#Chatbot #Payments - Conversational Commerce

We spend more time on messaging apps than before. This also has a huge impact on the way we communicate and do business in the future. Chatbots are becoming more prominent in a standard sales process but also in customer service applications. With the increasing importance of chatbots in business applications, payment processes are taking an integral part of this development. We are therefore happy to introduce our way partnership with secondbrain AG to allow an easy integration and best-in-class payment experience for chat bots - almost out of the box.

Learn more about conversational commerce and how easy it is to use these new sales channels in your applications in combination with our powerful payment platform.

What is Conversational Commerce?

Conversational commerce is a term that refers to the trend toward interacting with businesses through messaging and chat apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Talk, and WeChat. These companies use technologies for natural language processing based on artificial intelligence that allows computers to gather information out of the messages and recognize the intent of customers.

Consumers can chat, get customer support, ask questions, get recommendations and finally have the option to purchase their products from within messaging apps.

The use cases for shopping and payments can differ. From a basic sell funnel with recommendation where the sales process works in a conversational mode with a chat bot, to use cases for customer service where the customer has the option to cancel a flight (see the example by KLM), or to sign up for an insurance policy (see the example of IKEA powered by IPTIQ and wallee), or to do claim management where insurance claims are automatically processed.

Chatbots will gain in relevance

Consumers are increasingly relying on messaging apps for all forms of communication, whether personal, business, or commerce. Chat bots become increasingly important. Here is why:

1. 40% of millennials claim to engage with bots on a daily basis (Mobile Marketer).
2. Additionally, a study done by Salesforce shows that 69% of consumers prefer to use chatbots for the speed at which they can communicate with a brand. However, instant messaging has just about reached its tipping point, with the total number of instant messages sent overtaking emails by mid-2016.
3. eCommerce stores adopting Facebook Messenger along with an abandon cart chatbot have started to boost revenue by 7-25% (Chatbots Magazine).
4. Millennials are about twice as likely to use a chatbot that acts as a personal shopper compared to age groups older than them (Facebook).

Furthermore, the trend is clearly going towards instant messaging and applications where the buyer no longer leave the messaging app for to complete the purchase.

Conversational Commerce will change the way we interact

The last decade was the era of mobile commerce and establishing a presence on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook etc. But over the last two years, messaging apps have started to outpace social networks when it comes to where we spend our time.

This will also be true for when it comes to how we shop. In the future we will get used to talking to a chat bot and ask him for Recommendations for a “Running Shoe below 200 CHF”. And you will be presented with intelligent choices based on the information the retailer already has about us. Furthermore, chatbots can also generally help to improve the user experience. See below an example of Pfefferbeere where the customer has the option to easily reserve a table online.

Payment in times of Conversational Commerce

Payments are at the heart of all forms of commerce, whether business-to-consumer, business-to-business or peer-to-peer. As such, it’s also one of the areas of focus in this shift towards conversational commerce.

As mentioned above a lot of people spend more and more time on messaging app. Also in the age of conversational commerce User Experience becomes increasingly important for the shopping channel. This is why together with secondbrain AG we have developed a simple framework that allows you to enhance your WooCommerce Shop with a conversational commerce channel.

What is needed:

1. Secondbrain provides the basic infrastructure, develops the use case together with its customers, designs all (AI-based) chat bot dialogs and handles the integration of the Wallee Payment API.
2. In order to boost user experience it is important that the sales process is seamless and fast. In order to achieve this we enable the implementation of the payment forms directly inside the messaging apps combined with tokenization it is also possible to recognize a customer and allow him to store the payment information for later purchases. By the way: wallee is also integrated with the latest Scheme Tokenization networks that allows the storage and automatic update of outdated credit card information Have a look into our Tokenization Blogpost where we provide additional information).

Try it out

Recently we finished the first project for a small chatbot-webshop of Pfefferbeere AG ( host of the world-famous alpine restaurant "Aescher"). "PEPPER", as the bot is called, allows you to order food or gifts via the chatbot using the Facebook-Messenger channel. PEPPER also automates the social media channel of Pefferbeere AG based on her AI skills.

Besides that we also recommend that you check other conversion optimization tools such as one-click checkout. There are certain payment provider like wallee which work on the latest technology that allow merchants to store the payment details at Visa / Mastercard. This allows them to be informed when the card is exchanged or updated without any work needed from the customer.

What we showed above is a simple showcase based on WooCommerce. As mentioned previously, there are a lot of additional use cases when it comes to customer services. Therefore, we are already working on projects in the insurance industry for claims management etc.

It’s already happening…

Conversational commerce is an exciting shift in the world of tech and business. In a word, conversational commerce is bringing commerce into the familiar and personal context of messaging apps which finally result in a transformation of the customer experience by introducing a high level of convenience.

Questions / Help

Let us know if you are ready for the next era of commerce powered by AI and get in touch with us.