Most Americans are unsure of how consciously companies behave while using and protecting personal info. Nearly 81% of them report being insecure about potential risks of data collection, and 66% claim to feel the same about government data collection.
It`s really difficult to weigh the level of potential risks and understand the anticipated harm that irresponsible behavior with personal data can cause. How can this affect our further actions, what restrictions and changes will it bring?
Let`s analyze the main points of what happens when disclosing personal data and how to properly protect yourself using the example of the recent situation in South Korea.
Korean company ScatterLab launched a “scientific and data-driven” app, which was supposed to predict the degree of attachment in relationships.
It relies on KakaoTalk, the most popular messenger app in South Korea that is used by about 90 percent of the population.
So, the analysis of your romantic feelings (or their absence) costs just around $4.50 per conversation processing. “Science of Love” worked like this: it studied the conversation and based on certain factors (such as average response time, how often the companion writes to you first, the fact of some trigger phrases, and emotions usage) gave a conclusion on whether there is a romantic connection between the interlocutors of the dialogue.
You can say “Come on! Does anyone know that better than your inner sensation? How an app can be aware of what is going on in a person`s head or heart while they are texting you?” Well, there is some common sense here. But the fact is that by June 2020 Science of Love had received about 2.5 million downloads in South Korea and 5 million in Japan, and was preparing to expand its business to the United States.
So, let`s reveal why does it become so popular among Korean guys and girls? “Because I felt like the app understood me, I felt safe and sympathized. It felt good because it felt like having a love doctor by my side,” one of the users tells in the review.
In December 2020, the company introduced an A.I. chatbot Lee-Luda.
As a well-trained AI consultant, the bot was positioned, taught on more than 10 billion conversation logs from the app. “20-year-old female” Lee-Luda is ready to set a true friendship with everybody. As the company`s CEO mentioned, CEO the purpose of Lee-Luda was to become “an A.I. chatbot that people prefer as a conversation partner over a person.”
Just after a couple of weeks of the bot launch users could not help but pay attention to the harsh treatment and statements from the bot towards certain social groups and minorities (LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, feminists, etc.).
The developer company, ScatterLab, explained this phenomenon by the fact that the bot took information from the basic dataset for training, not from personal user discussions. Thus, it is clear that the company did not properly filter out the set of phrases and profanity before starting the bot training.
The developers just “failed to remove some personal information depending on the context,” (Well, it is what it is).
Lee-Luda could not have learned how to include such personal information in its responses unless they existed in the training dataset. But there some “good news” as well: it is possible to recover the training dataset from the AI chatbot. So, if personal information existed in the training dataset, it can be extracted by querying the chatbot.
Still going not so bad, huh? To make things worse, ScatterLab had uploaded a training set of 1,700 sentences, which was a part of the larger dataset is collected, on Github. It exposed names of more than 20 people, along with the locations they have been to, their relationship status, and some of their medical information.
ScatterLab issued statements of clarification of the incident intended to soothe the public’s concerns, but they ended up infuriating people even more. The company statements indicated that “Lee-Luda is a childlike A.I. that just started conversing with people,” that it “has a lot to learn,” and “will learn what is a better answer and a more appropriate answer through trial and error.” However, is it ethical to violate individuals’ privacy and safety for a chatbot’s “trial and error” learning process? No.
Despite the fact that this situation has become a high-profile event in Korea, it has not received attention on a global scale (and we think quite unfairly). It’s not about the negligence and dishonesty of the creators, this incident reflects the general trend in the development of the AI industry. Users of software based on technology have little control over the collection and use of personal data. Situations like this should make you think about more careful and conscientious data management.
The pace of technology development is significantly ahead of the adoption of regulatory standards for their use. It is hard to foresee where the technology will lead us in a couple of years.
So, the global question is “Are AI and tech companies able to independently control the ethical component of the used and developed innovations?”. Is it worth going back to the concept of “corporate social responsibility”? And where is this golden mean (Innovation VS Humanity)?
