How Chatbots Can Reduce Product Return — An Extensive Guide
A recent survey suggests that almost 30% of all purchases that are made online are returned. For startups and even for stable businesses, this is too much of a percentage.¹
If your business is facing conduct of shopper behavior that indicates a return is likely, a variety of chatbots can effectively and preemptively intervene in this transaction and can prevent a return from happening.
Introduction
There are multiple ways in which chatbots can help you to reduce your product returns, and this article will take a look at some of the significant ways in which chatbots can help businesses. However, it is important to understand here that chatbot efforts must be met with equal efforts from the business operators to ensure that chatbot is able to give its maximum.
· Helping Customers in Choosing the Suitable Products
This works in multiple ways. One of the basic ways, for example, is if a buyer has viewed and checked the size guide listed on your store and has wrongfully added two of the same items in the cart. Here, a chatbot can make its intervention and help the customer to select the products of the right size.
This ensures that not only the customers are being helped to avoid the hassle but also makes sure that the returns on products remain minimal. After all, 70% of the product returns are because of the initial wrong order placed by the customers.
Furthermore, chatbots can help potential buyers in making the right choices for the products. For example, a customer has searched for sportswear from your site for football, but since the search results will show all the sportswear listed on your website, a chatbot can then help the customers by intimating them about the particular product that they are actually looking for.²
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· Guiding Customers about Usage and Installation of the Products
One of the major reasons for product return is when customers are unable to understand how to effectively use or install the product that they have bought. Amazon says that 40% returns of its products related to the niche of electrical accessories are because of the users’ ignorance to effectively use and/or install them.
However, with chatbots, you can easily solve this problem. Almost all the modern chatbots are providing installation guidelines with the help of video tutorials and the written guidebooks. It is a big factor that can significantly reduce the return of your products, especially if you are dealing with products that need installation or the ones that require tutorials to make the most of their usage.
· Making the Return/Exchange Process more Efficient
It has to be probably one of the most underrated functions of chatbots, and it needs to be talked about more. Even the era of human live chat support couldn’t cater to the return and exchange process more efficiently than how chatbots are doing right now.
Nowadays, if a customer wants to exchange a particular product, chatbots will quickly and efficiently solve the query of the customer. This way, your store will get an exchange instead of a return, which would normally have happened without the presence of chatbots. Even the customers that come looking for returns can be effectively guided by the chatbots to rather go an exchange.
Furthermore, when the return is inevitable, chatbots make sure that it happens as soon as possible and with the least of a hassle for the customer. It ensures that not only the product is returned quickly and ready to be sold again, but also that the customer enjoys a positive support experience and considers you for future orders.
Conclusion
Apart from the reasons listed above, there are multiple other ways in which chatbots can help boom your business and reduce your returns. Modern AI-based chatbots are able to track the user data and then use the data for future references and preferences to the particular users.³
You must have experienced it yourself when you left an online cart without processing it, and you received a mail reminding you to finalize and process your order. This is an AI chatbot at its best. With the development of AI, which seems unstoppable, there will be more features added in the chatbots that would surely make them more user-friendly, and that would help customers in catering for their problems regarding orders’ returns and exchanges.
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2. https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/chatbots/
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