Chatbot

The word chatbot is a contraction of the words "chat" and "robot". Quite simply, it's a robot that chats.

People who have worked in a customer service department have found that a lot of people's questions are repetitive. It can be something like "how much is shipping?" or "can you deliver before the weekend?" and "do you have Adidas shoes?" in a webshop.

One day, visionary people thought "we should get a robot to take care of that" - and then they got started.

The first chatbots were somewhat helpless and really bad at helping users. But things have gotten much better. Big tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Facebook have worked with AI and made much of it available to users for free, so today chatbots have become tolerable and can often recognize the most common answers.

A chatbot can also "greet" your user on chat and ask "are you already a customer?", "do you have an order number?" and so on to guide the user to the right person or department that can help them further.

Facebook Messenger provides a free chatbot for online stores. Whether you should use it, I'll leave that up to you. But one of the benefits is that you can retarget the users you've chatted with, which can be very effective. At the time of writing, it's relatively simple and can only handle the most basic queries. For the real deal, you need to look at dedicated chatbot software.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.