How chatbots can help e - commerce traders with Christmas shopping

Who hasn't experienced this: When gifts for several people have to be bought in one fell swoop during the Christmas season, it's easy to run out of gift ideas. That's where an advisor who is there to help would be a great help. In the stressful Advent season, however, many customers don't have as much time and prefer to shop online. And they often do so outside official opening hours, when your customer service team has long since finished work.

However, this does not mean that your customers have to do without personalized advice.

In the following section, you will learn how chatbots can help you to be there for your customers around the clock:

Who do I give what to? A chatbot can help with this problem by asking, like a human employee, about the preferences of the person receiving the gift and suggesting suitable items on this basis.

There are two ways how you can inform your customers about the delivery status of their package:

Either they actively use the chatbot and ask for the delivery status of the desired item. To do so, they tell the chatbot which item they want to know the delivery date for and receive the desired information without having to change the channel.

However, it is also possible to inform the customer about the delivery status via push notification, without the customer having to actively ask each time. This is especially useful in messenger channels such as Whats App. 

Deliveries can always be delayed or an appointment gets in the way of the customer. Therefore, it is a good idea to give customers the opportunity to leave a message for the delivery person right after the delivery, telling them where the package can be left if they are absent or which neighbor will receive it.

It can always happen that the selected gift cannot be delivered before Christmas. At this point, a chatbot can support the customer by suggesting similar items.

Alternatively, based on the previously selected product, he can suggest items from another product category that might match the preferences of the gift recipient.

You don't always meet the taste of your loved ones. In this case, a chatbot can help with the return. First, customers log into their account via the chatbot. 

The chatbot can show them the items they have purchased and ask them to select the item to be returned.

After they have selected the article, the chatbot supports them in the process by providing them with the required return slip directly via download link.

In this way, the return and refunding is made as easy as possible for the customers. 

A chatbot can facilitate the return of incorrect gifts. However, the recipients then initially go empty-handed and the search for a gift begins again for the customers. A chatbot can help here by offering not to refund the money, but to send it to the recipient as a voucher by e-mail. 

Of course, crooked amounts of money like 45,99€ do not look so good on a voucher. Therefore it is a good idea to give the customer the possibility to round up the amount to a desired amount.

To make the voucher even more personal, the customer can be offered to add a personal message to the mail.

All the actions described above can be processed by a bot independently without the help of service staff. By connecting to your store's systems, the chatbot can access all the necessary information in real time and perform the desired actions.

You can implement the bot directly on your store's website or make it available to your customers in messenger channels such as Whatsapp. You don't have to do any extra work: once your bot is developed, it can be easily deployed via a conversational AI platform like BOTfriends X to connect to multiple channels simultaneously.

If you would like to know more about chatbots in e-commerce, download our whitepaper "Conversational Commerce - The next step in e-commerce".