Conversational Commerce Market Trends–Driving Online Sales Through Live Chat and More

Introduction: A New World of Opportunities

It should be of no surprise that the world of online communication tools and customer service has evolved at an unprecedented rate over the past two decades, thanks to live chat technology. If you are still attending to your customers’ needs via phone and email in 2022, you’re definitely missing out big-time on a huge market of website visitor engagement opportunities built for online businesses. But, beyond the live chat, conversational commerce has boomed on a technological and social level in ways that have transformed how businesses reach out to and service customers, as well as the expectations consumers have today for online stores and e-shops.

In the online world, businesses do not have the luxury of getting to know their customers in-person. As such, communication tools and techniques used to engage with website visitors and customers have become absolutely necessary for web shops and internet-based stores. Since their inception in the early 2000s, messaging apps have been evolved in order to meet the customer communication needs of online businesses. The fact of the matter is that having an online business without a live chat communication tool for your customers would be like having a brick-and-mortar store without a shop assistant.

This article will evaluate today’s conversational commerce technologies and trends, and how they mutually benefit businesses and consumers.

Why Conversational Commerce?

Definition and Business Value

Let’s start with a simple definition: what is conversational commerce? Coined by Uber’s Chris Messina in 2015, conversational commerce can be summed up as “the intersection of messaging apps and shopping.” In other words, a shopping experience that results from website visitors communicating with businesses via live chats and web chat apps like Facebook Messenger, and others. What’s more is that with conversational e-commerce solutions, businesses can leverage human support combined with chatbot support, and various other tools offered within it.

Conversational commerce products offer everything from chatbots to chat management tools, and loads of website visitor data and metrics in between. Conversational e-commerce technologies provide online businesses a wealth of different features that are built to save web shop owners resources, time, and money, all while boosting financial growth and better plan for the future with scenario planning. Simply put, conversational commerce solutions open a myriad of customer service, marketing, and sales opportunities to businesses.

So, why conversational commerce? Conversational commerce facilitates communication between consumers and businesses. It provides win-win customer service that benefits both the buyer and the online store by offering expedited and effective customer care, all while opening up unique opportunities for businesses to engage with their website visitors, and drive their online sales. But, that’s not all–numbers don’t lie and the research behind these extremely popular messaging applications is very compelling.

Statistics around Conversational Commerce

According to research, approximately 73% of customers consider live chat to be the most satisfactory form of communication with a company; 42% of customers chose live chat as their preferred method to give contact information (higher than any other lead generation method); and, Gartner reported that live chat is the “number one service choice for shoppers between 18 and 49 years old.” This final piece of statistical evidence demonstrates the vast number of consumers spanning across generations who prefer to use live chat as their chosen method of customer support.

Looking into the future, there is a projected volume of €1,054.00 billion in e-commerce expenditure in Europe alone by 2025; the total access of chatbot messaging apps will reach $9.5 billion; and by 2023, the global live chat market is projected to reach $987.3 million. So, if by chance you are wondering, “Do these online communication tools have a future?” The answer is, “Yes, they absolutely do.” Furthermore, at these projected levels of financial growth and usage stats, it begins to look like messaging apps will be a mandatory standard for online businesses, assuming it has not become so already.

Overall Impact of Conversational Commerce

With all of the above information in mind, the question then should be “why not conversational commerce?” In the end, it is a booming IT trend that has had massive social impact and technological influence across the globe. It has literally rewritten the rule book and the mediums used for customer service, all while offering online businesses a world of new opportunities to grow their sales and conversion rates.

It would be fair to claim that the opportunities a conversational commerce platform opens up to its users outweigh any potential negatives, and customer care teams will tell you the same thing out of experience. However, some negatives budding web shop owners could possibly perceive are having to spend time learning new tools, paying money for technological solutions as an investment into your business, and of course, incurring any stress that comes with launching a business and having to spend money before you are actually making money back. But, the proof is in the pudding, and a conversational commerce platform is a web shop’s ROI dream made into reality when put to good use.

Point being: Join the conversational commerce revolution, we’ve got cookies (and they’re fresh, homemade ones that were ordered via live chat and delivered within minutes of being baked).

Join the Conversational Commerce Revolution with Smartsupp

Considered one of the most popular conversational e-commerce solutions in Europe, Smartsupp enables businesses of all sizes to deliver a personalized online shopping experience that drives online sales through conversations with website visitors. The end purpose is to turn your website visitors into loyal customers via webchat communication, where customer care teams not only assist shoppers, but also to engage potential buyers and close sales with them.

The three core features Smartsupp delivers to help businesses drive sales while delivering outstanding customer service are live chat, chatbots, and video recordings. Within these three primary tools, we can find various other features used for conversation management, as well as online communication tools built for day-to-day customer service tasks.

Let’s take a closer look at these various conversational e-commerce tools and what they can help us achieve when managing your web shop.

Live Chat

Genuinely connect with your visitors and turn them into loyal customers. The live chat is the core conversational commerce tool, it is where the magic happens. Providing a direct visitor engagement tool along with data insights and metrics, the live chat is your portal to the visitor’s world–it is where you are able to find out who they are and what they need, and service their requests all while increasing sales.

They say that the key to good business is creating win-win situations. The live chat does exactly that–it provides desirable and rapid customer care all while helping a business improve conversion rates and overall sales.

