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Conversational Commerce: It’s time to chat

Conversational commerce presents a massive opportunity for the future of marketing and sales. Learn all about it and how you can get started.

The ways consumers shop online and interact with businesses are changing. With the use of smartphones transforming our world, online users want instant answers, and companies need to streamline their operations to tackle the challenge. It stands to reason why there’s been so much talk around conversational commerce.

What is conversational commerce?

In 2016, Chris Messina described the term in an article as follows:

“Conversational commerce (as I see it) largely pertains to utilising chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context.”

In principle, Conversational Commerce consists in the notion of facilitating sales with conversations. The concept has existed for as long as humans buy and sell, because trading has forever involved discussion; whether it’s meeting with salesmen to discuss products, phoning companies to check stock or asking questions in person to an assistant in a shop.

For the world of ecommerce, communication has been a little different. Emails dominating the digital dialogue for years has meant that the conversation hasn’t always been real-time, but this is now quickly shifting.

With the rise of AI and instant messaging tools, real-time conversation has progressively become a core part of the online shopping experience — and live chat is assuming the protagonist role.

Live chat is the epitome of conversational commerce online. Asking questions is innately human, hence, when given the chance, online consumers jump at the opportunity to engage in chat and ask for help before completing a purchase.

The benefit for businesses is clear; engaging with visitors online is equivalent to assisting potential customers coming into your shop for help — a superb resource for closing a sale.

Live chat has the ability to shorten the sales funnel to a single conversation. Without the need for emails going back and forth, Internet searches for information, forms being submitted online, or other broken means of communication — a visitor who engages in conversation via live chat can immediately be assisted, qualified as a lead and turned into a customer.

When it comes to closing sales, time is of the essence — and with the power of real-time conversations, you can close deals in minutes. That’s the great opportunity.

Live chat is allowing businesses to capitalise on instant messaging and increase sales, whilst enhancing support online and boosting customer engagement.

Getting on top of the game

Conversational commerce is here for the long haul, re-shaping customer interaction for the future. If you’re not giving your visitors and customers to chat with you online, you’re missing out on a big opportunity.

Getting started with live chat is easy and it doesn’t have to cost you much. In fact, in many cases you can get started for free.

Original post on getibby.com.

Keen to try live chat on your website? Check out Ibby where you can sign up for a free trial to start delighting customers with the power of conversations.

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Conversational Commerce: It’s time to chat was originally published in Marketing And Growth Hacking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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