The Executive’s Guide Series: How Conversational AI Is Revolutionizing The Ecommerce Experience

There’s no question that the way customers interact with eCommerce is changing. Digital transformation has significantly improved the eCommerce experience by streamlining payment, shopping cart, and AI driven brand interactions in online shopping. In fact, Gartner expects that 70% of all customer interactions will involve emerging conversational AI technologies such as machine learning, chatbots and Digital People by 2022. Additionally, Markets and Markets estimates that by 2025, adoption of conversational AI in the enterprise is expected to grow from USD 4.8 billion in 2020, to USD 13.9 billion by 2025, at a growth rate of 21.9% during the forecasted period. These forecasts signify a shift in customer experience in ecommerce, going from one-dimensional online transactions into a two-way connection between customers and their favorite online stores.

With the rise of Conversational AI, Chief Transformation Officers, Chief Information Officers, and other customer experience (CX) leaders are devoted to understanding which tools can help deliver the most delightful experiences to their customers. But not all conversational AI tools are created equal.

In this blog you’ll learn:

• What is Conversational AI, and how Digital People take it to the next level
• How Digital People can build trust in eCommerce transactions
• Digital People use cases for eCommerce

What is Conversational AI?

At its core, Conversational AI is the technology that powers automated interactions between humans and machines. These conversations could be text-based (as in chatbots), audio-based (as in voice assistants) or multimodal with voice, text, video, and multimedia all in one (as in Digital People). The goal of Conversational AI is to mimic the best types of human interactions — natural, relatable, thoughtful and empathetic — and reflect that experience with machines. We need machines to communicate the way we do seamlessly in order for this relationship to be successful; otherwise, it leads to frustration and miscommunication.

“Similar to how the iPhone upended commerce, Digital People will inspire brands to reimagine their online customer experience. With Autonomous Animation, Soul Machines will be able to capture and magnify the advancements in Conversational AI to create a trusted, collaborative, and highly-personal experience.” — Shantenu Agarwal, VP Soul Machines

To do this successfully, Conversational AI needs to process large volumes of conversation data between humans and machines. We partner with today’s leading NLP providers including Google Dialogflow and IBM Watson to recognize speech and text inputs, translate across various languages, and then share relevant answers to customer questions. Most existing Conversational AI tools stop there.

How Digital People take Conversational AI to the next level

Beyond a one-dimensional interaction with chatbots and voice assistants, our Digital People elevate customer and brand experiences by delivering the goodness of human and machine collaboration in a safe, engaging and powerful way to connect. Our team of researchers have successfully recreated a Digital Brain that replicates the way we handle everyday interactions. Thanks to our Human OS Platform and a proprietary technology we call Autonomous Animation, our Digital People are fully autonomous and authentic in their responses. This is what makes our Digital People experience unique in our industry today — they can see, understand, and relate to you, autonomously in real time.

If you smile at a Digital Person, it triggers a response within their Digital Brain, which allows them to relate to your emotions and smile back.

In eCommerce today, consumers expect a more dynamic relationship with brands. Because buyers cannot physically test or examine what they’re buying, trust is of utmost importance. Digital People are able to create this trust and provide the confidence that buyers seek by providing compelling ways to provide an interactive environment that scales, especially in high-value products that require more research. Beyond the standard functions that a chatbot can provide, including sharing information about promotions, managing orders, and offering customer support for a product via text and chat, Digital People offer a more personal, interactive and deeply dynamic experience. Digital People can fully embody a brand’s personality and tone of voice and interact more fully via video, images, games, and music. Most importantly, Digital People can form emotional connections with customers while providing product expertise, personalized advice, and informed recommendations — all of which reinforce trust in the same way a friend can provide.

Use cases for Digital People in Ecommerce

If you’re still interested in more insights and examples for how Digital People can build trust eCommerce, we share some use cases we’ve seen through our eCommerce customers below:

• Online customer Service

You can use Digital People to answer commonly-asked questions, resolve problems and offer solutions. Digital People can also automate repetitive and manual processes such as order placement, balance inquiries, technical assistance and other customer service requests. This helps businesses achieve higher productivity gains with lower manpower.

• Lead generation and conversion

Digital People can direct customers to the right pages, products or services, or cross-selling and upselling products to customers. Each Digital Person is built with a unique personality to deeply understand your products in order to not only recommend, but also suggest complementary or higher value products and services.

• Customer Research and feedback

Digital People are built to develop emotional connections with customers and prospects, understand their needs, and offer tailored solutions. Our existing clients utilize Digital People to learn the number of times a customer has lost their credit card, how their customers respond to marketing copy, what products to use for dry skin, which products their customers prefer, what finance options are best suited when buying a car — the list goes on. By collecting this data from these conversations, business executives are better able to understand their customers and their challenges. When customers can identify the most common challenges for their customers, business leaders are in a better position to make it easier for them, thus improving the customer experience.

Conclusion
Customers are demanding more personal connections and expect more from brands in order to build trust and customer loyalty. As Conversational AI continues to rise, so does the need for building two-dimensional ways to connect with customers that goes beyond existing text, chat, or voice-based tools.

Our technology builds upon existing cutting-edge technologies to make the eCommerce experience multimodal vs merely one dimensional. With Digital People, today’s leading eCommerce executives can connect with their customers in a powerful new way and transform simple online purchases into engaging and meaningful connections at scale.

Interested in learning more about Digital People? Visit www.soulmachines.com.