Guest post by Michelle from Heroic Search
Google have got their self-driving car, while Elon Musk is musing on the fact that we could all be living in some sort of augmented reality not dissimilar to The Matrix. This Artificial Intelligence (AI) thing sounds pretty harebrained, doesn’t it?
But as you’ll find out in this article, AI is just like every other new thing – scary at first, but perfectly natural once we get used to it.
And for ecommerce store owners, it’s also pretty frigging awesome. Allowing you to increase conversions and sales, if used correctly.
Why Hasn’t Your Ecommerce Store Adopted AI Yet?
According to Malcolm Gladwell in his mega-successful book The Tipping Point, we as humans prefer to wait until someone else takes the lead before we follow. He uses the example of a person in need of help in the street. We can clearly see that the person needs help, but we often shuffle around the incident sheepishly and continue walking.
Why? We’re waiting for someone else to make the first move.
When it comes to implementing AI in their ecommerce businesses, you could argue that a lot of business owners are of the same mindset. We look around to see what others are doing before we make our own move.
Again, why? One of the reasons could be that AI still sounds so otherworldly and even a tad scary.
However, more and more ecommerce businesses are getting on board with AI, and are using it to improve the customer experience. And Amazon is one giant ecommerce business that is taking the lead.
How Amazon Is Using AI To Improve The Customer Experience
As Forbes so excellently point out, fake reviews damage peoples’ trust in your brand. As customers shopping online, we rely on reviews to help us make a better, more informed decision regarding where to put our money.
Fake reviews are so annoying. Most of us have bought flimsy products in the past on the back of a fake review. Perhaps your customers have, too.
Fake reviews are sometimes easy to spot: They’ve all been posted on the same day, they all give glowing, 5-star references.
But some fake reviews are harder to spot – at least for us humans.
AI – as hard as this can be to admit – is smarter than you or I. It’s able to spot a fake review a mile off.
Amazon, who have been suffering from a wave of fake reviews for a long time now, have at last found a solution to their problem. And it’s come in the form of AI.
Amazon’s AI-machine learning system has been in the works for a few years now. It can’t delete a fake review altogether, but it can ensure that verified customer purchase reviews are moved to the top.
And it will be these higher-placed, accurate reviews that go on to shape the star rating of a particular product.
In other words, the fake reviews will hold less prominence and weight.
Amazon isn’t just relying on AI to eliminate the effect of fake reviews and improve customer trust, though. They’re also using it to help them navigate drones for faster delivery, and eradicate checkout lines.
And then there is Alexa, your very own personal assistant who plays the music you want to hear, gives you the latest news headlines as you eat breakfast, and tells you jokes whenever you’re feeling lonely.
In short, Amazon – who got together with Microsoft and Alphabet to safeguard the future of AI so that it doesn’t get out of hand – is unleashing the potential of AI and showing how it can propel ecommerce stores into the future.
Naturally, you’re not all going to develop your own voice-controlled personal assistants or fly packages to customers with drones. So what else do you need to know about AI and ecommerce? How can your online store use it?
AI is the Future of Conversational Commerce
Another week, another new term. This week, it’s “conversational commerce.”
What is it? Conversational commerce is friendly chat apps that talk to your customers as they shop in your online store. Think of them as being the digital version of the helpful store assistant in real life who asks if you need help.
The difference is that, instead of a human chatting to us, a robot will be keeping us happy instead.
That’s right. AI is the driving force behind this innovative new frontier that will make the customer experience so much more rewarding. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they just ask the chat app.
Shopify is one ecommerce store that is onboard with the emergence of conversational commerce. They’ve already got lots of sweet chat apps that will help your own store to stay on top of the latest trends and keep your customers happy. Platforms that combine their chat apps with awesome responsive themes provide a way of offering online shoppers an excellent UX.
It doesn’t stop there. With the correct ecommerce theme you can have a fully integrated Facebook store along with messenger chat support to further personalize the shopping experience. Your customers will have the opportunity to buy orders directly in the Facebook chat, as well as tracking their order in real time, increasing your sales.
AI Makes It Easier For Customers To Search Your Store
Don’t you hate it when you walk into one of those over-crowded thrift stores and can never find what you want. But have you ever thought that maybe there are customers shopping on your site, who can’t find what they want either?
Just because your store is online, it doesn’t mean that it’s any easier to search. Google has used AI to improve their search algorithms, so that they are now the undisputed search engine kings.
And you can do the same.
As Kissmetrics point out, a lot of us don’t think too much about our search feature. There are other important things to focus on, such as our landing page. But customers getturned offf when they can’t find what they want.
It’s impossible for your team to be there 24/7, helping your customer find what they’re looking for. But AI can help by understanding exactly what a customer wants and needs, and ensuring they find it in your store.
AI Improves Personalization
Lastly, AI can solve the issues you have pertaining to making sure that the customer experience is much more personal.
Although personalization isn’t new in our world, AI is helping it to get even better. Instead of trickles of info and data about individual shoppers and their habits, AI will bag you a wealth of info and deep data that personalizes the shopping experience like never before.
To wrap up, it’s really important that you start using AI sooner rather than later. As forecast by Gartner, 85% percent of all interactions between retailers and customers by 2020 will be carried out by AI. This means that your rivals are all geared up to embrace the revolution. Don’t get left behind!
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