Ensure Your Retailer Chatbot is Ready for the Holiday Shopping Season Right Now
The holiday shopping season is an incredibly hectic time. Holiday season sales alone make up nearly a fifth of total retail sales per year, amounting to more than $3 billion annually. With shoppers and retailers alike in a frenzy, the huge increase in sales can also lead to confusion—whether customers have an issue to sort out, are in need of product recommendations or more. Retailers employing a retailer chatbot to make their customers’ lives easier have an advantage this holiday season by providing an easy channel for customers to make a purchase or ask a question. But given the dramatic influx of sales and fierce competition, is your chatbot ready to support shoppers this holiday season? Before it’s too late, you’ll likely want to make some changes to ensure your bot is in-shape for holiday shopping. Click To TweetHere are the retailer chatbot analytics metrics to track and the changes to make this holiday shopping season.
Empower Users to Better Manage Sales
The holidays are a hectic time. Between events planning, gift-buying and daily tasks, shoppers and retailers alike are in an overwhelming frenzy throughout the holiday season. To lighten the workload for your team and providing better customer service during this stressful season, you may want to make amends to your retailer chatbot design to allow for managing sales.
One feature worth implementing specifically for the holidays is to provide reminders of shopping deadlines to customers. For example, you might reach out with push notifications to alert users to an impending deadline for free shipping offers. You can also do it when customers can expect to buy and still get guaranteed Christmas delivery. Users will appreciate remaining aware of how much time they have left to make their purchases. Besides, those who don’t want notifications may opt out of receiving them.
If implementing this, you’ll want to keep a close eye on peak engagement times for you bot. This chatbot analytics metric helps you gauge when to push notifications out that customers will find useful.
Another essential functionality is to allow customers to quickly check an order status through the conversational interface. These functions include:
- Checking on where the shipment is
- Changing shipping options, when available
Again, these are two huge quality-of-life improvements that help customers asses their orders during the hectic holiday season. DSW’s retailer chatbot is an excellent example of this. After customers make a purchase, they can track their orders every step of the way. These post-purchase features increase customer loyalty. Because the holiday season is an excellent time for netting new customers, building customer loyalty that can extend beyond the season can be essential for your business. Also, making your chatbot more usable is an easy way to do that.
Primary analytics you’ll want to check here is conversation steps and retention rate. Are users finding the solutions they want quickly? Are order changes and status checks as streamlined as possible? Keep an eye on these analytics in your reports as the holidays approach to ensure you’re providing the best user experience you can.
Don’t Forget to Deal with Post-Holiday Shopping
Things aren’t over once the holidays are done. Many will want to return unwanted gifts, while others will have received gift cards that they’ll want to redeem quickly. Remember how we mentioned the importance of customer loyalty past the holiday season? This is where you put things to the test with your retailer chatbot.
First, provide an easy and stress-free way for customers to request a return on a post-holiday gift. Some customers find requesting returns to be intimidating or awkward, but your friendly chatbot can handle their requests without making them feel guilty. The chatbot can—and should—also ask why the user is returning the item (did it not fit properly? Is it just something they don’t want?) in order to:
- Collect data on customer response to products
- Cross- or upsell the exchange and suggest something that does work for the user
What to Look Out for in Chatbot Analytics Leading into the Holiday Shopping Season
As the holidays quickly approach, you’ll need to keep an eye on chatbot analytics to ensure your bot is ready to handle shoppers’ requests. First, it’s a good idea to generate analytics reports much more often so you can stay on top of user activity, making changes whenever necessary. This is a stressful time, and error messages or other pain points can quickly drive shoppers away to the competition.
It’s also important that you assess the most active and peak times that users are talking to the bot. It’s inevitable that some users will encounter an issue that requires them to speak to a live agent. So, you should remain aware of peak hours to ensure your dedicated team is available and ready to swoop in when needed.