Specifically, the live chat offers the following key business attributes:

1. Unify multichannel chats on one dashboard
2. Offer flexible and easy-to-use customer communication
3. Dive into key visitor details, insights, lists, and history
4. Integrate team customer care efforts
5. Automate repeat tasks while improving online sales

In essence, the live chat is way more than a vast communication highway with your visitors, it is also a customer service hub that delivers a great variety of powerful communication management tools, all on one platform.

Chatbot

There is no doubt that the live chat is truly an effective customer engagement tool, a real money-maker–but, throw in Smarty, Smartsupp’s superstar chatbot, and you will have a well-oiled customer service, marketing, and sales machine that will keep online business on the up-and-up. Conversational commerce chatbots provide rapid customer service, market products by rendering lists of options, and give your human agents a breather so that they can focus on the tasks that have the most business impact.

Here are some of the core awesome chatbot capabilities you should know about:

1. Automate your sales and customer service processes
2. Let your chatbot help you obtain quality leads by acting as a first-filter greeting to visitors
3. Boost online sales with less effort
4. Guide visitors and improve conversion rates
5. Save time and resources

In the conversational commerce world, chatbots are the extra superstar agent you can’t be without–they help save massive amounts of time and resources, all while helping you do marketing and boost sales. If you’ve never set up a chatbot before, have no fear, Smartsupp offers chatbot templates that will help you get started on the right path.

Video Recordings

A business game-changer that is not offered by any other vendor other than Smartsupp, the video recordings feature helps you detect spots on your website that may be impeding sales, or creating confusion for visitors. Most importantly, session recordings literally let you see what your visitors are doing on your website, so that you can understand how to best improve sales opportunities anywhere on your page, and also provide well-informed service to customers.

Video recordings provide the following advantages to online businesses:

1. See every step of the buyer journey
2. Detect potential website issues and improve UX
3. Get videos paired with their respective chat
4. Get to the video recording parts that matter, with ease
5. Stay organized and informed

The video recordings feature is a messaging apps dream asset, giving that extra line of sight into visitor buying behavior, and website layout and performance. The most reliable information you can obtain can be seen with your own eyes, and detecting the blind spots of your online shop can help improve business significantly.

Of course there are many other cool gadgets and features we can dive into, but the above breakdown should help paint the big picture about online communication tools like Smartsupp. But, in order to really see the power of conversational e-commerce solutions, we can also take a look at how other companies have put Smartsupp to use and the results they acquired from it.

Smarstupp Case Studies: Breno and Dokonala Kava by the Numbers

As the saying goes, “the proof is in the pudding.” In this case, the proof is in the numbers. Breno, one of the largest furniture wholesale operations in Central Europe, and booming Brno coffee business Dokonala Kava, have demonstrated what can be achieved using a conversational commerce product like Smartsupp.

Breno

One of the largest wholesale operations in Central Europe and a major player in the carpet and PVC products industry, Breno were looking to further increase their already stellar sales results through improved communication with their website visitors.

With Smartsupp, the carpet and and PVC products powerhouse achieved the following key figures:

• +169% conversion rate
• 30% higher order value
• 98% satisfaction rating for their live chat support
• Average response time of 6 seconds
• 3.1% of visitors used the live chat, which delivered a notable 10.8% of the total revenue
• 50% decrease in repetitive questions by using chatbot
• Average order value increased by +30%
• Every 5th conversation now ends with a sale
• 800 monthly conversations managed

Dokonala Kava

Establishing a business in the very saturated coffee market is no easy task, but with the help of Smartsupp, Dokonala Kava achieved this with their online store and now also a physical brick-and-mortar store in Czech Republic’s second largest city, Brno. In order to achieve this, Dokonala Kava knew that they needed to be in close contact with their website visitors.

With Smartsupp, this now well-established coffee distributor achieved the following key figures:

• +379% conversion rate
• 150 monthly chatbot interactions
• 120 monthly conversations
• 95% satisfaction rating for their live chat support
• 39 seconds first response time
• 2% of visitors who received support on live chat made up 15% of their revenue
• Average order value increased by 127% per visitor via chat
• Every tenth conversation resulted in a conversion
• 0.5% of visitors who interacted with the chatbot comprised 5% of the total revenue made

As can be seen in these two case study examples, Smartsupp helped an already established major player like Breno boost their online sales, and aided a budding local business like Dokonala Kava to take off and have major success in their market on a national level. From the data and evidence presented above, it can be deduced that a reliable conversational commerce platform can absolutely bring excellent results to businesses of any size and sector when put to correct use.

Key Takeaways

Conversational commerce solutions are cutting-edge technology empowering companies to improve sales and conversion rates through improved customer communication. This revolutionary technology is showing a promising trend that will secure its use by the majority of online shop customers in the future, worldwide.

Conversational e-commerce products like Smartsupp offer an affordable way to connect with customers via live chat to help drive online sales significantly, as was seen in the cases of Breno and Dokonala Kava. With the above factual evidence and numbers in mind, it would be fair to say that conversational e-commerce is the new and standard communication tool used to connect online businesses and consumers.

Reach out to one of our sales representatives at sales@smartsupp.com to find out more about how Smartsupp can help you be the next e-commerce success story.