How to Drive Revenue Through the Roof
The first premise in this discussion is the enormous number of shoppers that start on their Smartphones, then abandon the search and finish later on their desktop. This is the ‘norm’ for mobile shoppers. This begs the question, ‘WHY?’ Why did they fail to purchase the first time?
Clearly the experience didn’t work for them. Certainly some of them will buy from the same retailer when they get to their desktop, but how many will ultimately choose a different retailer? And how do you, as an eRetailer, fix this problem and convert those mobile shoppers to buyers?
Simple. Fix the Mobile Shopping Experience. Use the same User Experience all the Smartphone manufacturers have figured out. Mobile Voice Search.
Per Gartner
Conversational commerce — During the past two years, the use of …voice-driven devices has driven interest in their use for digital commerce.
Today… Mobile commerce has low uptake that holds back the potential impact of high conversion on native apps, while responsive design enables the mobile web.
Conversational commerce utilizes natural-language interfaces such as voice and text chat, including messaging platforms, to enable people (and machines) to discover and purchase goods and services via a dialogue.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification
Conversational commerce is in its earliest stages, but the hype has accelerated considerably in the past year, primarily due to…Facebook Messenger chatbots and Amazon Echo (Alexa). These developments are enabled and driven by smart machine technologies that take advantage of improvements in technology such as natural-language processing (NLP), natural-language question answering (NLQA) and deep neural networks trained on vast amounts of real-world data. This hype is…about a new UI to commerce software, that of voice and text.
Several paradigm shifts in technology and culture are leading to a future, which requires you to be closer to your customer’s context and use of their preferred terminology. By “comes to you” we mean that digital commerce will need to be available when and where your customers are, via the technology they interact with daily including:
- Social messaging platforms
- Smartphones
- Voice-driven smart home devices
- Connected vehicles
… regardless of where the customer is in their journey.
Digital commerce interactions via these interfaces are rapidly moving to include the natural-language interface embedded in these devices: that of text-chat and voice. We’ve reached a tipping point where the utility of the systems have exceeded the friction of using them.
Mobile commerce is the interaction among businesses, people and things via a mobile device that results in a transaction of value for the customer. “Value” could be derived from finding products quickly online or in the store, ordering seamlessly, receiving promotional pricing, redeeming loyalty rewards or coupons, or easily making a payment.
User Advice
Add mobile functionality to engage customers — be it to entice them into stores, make their in-store shopping experience easier, or make shopping on their mobile device easier.
In Digital Commerce, It Certainly Pays to Get Semantic
A commonplace search such as “short, black, sleeveless V-neck dress” . . . that ends in the conversational equivalent of a “404 (document not found)” result. Over-reliance on conventional keyword-based retrieval is simply not enough. This is compounded by the enormity of inventory on digital commerce platforms, and exacerbated by the challenge of linguistic variations — for example, “short black dress with no sleeves and a V-neck” or “black halter neck cocktail dress.”
Ambiguities in semantics arise as well when there are multiple grammatical interpretations possible. “Giant road bike” and “Giant road bike” can mean very different things if the semantics engine cannot infer that “Giant” refers to a brand of bicycle and not the size of the bike in question.
Providing easily integrated Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) with strong semantic understanding and natural-language inference capabilities will become de facto for digital commerce Technology Strategic Partners (TSPs).
The First, the Best, the Best there ever Was
EasyAsk pioneered the concept of Natural Language Search for eCommerce. It’s certainly gratifying to see Gartner and truly the entire Analyst Universe line up and salute the benefits of NLP, but what’s most gratifying is to see the dramatic revenue boost our clients realize within 90 days. The concept of returning highly accurate results the very first time always result in a dramatic jump in sales, but never more than in a Mobile Shopping environment. Imagine shopping exactly the same way you’d speak to Alexa, or Siri or OKGoogle and immediately getting the correct products, with just one touch. THAT’s how you fix the Mobile Shopping problem.
Come join NorthFace, Timberland, True Value Hardware, Lamps Plus and dozens of other eCommerce retailers, and let us show you how to drive significantly more revenue, instantly. We guarantee it.