It is said that the language keeps changing every 100 miles you travel, irrespective of your demographics or direction. But, when it comes to expanding your business globally, you need to be capable of communicating in multiple languages no matter what your geographical location is. Businesses are now able to see the benefits of being multilingual while communicating with global customers as they expand their territories for revenue growth.
Since multilingual capabilities are not possessed by every human agent communicating with customers, business strategists are now targeting to deploy AI-powered intelligent chatbots into their support system. These multilingual chatbots are capable of supporting vernacular languages that help businesses to expand their global customer base to the regions where English is not a primary language.
According to a survey by Oracle, when asked which emerging technologies they are already using, 80% of respondents said they have already used or are planning to use AI-powered intelligent chatbots by 2021.
The survey showed that business leaders are preferring to dote on AI automation technologies, which includes chatbots, for sales, marketing, and customer service. 42% of the participants believe that AI-powered automation technologies in these areas will augment the CX curve for their businesses. Also, 48% said that they are already using chatbots for their business functions, with 40% planning to implement some form of cognitive AI-powered technology by 2021.
Although complete automation of the customer service workforce is not feasible, automating customer management and sales positions using AI chatbots in the US would result in considerable savings. According to Public Tableau, 29% of customer service positions in the US could be automated through chatbots and other cognitive AI-powered IVAs that estimates upto $23 billion in savings from annual salaries.
While AI-chatbots will become omnipresent in the next few years, multilingual capabilities will further help businesses to drive growth.
What is a Multilingual Chatbot?
A Multilingual Chatbot is an AI-powered intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) that allows businesses to communicate with users speaking various local and regional languages other than English. Conventional chatbot technology has a limitation of conducting a conversation only in one specific language. Multilingual Chatbots are interactive software platforms that reside in apps, live chat, email, or SMS, and can communicate with customers in the languages they are most comfortable with.
For example, if your business is in the US and you are planning to open a market in Asia, your website might have a chatbot that communicates in English, but not everyone in Asia speaks English. While it is helpful for US customers, the chatbot’s inability to communicate in other languages will hinder companies’ growth in Asia. All this results in the multiplication of efforts, time, and costs.
Multilingual chatbots are capable of communicating in multiple languages — not just translating the dialects. Gone are the days where multilingual meant “Translate and Understand”.
Building multilingual chatbots requires more than just processing text or dialogue in English through a language translator. To effectively communicate in multiple languages, a chatbot must be aware of the end-users’ culture and able to understand regional nuances. This can be done using AI NLU models.
Natural language understanding (NLU) is a branch of artificial intelligence that uses these intelligent chatbots to understand input made in the form of text or speech, and respond in the same manner and context.
In NLU, machine learning models improve over time as they learn to recognize syntax, context, language patterns, unique definitions, sentiment, and intent. Business applications often rely on NLU to understand what people are saying in both spoken and written language. It helps them provide a personalized response to their customers that improves the end-user experience.
With consistent development in Artificial Intelligence technology and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models, building a multilingual chatbot is no longer a big deal. However, staying on top of the emerging AI technologies is the real need of the hour for business leaders who see it as a topmost priority.
Why is it needed?
While translator services are rapidly improving their capabilities to detect and translate, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) services are much ahead of the curve in language processing. The growing demand for language and locale understanding capabilities in chatbots is driving the continuous evolution of these services.
Business studies suggest that most customers, in spite of being multilingual, prefer to interact with your brand in their native language. In order to localize a brand, one must ensure that customers can interact in a language they are most comfortable with. Multilingual chatbots are thereby the most efficient and cost-effective answer to meet this demand. Here are a few reasons why a multilingual chatbot becomes a priority for global businesses:
Benefits of a Multilingual Chatbot
Multilingual chatbots help businesses stay ahead of the curve in terms of customer service experience. Contact centres leveraging multilingual chatbots help and troubleshoot problems for customers in a language that they are most comfortable with. A multilingual chatbot can seamlessly switch between languages, hence enhancing and personalizing the customer service experience.
