By Vasudeva Rao Munnaluri
The annual end of year festive season sale is one of the most significant events for e-commerce businesses in India, with massive revenue generated during this period. In 2022 alone, the e-commerce industry’s revenue during the festive season sale stood at $480 million.
During this period, ecommerce businesses are tested on their ability to deliver seamless and conversational online experiences. They face the challenge of managing surging customer queries, ensuring the right mix of support staff are available to handle a myriad of issues across different communication channels.
E-commerce businesses must be ready for these challenges because customer expectations – especially during the annual sale – have increased. They want conversational, AI-driven experiences and expect chatbots to solve their issues quickly in a personalised way. According to Zendesk’s CX Trends Report 2023, Indian customers expect AI to have the ability to communicate in a conversational way (46%) and offer personalised responses to queries (43%). This is particularly evident with generative AI opening up more and more possibilities.
E-commerce companies are uniquely placed to turn these challenges into opportunities for success with the help of generative AI because of its proven ability to help businesses offer conversational experiences at scale.
Quick, accurate conversational experiences
Generative AI is not intended to replace human agents; instead, it serves as a valuable tool in the arsenal of e-commerce businesses, particularly during periods of high demand. The right human-automation strategy with intelligent generative AI-powered CX solutions can ensure that customer queries are addressed quickly and accurately.
For example, businesses can choose to automate responses to common queries depending on the frequency of such requests like delivery status, returns, product exchanges and refunds. Agents can also get detailed summaries of customer queries instantly with all the information on the customer’s interaction history, ensuring they have the necessary context from the start. CX solutions powered by generative AI can also draft perfect replies that reflect the right tone, for the agent to review and hit send.
These solutions are capable of identifying gaps in help centre articles based on the most common queries, and instantaneously draft complete articles for the admin to approve. Doing away with these manual, repetitive tasks is where e-commerce businesses can leverage generative AI, allowing support agents to focus on higher-value tasks. And it’s not just efficiency that generative AI has to offer.
Delivering empathy at scale
Customers want to be seen, heard and understood. And if they don’t feel like they are, they will switch to a competitor. Zendesk research shows that 72% of consumers in APAC say that a bad experience can ruin their day, and two-thirds of Indian customers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience, making it that much more important for companies to understand customer sentiment. Generative AI is a gamechanger in this regard with its ability to analyse customer sentiment and intent. It can identify at-risk customers by conducting customer sentiment analysis to gauge intent and tone. Paired with automated routing and AI-powered workflows, the insights gained can ensure the most experienced support agents handle the tougher interactions, bypassing any self-service or chatbot workflow.
During periods of surging ticket volumes, e-commerce businesses stand to benefit greatly from generative AI-powered chatbots that deliver consistent, conversational and personalised experiences at scale. However, many existing chatbots are often unable to provide accurate, personalised responses and require businesses to program responses that lead customers to a help centre article, which they would still have to search for the answers themselves.
With generative AI, chatbots can be more conversational and human-like, offering empathy at scale. It can generate deeply personalised responses using the organisation’s existing knowledge base. For instance, Zendesk AI is built on the largest CX-specific dataset and continuously learns from every customer interaction, enabling businesses to better assist customers with greater accuracy. Businesses can also set the tone chatbots use depending on whether they want it to sound casual or professional.
Generative AI as a revenue driver
During peak sales periods, it’s very common for customers to not find the product they specifically want either because it’s out of stock or unavailable. In most cases, these customers will switch to a competitor. With generative AI, e-commerce companies have the unique opportunity to upsell and cross sell at scale, ensuring they don’t lose potential revenue generating opportunities. Generative AI has the capacity to hold the customer’s attention by providing real-time recommendations at every step of the buying journey, offering them the level of personalisation they seek.
The technology has the ability to analyse a customer’s shopping history and make accurate recommendations. If the customer were shopping for a particular mobile phone but found that it was out of stock, generative AI has the ability to analyse a customer’s shopping history, quickly arm agents or chatbot with alternatives that have similar specs, features, price range and discounts. Equipped with the right context and information, agents can offer personalised recommendations and even payment options within the chat. The buying journey is completed without ever having to leave the chat, ensuring the customer is happy while the entire journey is effortless.
Generative AI has been making waves across the world and for good reason. The conversational capabilities and easy accessibility of generative AI presents a unique opportunity for e-commerce businesses looking to tackle some of the biggest challenges they face, especially during the festive season. While the benefits of generative AI are clear, it’s important to understand that human beings still remain central to CX. The majority of consumers today want generative AI to improve interactions, not replace agents. In fact, 81% of consumers say having access to a human agent is critical in maintaining their trust with a business when they have trouble with AI customer service.
Businesses intent on harnessing the power of generative AI need to ensure that AI adoption is done right — identifying, testing, and fine-tuning additional intelligent layers to continually improve customer and agent experience. Having a well-thought out human-automation strategy – one that maintains human oversight throughout – will ensure AI is implemented to suit the business’ specific requirements and customer needs.
We are at a tipping point with the latest generative AI technology harnessing the power of large language models to generate such human-like conversations. As AI is increasingly being embedded across the entire customer journey, e-commerce companies have much to gain by shifting from reactive service to proactive while eliminating significant amounts of workload that is manual and repetitive.
The author is the RVP India and SAARC at Zendesk
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
