To Conversational Commerce This Ebook Will Set You up for Conversational Commerce Success

to Conversational Commerce This ebook will set you up for conversational commerce success. You’ll learn why it’s the new competitive frontier for smart brands and you’ll get concrete guidance on how to build out your customer experience strategy to take advantage of it. PART 1 Conversational Commerce Human speech can be considered a kind of coding Miller knew back then that the technology was language, think of English, Mandarin, or Swahili. possible, but it wasn’t until the graphic processors Until recently, computer programs spoke a different grew, thanks in part to the gaming industry, that language -- HTML, C++, JavaScript, etc. With the rise they were able to make those possibilities real. of speech recognition and other advances, the ways in which humans and machines speak are starting to The personalization they wanted for customers and merge, meaning that you, as an ecommerce leader, the scalability they hoped for businesses has now can leverage the benefits of conversation with the become a reality. AI technologies can now recog- cost savings of scaling with technology. nize and understand language, and, because of vast cheap storage, the programs can look at huge data ‘Conversational commerce’ has become a term for sets to parse meaning. business being done using natural language, linked with technology to provide personalized help, Platforms will continue to evolve and change, but context-aware recommendations, and concierge-like the core concept, as stated by Dan Miller, remains assistance for everything from shopping to traveling the same, “The whole point of ‘Conversational Com- to scheduling. It’s ChatBots that help us complete merce’ is to put customers in command of the de- transactions within Facebook Messenger. It’s Alexa vices they use and in charge of the relationships they giving us an update on when that pair of boots we have with their selected vendors. It starts with strong ordered will ship. It’s meeting and engaging with assertion of identity and authenticity and moves from customers on the platforms they use and love. there.” And it’s where brands need to be. Dan Miller, Lead Analyst and Founder of Opus Conversational Commerce Research, Inc., coined the term “conversational commerce” in 2013, but he and his team had started Is The Future And The Present looking at technologies that supported phone-based Chris Messina, who helped to popularize the term commerce all the way back in 1985. “We were and is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber, de- looking at how some combination of phones and clared “2016 will be the year of conversational com- computers were going to be able to answer our merce.” What he predicted back in early 2015 has questions,” he said. now become a reality -- leading brands are already capitalizing on these channels and leaving their competi- tors behind. What does that mean for your brand? When you master conversational commerce, you’ll deliver experiences that make your customers feel as if you hired a personal assistant to help each of them. Conversational commerce “Not only do companies today need to exceed customer is the new battleground for expectations, but they need to make it easy for the customer to do business with the company,” writes brands that want to excel at Forbes’ Blake Morgan. “Want a powerful customer ex- delivering industry-leading perience? Simply ask yourself how easy you can make life for your customers.” customer experiences. Recognizing The Conversational Within this ebook, we’ll show Commerce Around You you why you can’t ignore it If you think conversational commerce is still a pinpoint and we’ll walk you through on the retail horizon and that you and your organization the building blocks of a will have plenty of time to prepare for it, you’re wrong. Enabling AI technology is already all around us, helping customer engagement strat- to make our daily lives and our interaction with egy focused on leveraging brands easier. conversational commerce to Let’s say a potential partner emails you for a meeting next week. You respond and CC Clara, who takes it its biggest advantage. from there, setting up your meeting over a few emails with your partner, putting it on both your calendars, and even reminding you. You might not even have to tell your contact that Clara isn’t a person, but a bot. And she’s not the only one scheduling meetings - this kind of technology is now commonly available and we may see bots working with other bots to book our calendars sooner than we expect. Your 10-year anniversary is coming up, so you want to plan a quick getaway to celebrate. You text Taylor, and Terms To Know she recommends locations based on your budget and hotels based on reviews. She even offers to book your App fatigue: The decline of app popularity, especially flight for you. You thank her, feeling a bit silly, brand apps, caused by a backlash against too many because Taylor is also a bot. notifications, the saturated app market, and the need for updates from both developers and customers. For- On the way out the door, you realize you’re out of pens. rester Research reports that people spend over 80% You call over your shoulder, “Ok Google, order me some of their time on their phone is their 5 favourite apps pens.” Your Google Home’s Assistant will do just that which tend to be social, messaging and media apps. from one of over 50 Google Express retailers. “Got it, Artificial Intelligence (AI): An umbrella term for any ordering pens from Walgreens,” Assistant replies. And ability of computers to perform tasks that otherwise without looking at a screen or touching anything, you’ve require human mental capacity, for example speech recognition, visual perception, language translation, restocked your home office. and decision-making. Clara, Taylor, Alexa (and Google Assistant and Cortana) Automatic Speech Recognition. (ASR): Computer sound (mostly) like members of the next big girl group transcription of spoken language in real time. but, as Will Oremus writes in Slate, they and their ilk are Bot: Any software application that runs automated actually harbingers of our new digital reality: tasks, called scripts, over the internet. Chatbot: A software application that simulates a “Like card catalogs and AOL-style portals before it, Web conversation with a human. search will begin to fade from prominence, and with it ServiceBot: A brand-developed software application the dominance of browsers and search engines. Mobile that lives within a messaging or voice-activated chan- apps as we know them— nel and can provide product order status updates and icons on a home screen that support customers in making returns and exchanges, you tap to open—will start among other tasks. to do the same. In their place Conversational User Interface (CUI): An intelligent will rise an array of virtual interface that allows for input either through voice or assistants, bots, and soft- text commands in a style similar to the way humans ware agents that act more communicate and provides contextual responses in the and more like people: not same manner. only answering our queries, Machine learning: The ability of computer programs but acting as our proxies, and software to acquire new data and change behavior accomplishing tasks for us, without additional reprogramming. and asking questions of us in Natural Language Processing: The interactions return,” he writes. between computers and human languages. Evolution Of Ecommerce: From Clicks To Chats Buying and selling online began in earnest in the ‘90s. In 1995, the year Amazon and eBay both started, the internet existed as 120,000 registered domain names. Over the next three years it grew to more than two million. Now, more than a billion websites are online. Ecommerce has also expanded by leaps and bounds. In 2006, ecommerce accounted for approximately 3% of total US retail sales. So far this year, it’s approach- ing 10% and represents an almost 15% year-over-year increase compared to 2016. While online shopping has become a bigger slice of the retail pie, the framework of ecommerce has largely remained the same for most of its history. The ways in which retailers served their customers, stayed in touch, and encouraged repeated sales primarily leaned on established promotional channels like email and advertising. Even innovations such as mobile push notifications focused on aggressively “encouraging” a customer to pay attention to your brand vs. offering an elegant and seamless oppor- tunity for the customer to engage with you on their terms. But in an era in of Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Slack and Uber, the old ways no longer work for us- ers who have become accustomed to being able to communicate with each other and the world at large in real-time, across devices, whenever and wherever Customer Experience As The they want. As customer behavior evolves, so do their expectations around B2C communications. Today’s New Competitive Battleground retail shopper interacts with brands that use the platforms she relies on as fluidly as she does. Whether New digital technology has helped to push customer she thinks about it in such terms, she wants truly experience to center stage as a key differentiator be- conversational commerce and despite the difficulties tween leading and lagging brands. A great customer in creating a seamless interaction, it’s up to you to experience builds loyalty, while a poor one increas- deliver it. ingly means you’ve lost that shopper’s business forev- er. While in 2006, 68% of customers with a bad expe- “You can no longer segment yourself to service prac- rience left a company for good, by 2016, that number tices that only you are comfortable with,” says Amir had topped 80%.

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