Here are the key benefits of using multilingual chatbots:
Save Costs — Considering the difficulty in recruiting resources of varied language proficiency, businesses end up saving a lot of money by deploying multilingual chatbots. Companies still spend a huge amount of money on hiring multilingual staff to connect with the local customer base, which is not an efficient approach. Hiring and training resources incur more expenses to the business. Therefore, implementing a cost-efficient solution becomes the primary priority for decision-makers. Multilingual Chatbots make it possible for them.
Improve CSAT: Offering multilingual support doesn’t just drive CSAT scores, it can even impact churn. According to a recent research, 29% of businesses say they’ve lost customers because they don’t offer multilingual support. Additionally, 70% of end-users say they feel more loyal to businesses that provide support in their native language. A multilingual AI chatbot interacts with your customers of different local languages without any error. Multilingual chatbots are trained to answer repetitive queries in any language without skipping any important information. It’s going to stay 24/7 available and provide customers with the best possible experience.
Convert Leads Globally: With 57% of global companies already adopting Conversational AI technology, the percentage is way lower when it comes to adopting multilingual AI chatbots. So, there is a strong possibility that your competitors have still not adopted a multilingual chatbot. If so, deploying an AI-powered multilingual AI chatbot can easily be your deal-breaker. If you’re planning to go global and you have already deployed a multilingual AI chatbot that can communicate in 40+ languages, half of the lead-generation battle is already won.
Develop Local Customer Base: An AI-powered intelligent chatbot that converses in the local language can take customer communication to a next level. According to an article by Inside Intercom, 35% of end users would even be willing to switch products to one that offers support in their native language. As a result, most of the businesses are adopting localization strategies to expand their customer base and drive engagements in the local language. Localization means customizing your product/service offerings according to the demands and expectations of the local customers. For businesses willing to invest and adopt a comprehensive multilingual AI chatbot localization strategy, the payoff turns into a success story.
NLP: The Technology Behind Multilingual Chatbots
It is evident that for Conversational AI technology to be truly successful, it should be able to interact with users in the language they are most comfortable with. Most multilingual chatbots are either programmed with a sophisticated NLP engine that helps them identify language, or more commonly, a bot designer platform that redesigns and trains the chatbot to interact in that specific language. Natural Language Processing allows a machine to understand what we say in our natural language. That is, the way we naturally speak, with slang, abbreviations, mispronunciations and so on.
Key Capabilities that NLP provides:
NLP allows chatbots to understand voice input as well as text.
With NLP technology, the chatbot doesn’t need the exact correct syntax to understand customer’s expectations.
On the basis of its programming mechanism, it can auto-detect languages, context, sentiment, and intent.
Chatbots can either process their response through its NLP engine, or by analyzing customer’s browser preferences.
Final Thoughts
Chatbots have gained attention worldwide, and with the help of evolving AI and NLP technology, they are expected to become even more empowered in the coming days. With a number of businesses trying to use AI-powered chatbots in different innovative ways, building multilingual chatbots helps businesses connect with a wider and more diverse audience, in fact globally.
For an AI chatbot to be well-received and widely used, it is important that it can convincingly converse in a language that is most convenient to the customer. And since the business landscape has become largely global, multilingual communication has become a topmost priority. This is because an AI-powered multilingual chatbot solution can give wings to the customer experience transformation initiative and improve overall ROI for your business.
I hope this article helped explain how AI-powered multilingual chatbots stand out in the crowd. Designed by Haptik, these chatbots have been assisting brands to have more efficient and meaningful conversations in the language customers prefer. And it would be fair to say that the next generation of Conversational AI is at your doorstep and it’s time to embrace these impeccable AI-powered chatbot solutions.
