesses here:
- Customer Support: Simple chat bots can answer basic customer questions like opening hours, location, or provide simple tips or how to guides.
- Personalized service: When customers need a more personal touch, it is possible to handover conversations from the chat bot to a human.
- Free up time and save labour: Small businesses owners can free up precious time by allowing automation to engage with customers on simple repetitive tasks, and this will allow the business owners to focus on a more personalized service.
- eCommerce: Business owners can put their products and services on an eCommerce store and allow their customers to order and pay, ensuring higher revenues and higher sales closures.
- Loyalty: As every customer will engage with their phones, business owners will now have the phone number of every customer that engages with their business and understand new versus repeat customers preferences. Business owners can encourage repeat sales by offering a loyalty program. This way the Business owns the relationship and not a marketing intermediary such as a social media channel.
- Promotions: Once the business owner has the phone numbers of their customers, conversational commerce can be used to send messages of special deals and promotions (e.g., 2 for 1 Wednesdays).
- No Apps to download for customers: This is critical as many consumers do not like to download Mobile Apps for small businesses and this can be an unnecessary friction.
Messaging Apps are the digital equivalent as ‘footfall’ for small businesses, as every consumer has a Messaging App on their phone.
Payemoji – Conversational Commerce for Small Business
At Payemoji we enable Messenger Apps for Conversational Commerce for small businesses. Every small business gets a local mobile number (separate from their business number) and a QR code(s) that make it simple for your customers to engage through a Messenger App with your Business. This will then allow small businesses to offer customer support, offer an eCommerce store to allow their customers to buy goods and pay digitally. Small businesses can offer loyalty programs as their customer numbers are recorded. Integration into social media platforms and internet platforms is also easy i.e., local number, a QR codes or even we offer a simple plug-ins. All this is available through our solution, and best of all your customers will never have to leave their favorite messenger app to engage with your business.
Sounds Interesting?
With Payemoji your Business can experience the power of Messaging Apps for conversational commerce, all for a low monthly subscription fee… who said conversational commerce was only for big business!
