#Chatbot #Payments - Conversational Commerce

We spend more time on messaging apps than ever before. This has a huge impact on the way we will sell in the future. Chat bots are becoming more and more important in a standard sales process, but also in apps for customer service. With the increasing importance of chatbots, this is also becoming increasingly relevant for us as wallee AG. We are therefore pleased to present our partnership with secondbrain AG, which enables simple integration and a first-class user experience for chatbots - virtually 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 of interacting with companies through messaging and chat applications such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. These companies use natural language processing technology based on artificial intelligence. These companies use natural language processing technologies based on artificial intelligence that allow computers to gather information from messages and identify customer intent.

Consumers can chat, receive customer support, ask questions, receive recommendations and ultimately offer the possibility to buy their products through such apps.

The use cases for purchases and payments can vary. From a simple sales call with recommendations, where the sales process takes place in a conversation mode with a chat bot, to customer service use cases where the customer has the option to cancel a flight (see theKLM example), or purchase insurance (see the IKEAIPTIQand wallee example), to claims management where insurance claims are processed automatically.

Chat bots will gain relevance

Consumers are increasingly relying on messaging apps for all forms of communication, whether personal, business or commercial. And chat bots are becoming increasingly important. This is clearly reflected in available surveys:

1. 40% of Millenials say they interact with bots on a daily basis (Mobile Marketer).
2. In addition, a study conducted by Salesforceshows that 69% of consumers prefer chat bots because of the speed at which they can communicate with a brand. However, instant messaging has only just reached its tipping point, with the total number of instant messages sent overtaking emails by mid-2016.
3. eCommerce shops that use Facebook Messenger in conjunction with an abortedshopping cart chat bot have started to increase their revenue by 7-25%(Chatbots Magazine).
4. Millennials are about twice as likely as older age groups(Facebook) to use a chat bot that acts as a personal shopper.

In addition, the trend is clearly towards instant messaging and apps where the buyer no longer has to leave the messaging app to complete the purchase, more on this below.

Conversational Commerce will change the way we interact

The last decade has been the era of mobile commerce and establishing a presence on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. But in the last two years, messaging apps have started to overtake social networks when it comes to where we spend our time.

This will also apply to the way we shop. In the future, we will get used to interacting with a chat bot and asking it for recommendations for a "running shoe under 200 CHF". You will be given intelligent choices based on the information the retailer has already gathered about you, and chatbots in general can also help improve the user experience. See an example from Pepperberry below. A simple conversation with the bot is enough to reserve a table for 10 people - anytime and no long waiting in the loop.

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 is also one of the focus areas in this shift towards dialogue-based commerce.

As already mentioned, many people are spending more and more time with messaging applications, and in the age of conversational commerce, the user experience for the shopping channel is becoming increasingly important. For this reason, we have developed a simple framework together withsecondbrainAG that allows you to add a conversational commerce channel to your WooCommerce shop.

What is needed:

1. Secondbrain provides the basic infrastructure, develops the use case together with its customers, designs all (AI-based) chat bot dialogues and takes care of the integration of the Wallee Payment API.
2. To enhance the user experience, it is important that the sales process is seamless and fast. To achieve this, we enable the implementation of payment forms directly in the messaging apps, combined with tokenisation it is also possible to recognise a customer and allow them to save the payment information for future purchases.By the way: wallee is also integrated with the latest Scheme tokenisation networks, which allow the storage and automatic update of outdated credit card information (read our tokenisation blogpost where we provide additional information).

Try it out

We recently completed the first project for a small chat bot webshop for Pfefferbeere AG (host of the world-famous mountain restaurant "Aescher"). With "PEPPER", as the bot is called, you can order food or gifts through the chat bot via the Facebook messenger channel.PEPPER also automates the social media channel of Pefferbeere AG based on their AI skills.Just add the application Pfefferbeere in Messenger or watch the video below.

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

What we have shown above is a simple example that adds another channel to the webshop based on WooCommerce. As already mentioned, 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 is already underway...

Long story short, conversational commerce extends the familiar sales process, and in our view ultimately transforms the customer experience by introducing a high degree of convenience when used correctly and purposefully. The use cases and applications will certainly become clearer in the coming months and years.

Questions / Help

Are you ready for the next era of AI-powered commerce, and get intouch with us.

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