So a couple years back (2017) Facebook made this Christian grey chatbot that was literally programmed to get weird (they thought it was sexy) while you messaged him. I remember stumbling across this thread of screenshots from a messenger conversation with said bot. This person had started talking to Christian grey pretending to be her pet lizard! It was so funny I was on the floor cry laughing! I had screenshots on my old phone but have since lost them and I remember her at one point describing the lizards head as a dorito chip! I really want to find this post again. I try to explain it to people but they never understand how funny it truly was. I hope y’all can find it. Thanks for any help!
The conversation is a talk between two people, just like I am talking to you…Yes, YOU!
Management is organizing anything to achieve a goal; just like I have organized this article in sections to help you understand.
When these 2 are put together they simply mean “Organizing talk between people to achieve a goal.”
Now all this is great but how does one achieve conversation management in a business to get results. That’s where AI came into the picture and from there emerged Chatbots.
In this article we will go through the following:
What is a chatbot?
How many types of chatbots are there?
Why do we need chatbots?
Are chatbots the solution to seamless customer service?
What is chatbot architecture?
How to build a chatbot?
Which platform to choose for building chatbots?
Why Quickwork Chat?
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is an array of code built to perform certain actions without the need for human assistance. This is an artificial intelligence software that can chat/talk/type with you just like a human would using Natual Language Processing (NLP) as your mobile assistants like Siri or Google, through an AI-powered speaker as Alexa, as a website chat widget, and much more.
What kinds of chatbots are there?
We primarily deal with 2 types of chatbots in our daily lives:
FAQ Bot: Now do you remember chatting on a website and being presented with a list of options to choose from? Well, the options you see are nothing but frequently asked questions that the bot has been pre-fed with along with the responses. These types of chatbots are very useful to establish trust and authority as a thought leader with your customers. FAQ chatbots are a great way for a business to enhance customer experience while saving time and money on the dedicated resource to cater to these queries plus it is available 24/7.
NLP or Contextual Bot: Now try to remember your conversation with a food delivery chatbot? Did it remember what you had ordered last? Did it ask you to just repeat your order instead of asking you to again choose from the menu? These are NLP Bots, which utilizes Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to learn and grow with every conversation. These capabilities allow them to provide customers with a more natural and personalized experience. It’s just like talking to a human agent.
Are chatbots the solution to seamless customer service?
Now contrary to popular belief chatbots/chat robots are not our enemies or going to eat up our jobs. Chatbots are not only proving to be the way to provide enhanced customer support but also cost-effective and enabling brands to build trust, retain and engage customers.
Everyone has a voice and the power to share their opinion everywhere online. Social media is now a powerful way for brands to communicate with customers. Even from pre-sales to post-sales, your customers can have a million questions on their minds, with little patience to get them resolved.
In today’s complex, high-tech world, customers expect reliable, responsive customer service. In fact, according to a report by Valero, we can’t afford to wait more than a minute to get answers to our questions. Automation can help you improve your customer interactions and provide customers with an immediate solution.
Automated chatbots: The solution to seamless customer service
Operational efficiency: Chatbots help in streamlining the customer service cycle and respond to customer queries in real-time. Thus reducing the call volumes and improves the TAT of customer queries.
Customer experience: ‘Customer is the king’- this phrase stands true to its last letter in today’s world where everything is customer-centric. And let’s be honest even when we are on the other side of things we hate waiting for a response and want our queries resolved immediately and if they aren’t catered to as per our schedule or as promised we either lash out on them or share negative reviews on social media.
Scale-up operations: Now imagine a turnout of even 20 customers at the same time and you have a customer support team of 5. What is this going to do? The 15 waiting in line for something super urgent are definitely not going to be happy and some of them might have a very simple query that only requires 30 seconds but since there are only 5 of you and 20 of them, they will have to wait for their turn. Now imagine having a chatbot catering to 60–70% of these queries and only the rest very critical ones being passed over to the customer support agent. This not only increases productivity but also the quality of interactions.
Chatbot architecture:
Chatbot architecture is what brings the chatbot to life. The usability and context of business operations is the deciding factor of how much architecture of the chatbot would change.
