What Happened
Retailers continue to explore new customer experiences powered by chatbots as two more prominent U.S. retailers launched their respective bot services. Mall of America, the nation’s largest shopping center located just south of Minneapolis, worked with IBM to leverage Watson’s cognitive computing power to develop a chatbot service that can help visitors navigate the sprawling shopping center and suggest routes and activities according to user input on how much time they have and what they are looking for. The chatbot is accessible via MoA’s Facebook Page as well as via a mobile web browser.
Similarly, Nordstrom launched its first chatbot on the Facebook Messenger and Kik on Monday to help holiday shoppers pick out gift items. The bot will start by asking a series of questions about who they are shopping for and then suggests appropriate gifts from Nordstrom’s online store accordingly. Nordstrom says the chatbot will available to consumers up until December 24.
What Brands Should Do
This is the latest example in retailers exploring chatbots’ potential in conversational ecommerce. Earlier this week, Sam’s Club also launched a “gift genie” chatbot that aims to help shoppers select holiday gifts. The rise of conversational commerce points to changing consumer behavior on mobile and a shift in brand-customer interaction. According to a recent research from DigitasLBi and Harris Poll, more than a third of U.S shoppers surveyed said they’d be willing to make a purchase through a chatbot and spend as much as $55.80 on each order. As more brands start to realize the vast potential of chatbots, it is imperative that they find the right partner to work with to develop effective conversational customer experiences.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building branded chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a chatbot experience supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on messaging apps and other conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client and learning opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland (samantha@ipglab.com) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: VentureBeat & Business Insider