Five years ago, experts told us that conversational commerce was the inevitable future of online shopping. Around 2018, I was working on customer experience initiatives for some of the world’s largest online retailers–and all of them were convinced that, sooner or later, chatting to robotic assistants would be an essential part of the ecommerce experience. It was time, they felt, to either get with the program and invest in chatbots, or risk being left out of the next great retail revolution.
The dream, at the time, was that customers would be able to fall in love with a product while browsing social media – a coat slung around an Instagram influencer’s shoulders, for example – and then start up a conversation with a virtual brand representative. This bot, in theory, would be able to provide product information, customized recommendations, and a smooth path to purchase; all without the customer ever having to leave the confines of the app they were first browsing.
But of course, things didn’t work out that way. In America and Europe, at least, conversational commerce has remained little more than a gimmick. While platforms like Facebook and Instagram were quick to launch in-app chatbot support for retailers, these services never truly found an audience; many of them would eventually be quietly shelved. And a recent National Research Group (NRG) study found that fewer than half (47%) of Americans would be willing to buy products using conversational commerce on social media platforms.
In part, the failure of conversational commerce to live up to the hype can be attributed to a mismatch between expectations and the reality of the technology available at the time. As recently as 2021, chatbots tended to be slow, clunky, and only useful in a narrow range of scenarios; they quickly broke down as soon as the customer strayed from a pre-programmed set of tasks.
But there are also cultural factors at play. In the U.S., concerns around data privacy and payment security are big barriers to the adoption of conversational commerce. Many Americans are already highly conscious of these issues when it comes to shopping online. Giving their personal info and credit card details to a bot was, for the majority, simply a bridge too far.
A second chance for conversational commerce?
Over just the past six months, the emergence of a new generation of conversational AIs has breathed new life into the notion of conversational commerce. And retailers who had previously written off the technology have had to reassess it with fresh eyes.
For one thing, tools like GPT-4 offer brands the possibility of building dramatically more powerful and more sophisticated chatbots – ones that are capable of responding organically to even the most unexpected of consumer requests. We’ll soon see what this looks like in practice, as major ecommerce platforms like Amazon in the U.S. and JD.com in China have already announced plans to roll out ChatGPT-style tools across their platforms.
At the same time, this new generation of AIs also seems likely to herald a cultural change in the way we think about talking to bots. In the past, consumers simply weren’t ready to accept that the experience of interacting with a human shop assistant could adequately be replicated by a machine. But as more and more people get the opportunity to use tools like ChatGPT or Bing’s AI-powered search for themselves, perceptions about what chatbots are capable of will inevitably start to change.
Already, Americans are expressing a newfound openness to the idea of using AI-powered search services. It’s easy to imagine that this enthusiasm could transfer over to the idea of conversational commerce–provided, that is, that retailers make the right decisions when it comes to incorporating these new tools into the shopping experience.
Learning from the mistakes of the past
While recent developments in AI may have given conversational commerce a second chance, this doesn’t mean that retailers can simply throw money at chatbots and expect to find success. Avoiding the mistakes of the past will require a more sensitive and thoughtful approach – one that takes into account the lingering anxieties that consumers still have when it comes to virtual shopping assistants.
A consistent theme in research on the topic has been fear among shoppers that new technologies – and the ongoing shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping and digital transactions – might lead to a world in which the human gets left behind; one where the shopping experience feels cold, sterile and alienating. Retailers, therefore, are likely to have the most success implementing conversational commerce if they think of it not as simply a source of brute efficiency, but as a powerful tool for pushing back against this trend of dehumanization. If they use it, in other words, to try to re-inject some of the joy of shopping in-person into the ecommerce experience.
In practice, this means not using chatbots as an excuse to scale back or underinvest in the human element of customer service. Instead, retailers need to focus on creating seamless paths to purchase that organically blend artificial and human intelligence. Longer-term, they should work to create new models for sales and customer service in which humans and machines are able to support and learn from one another in co-dependent and mutually beneficial ways.
Ultimately, it’s clear that this new generation of conversational AIs has created a unique opportunity for retailers; a long-awaited answer to the question of how to replicate the experience of interacting with a personal shopper or sales assistant in an online context. As shopping continues to migrate online, and as more and more of our conversations are mediated by social messaging platforms, conversational commerce looks poised to be the technology that bridges the gap between in-store and online — between the automated and the human.