Key components of a conversational chatbot architecture:
Environment
Question and Answer System
Plugins/Components
Node Server / Traffic Server
Front-end Systems
Now you might say all of this is great but how to build a chatbot? How do I know which platform to use? Isn’t it expensive and when I do will not have to spend a lot of my time and effort on managing the conversations?
Let’s start with the platform:
On a real-time iPaaS like Quickwork Journey Builder, you can build a workflow and connect your messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Quickwork Chat, etc. to create any type of chatbot within no time.
Here’s a demo on how to build a chatbot from scratch on WhatsApp:
Now you must be thinking, I have built these automated chatbots how do I manage these conversations that are going to come my way, how do I assign these conversations to my human agents after I deploy these automated chatbots?
Enters, Quickwork Chat:
Quickwork Chat is a messaging platform that creates awesome and best-suited virtual assistants and human-agent services for you. From FAQ bots, social messaging, and quick reply bots to context enabled chatbots, Quickwork Chat is the most reliable and efficient to serve the assistant service for your customers seamlessly.
The chatbots — multi-lingual in nature — create a live user experience and help answer queries using AI in real-time.
Quickwork Chat features:
Introduction to Quickwork Chat GUI:
Combine Quickwork Journey Builder with Quickwork Chat and you get a combination of automated chatbots and a conversation manager for effective customer service.
On Quickwork Journey Builder you can build automated chatbots on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, etc., and then connect them with Quickwork Chat to bring in that human support that your customers need.
The Multichannel feature allows admins and agents to communicate with customers available on any of the above-mentioned messaging platforms and enables them to view all the conversations in real-time on a single dashboard.
On Quickwork chat you can also build a live chat website widget and manage its conversations, Here’s a quick 2-minute tutorial on how to build a chatbot for a website:
You might be more concerned about getting started than about its functioning. You don’t need to worry because Quickwork provides customized solutions for companies that want to use chatbots as an automated customer service tool. With our team of experts, we can integrate your chatbot into a web portal or an app, and program it with natural language processing and natural language understanding capabilities.
Once live, the chatbots look and act as an integral part of your online business. In addition to the great visual appeal and features that Quickwork Chat offers, it provides a lot of value.
You can upload images, files, videos, audio, locations, and more. You can also share messages to provide customers instant answers to their questions through Quickwork Chats’ messaging system. With an easy-to-use conversational interface and a bot-to-human agent hand-off feature, Quickwork Chat makes it easy for businesses to engage customers when they need it most.
Conclusion:
Chatbots are the most modern way of communicating with customers. Using any kind of chat app, you can reach thousands of customers by speaking to them directly. How many times have you been checking the comments left on your Facebook page or Instagram? If you find yourself scrolling through pages of hateful remarks, there’s a really easy way to combat them. Chatbots will even monitor your online reputation and help you to keep track of the comments you’re receiving.
Keeping track of customer queries and building a reliable, seamless method for resolution is key to innovation in the field of customer service.
An integrated customer service platform provides helpful information and a smooth path for customers to explore your offerings. An intelligent customer experience can turn your customers into advocates of your products and services.
If you want to know more about chatbots and how they can help your organization don’t think much just…
A chatbot is an AI conversational program that you can use to chat with your customers/visitors on your behalf with pre-programmed responses. The conversation happens on Facebook-based platforms like Messenger. It aims at helping users with the necessary support in seconds.
While we have understood what these chatbots are. Now we also need to know how companies are using chatbots on Facebook to improve their social strategy.
How To Use Facebook Messenger Chatbots?
Using a facebook chatbot to assist marketing
With the availability of chatbots on Facebook, one can use such chatbots to generate leads via advertising. The basic idea of these chatbots is to automate the interactions and assist the target users with the requisite information. Before the availability of such chatbots, we often failed to respond to our prospects in real-time and engage them. Now this challenge seems to be solved.
