Synergising Conversational Commerce With Consumer Conversation

Conversational commerce makes for one of the top buzzwords today, especially among the marketing fraternity. It not only allows brands to connect with customers better, but also offers valuable data and facilitates seamless buyer experiences through chatbots, voice assistants, and messaging apps.

At the inaugural edition of BW Merit Awards 2024, Rajat Tuli, Vice President- Marketing, VLCC Group, approved the many benefits of conversational commerce. He assured that it is good to leverage it in businesses, especially in the service sector, as it tackles bad customer experiences. Though there do remain several technological hiccups, interaction with customers by bots helps elevate the overall experience, he said.

To this, Ketan Bhatia, Group Brand Director, Good Glamm Group, added, “This concept is not new. We all have our favourite Kirana stores. It’s an old example of conversational commerce. But in the case of the ecommerce market, it is still not mature enough.”

While talking about the medium to converse in commerce, Tuli said that chatbots, both on websites and in WhatsApp conversations, are a hit. For ecommerce, automation of conversational communication is still in the developing process. For him, there are still some challenges to it.

However, despite these challenges, experts were convinced that if the technology is used appropriately, it might reach its true potential. The more objective the bots were, the better the results would be, they expressed.

Bhatia further spoke about the humanised angle of bots: they must have the potential to make consumers feel that they are being listened to. "What is constraining is that bots are unable to create a personal touch. So, technology has to be intelligent enough," he added.

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The experts further highlighted that technology will develop over time, but it’s a brand that will enable it based on needs. With increased consumer interactions, big data on consumer behaviour is already ready. Processing of this data may help find the desirable questions at a consumer's end that might be updated in bots, they commented.

Pointing towards the language barriers that arise in this entire dynamic, experts emphasised the coherence in the language of websites and bots. It can’t be accepted that bots are providing solutions in every language, but the website is running in a particular language.

“We train many employees, but their performance differs from one to another. But in the case of bots, once they are fed with data, they will perform up to the mark every time. We just need to update them and increase the database to make them more people-friendly,” concluded Bhatia on the importance of bots in conversational commerce.

Navneet Singh

BW Reporters The author is a trainee correspondent with BW Businessworld