Improve your customers journey
Today’s Facebook chatbots have the capabilities to assist the shopping journeys. With several functionalities in areas of security, rich media messaging, and FAQ-based automation, assisted service has become a reality. This can become the ultimate reason to use chatbots for every shop owner. This can make the social buying journey a lot easier and meaningful too.
Improving your brand awareness
One can start initiating an active conversation the moment visits your profile page. Before these messenger chatbots, it was always a passive method of communication. We always had users who often looked for something and closed the tab quickly if they didn’t find it at once. Now expect to have a fruitful discussion with all your relevant visitors, and you can initiate the conversation too.
While you have understood the usage of your chatbot, it is essential to know what to keep in mind while writing chatbot messages. This is one of the most critical steps in building a Facebook chatbot.
Facebook Messenger Chatbot Best Practices
The objective of every customer support team is to have a list of super-effective messages. Here are some of the best tips we have got from some of the best customer support professionals.
Don’t overdo it with the text
The bot should never have more than messages without taking input from the user. It is good to respond even with humor sometimes but has to be a two-way communication at all times. So make sure you have a conversation with the visitor and not an email like a conversation.
Use emojis as required
Try to have less formal communication with your visitor as they are on a social platform like Facebook with you. Adding emojis can make their experience better and a lot friendlier. It will make the conversation shorter and with fewer words too.
Use breaks between messages
Avoid using large blocks of text or swamping users with too many messages right on their visit or raising a query. It is crucial to have a human-like conversation at all points in time. In case you find it’s getting complicated, always have the option for the users to switch to human-bot handoff.
Include smart messages
As mentioned above, having a more authentic conversation is supercritical. So with rich messaging, buttons, images, GIFs, and videos, you can add humor to your bot and engage your audience for a longer time.
Always have an option for a user to exit or human handoff
It may happen that your user is not ready to speak to the bot for long. Instead of forcing her, you can always call for real human interaction. The easiest way to do so will be to have the same in the quick menu.
Sign up for Kompose, a GUI bot builder based on natural language conversations for Human-Computer interaction. You don’t need any coding skills to master Kompose. It has a simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface. Sign up here.
Go to the Bot integrations section and use the “Create a Bot” option to start creating one.
Name your bot, set its language (as Kompose supports most used languages), and click save.
Create your first welcome message and embed Texts, Buttons, Images, or other rich media types.
Create answers for the bot. Define the intent that is possible and mention the phrases that you expect will trigger the communication. With time your bot will learn.
If you don’t want to create your chatbot from scratch, you can use one of the available chatbot templates also.
One can continue to improve the chatbot with time by adding more phrases with time and defined buttons. For a quick understanding, have a look-
Step 2: Integrating facebook with kommunicate
Visit the integration section and click on Facebook
Once you click on Settings, a pop-up will come that requires you to login on to your Facebook fan page.
Login our your Facebook account from the admin account and complete the process.
Once your integration is complete, you will be able to see the success message as mentioned below.
Step 3: Testing your kommunicate bot in facebook
Kommunicate has successfully integrated with Facebook, so you can start sending messages to your Facebook Page. The messages will also be sent to your Kommunicate dashboard, and the integrated chatbot will begin replying to the same.
This how it will look on the Kommunicate Dashboard.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the first major global health crisis we’ve had in over 100 years and saying businesses were unprepared would be an understatement. Almost every single industry has faced major losses and lost months and even years’ of growth — but not all. While industries like tourism and aviation were hit particularly hard, some have thrived due to lockdowns and quarantine measures — eCommerce is one such industry.
According to the eCommerce Trends 2021 SearchNode Survey Report
A major shift in consumer habits and shopping trends in favor of eCommerce was already in progress for years but 2020 was the equivalent of a fast-forward button for eCommerce growth. According to a recent report published by Adobe, eCommerce sales increased by 77% in 2020 and reached sales levels that were expected between 2024–26.
The New Normal: Top 8 eCommerce Trends in 2021
Rapid eCommerce growth will deaccelerate but not by much
One of the main reasons eCommerce growth was accelerated to such an extent was the mandatory lockdowns and quarantines placed all over the world. With brick-and-mortar stores all shuttered, consumers had no choice but to order online — and they did, in quite large numbers. But recovery measures have already begun in 2021 and soon brick-and-mortar stores will start servicing customers again, deaccelerating the rapid growth but not significantly.
Key Takeaway: The convenience of online shopping isn’t going to change and an increasing number of people will continue shopping online, albeit not at the same levels as 2020. This is an important trend for eCommerce businesses for two reasons. First, to avoid overestimating the demand and be left with unsold goods, especially during the holiday seasons. Second, to avoid underestimating the demand and have no stock. Additionally, predictive analysis and demand visibility will play a big role in ensuring that we do not have supply problems like businesses did in 2020. Speaking of which…
2. Investment into supply chain visibility
2020 was full of uncertainty and nowhere was it more apparent than in the supply chain industry. The supply chain industry has been going through a period of relatively stable growth (post-2011), and as a result, most supply chain companies did not invest in the required technologies, predicting demand using methods like the time series model (which look back to predict demand). Unfortunately, in uncertain periods like this, traditional prediction methods (such as time series models) are not accurate.
eCommerce Trend 2: Investment into Supply Chain Visibility
Key Takeaway: A shift towards newer technologies such as predictive analysis and big data analytics is expected to improve visibility. For eCommerce businesses, this means that they too would have to start working towards modernizing inventory and order management systems to improve integration with supply chain partners and in order to cope with market shocks and uncertainty.
Additionally, eCommerce businesses are also highly likely to begin diversifying their supply chain options to avoid supply chain bottlenecks and also mitigate overall volatility in the industry.
The mobile platform has been responsible for the majority of online shopping since 2017 and its market share is expected to expand to an even higher 79%. Additionally, online shopping trends on mobile applications and mobile web browsers are slightly different. For instance, conversion rates on applications outperform that of mobile web browsers by 157% — which is a huge gain. This means that if you don’t already have a mobile application for your services, get one. More than 8 in 10 shoppers prefer using a mobile app over a mobile website. However, 25% of consumers still use mobile web for online shopping so it needs attention as well.
Secondly, businesses need to ensure that their mobile user experience is fast, clean, and reliable. A slow mobile application is a guaranteed way to lose sales. And finally, smartphone applications are a great way of maintaining a constant and direct line of communication with your customers. Furthermore, messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger and even SMS are now a viable sales platform as both support business messaging and sales features that allow customers to browse through products and services and even place orders directly from their messaging app of choice.
Online Shopping Trends on Mobile Applications
Other online shopping trends on the mobile platform include advertisement, loyalty programs, and even customer service using tools such as AI chatbots.
4. The rise of remote working
The global health crisis forced businesses to adopt new practices and evolve their business models in many ways, including shifting from office work to remote work. However, there are numerous benefits of remote working ranging from cost savings to increased morale, which means that this practice is one of the few that will almost certainly outlive the pandemic. This will lead to a new category of demand from consumers that are now working from home — and a new opportunity for eCommerce businesses.
This is going to create numerous new needs that need to be fulfilled, from the quality of life (QoL) remote working products to home improvement products. Additionally, this will also change the timings during which consumers are most active on social media, which is important for your social media campaigns. Furthermore, you may notice an increase in demand for home delivery and even pick-up services, depending on your industry. eCommerce businesses in the food and grocery industries, in particular, will experience this as consumers may not be able to pick up groceries/takeout as often as they used to due to remote working schedules.
5. Catering to new demographics
The increase in eCommerce sales wasn’t driven by frequent online shoppers alone but also by an increase in adoption rates by demographics that traditionally preferred offline shopping. One of the key demographics is Generation X and Boomers (40 and older). Like everyone else, these groups shifted to eCommerce because of quarantines and lockdowns but even after the pandemic passes, a large percentage of this demographic plans on continuing shopping online. In fact, 1/3rd of the consumers aged 65 and over plan on increasing their online spending. This means that eCommerce businesses also need to take into consideration this group.
eCommerce Trend 5: Catering to New Demographics
Following are some of the areas of eCommerce operations that may need attention:
App layout: A far too complicated app layout might be off-putting to the older shoppers. However, workarounds such as a navigation bar, search option, or shopping assistant can be implemented instead of a complete redesign.
Accessibility options: Depending on where you live, accessibility options might already be mandatory but even if they’re not, features such as text-to-speech or speech-to-text can be beneficial for not just senior citizens but to everyone.
Advertisement: Effective advertisement is a great way of connecting to a new demographic and this case isn’t an exception.
They’ll be numerous other things that may require changes such as copywriting (taglines, descriptions, overall messages), graphics, and (preferably 24/7) customer support.
6. Change in purchasing power
In just a single year, almost everyone’s lives have changed significantly, and not all of it has been for the better. As a result, the purchasing power of the vast majority of consumers has reduced. Even in countries with limited job loss, people will limit their expenditure due to economic uncertainty. Does this mean that eCommerce businesses must lower their selling prices? Not exactly.
Instead of slashing prices (and potentially devaluing brand image), businesses need to rethink their customer proposition and ensure that the new message is aligned with the current market trends and preferences. For instance, most of us are now more health-conscious and as a result, it’s a smart business move to emphasize the lifestyle and health benefits of your products/services.
One industry that has been and will continue to be an exception to this trend is the luxury goods industry.
7. Personalization at scale
Personalization is always appreciated, in fact, more than 50% of online shoppers rate a personalized shopping experience as important. But when serving hundreds of thousands of customers, making even small changes becomes difficult. But that’s changing as new technologies personalization at scale not only possible but also financially feasible.
One of the most popular technology in this sphere is conversational AI which brings cutting-edge AI and big data analytics to traditional customer service. The premise is simple: almost every business today is collecting terabytes on terabytes of data on their customers but only some businesses are leveraging that information for loyalty programs and business messaging. the majority of the businesses are unable to fully utilize their data. This is where AI comes in. By training computers, data scientists enable a piece of software to:
engage consumers in personalized conversations
answer complex questions in a surprisingly detailed manner
enroll new customers into loyalty programs and manage existing customers
send personalized reminders and recommendations based on their previous shopping habits
The capabilities of this technology allow companies to innovate and find new ways to engage with millions of customers on a one-to-one basis autonomously.
8. Category-based demand
In addition to a change in consumer spending, there is an ongoing shift in consumer tastes and preferences. The pandemic has brought about various buying habits and a recent survey by Nielsen identified a number of consumer behaviorisms but the following five trends are especially interesting:
Buying health and wellness products
Buying preventive health products such as masks and sanitizers
Stockpiling on pantry items
Buying in bulk
Fewer shopping trips
Category-Based Demand: Buying Trends
These five trends will translate to an increased demand for certain groups/categories of products including health products, grocery products with long shelf-life, and preventive safety gear. Additionally, it also means that eCommerce businesses should focus on aligning business goals with these new consumer behavior trends, for instance, by increasing average cart value, providing faster delivery, and better customer service.
Our eCommerce trends predictions for 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has been ongoing for a year now but things are finally starting to change, albeit slowly. Various global health organizations have approved multiple vaccines and the initial rollout has already begun. This marks the first stage of pandemic recovery and also the first step into “the new normal”. That said, we are unlikely to see any overnight changes but rather shifts in consumer trends and preferences drawn out over the entire year. Our predictions for eCommerce trends in 2021 take this into consideration and revolve around the few dominant themes for this year, including remote working, customer service, autonomous working, and consumer behaviorisms.
If you’d like to know more about how you can improve customer service on your eCommerce website or mobile application for the “new normal”, feel free to reach out to one of our conversational tech experts.
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