Build a Messenger Store
with Dialogflow

Companies are enthusiastic in leveraging these Chatbots to help improve their end-user customer experience. While most chatbots are designed to help customer, one offshoot of this platform is building an eCommerce store via Messenger and Google Assistant. In this article, we discuss why companies are building eCommerce stores on chat platforms and why to build a Messenger store with Dialogflow.

Chatbots are on the rage right now. A Businessinsider report says 80% of the businesses will deploy Chatbots by 2020. So, what makes this piece of artificial intelligence so relevant in today’s market? There are a couple of reasons. Some of them are:

• They help build consistent experiences in customer support
• Lower cost of maintaining a customer support function
• Easier to scale the function as a company’s requirements grow
• Easier to adapt to other products or other regions

What exactly are Chatbots?
A Chabot is a platform that emulates a human interaction over a text chat or voice assistant. With the emergence of multiple platforms, Chatbots are turning into quite a useful tool, particularly with the emergence of new messaging tools like Facebook messenger and Google Assistant.

AI-powered Chatbot
As the concept of bots evolves, it is important to understand what is an intelligent bot and how is it different from an automation program with standard responses. A true AI-powered Chatbot can understand the conversation, and has the ability to teach itself about the conversation. This allows eCommerce companies to teach the bot on how to respond to a wide array of scenarios. With proper training, these bots can also upsell and cross-sell effectively, leading to increase in revenues.

Below are some use cases of successfully using Chatbots for ecommerce sales process – DigitalCurrent
After just a couple of months of using their own Facebook chatbot; 1-800-Flowers reported that more than 70 percent of its Messenger orders derived from new customers!

Nitro Café (the world’s smallest café) increased sales by 20 percent with their Messenger chatbot — designed for easy ordering, direct payments and instant two-way communication.

Are you focused on customer experience for your end users? If so, make sure to read our blog.
eStore with Messenger + Dialogflow
Dialogflow by Google (earlier API.ai) is one of the best natural language based AI in the market today. Key advantages of using it are:

• Best platform to create a natural language interaction based platform with customers. Its inherent ability to process language makes it a great platform to set up a voice based store.
• The platform can work seamlessly with various platforms like Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Slack among others. Hence, with Dialogflow, you can seamlessly integrate with a store any of these platforms.
• You can go global with its natural language processing ability. It supports more than 14 languages. With the help of this support, an ecommerce store can seamlessly support stores in multiple countries from the same instance and no additional cost.

Messenger is the most popular app today with more than 1.2 billion users, as of 2017. By building a store on it, you are potentially reaching all of them. Messenger support is standard in Dialogflow.
Chatbots on Other Platforms
Facebook is the most popular platform when one considers the global market as a whole. However, other platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat, and BBM are some of the most popular alternates to Messenger in niche markets. These rankings differ based on the region of focus and segment of users you consider. Another chat platform worth mentioning is the Google Assistant. The growing popularity of this app can be attributed to the fact that it is a default app on most Android phones. Google Assistant allows you buy via a store connected to the platform without touching your phone. When this functionality is extended to the Google Home, innumerable opportunities open up.

Why build a Chatbot for your estore?

Helps improve sales

Mobile messaging platforms have a substantial user base. Creating a Chatbot store helps you tap into this large user base to increase your sales. These Chatbots can also train themselves to populate relevant information during the chat. It creates immense opportunity to upsell and cross sell for the ecommerce players.

Personalization

Chatbots connect to the same platform that hosts your ecommerce store. Hence, they have access to all the details of the customer account. The beauty of Chatbot comes out when this information is contextually used to pitch products to customer. In addition to added sales, this feature helps create an experience for the end user that increases retention.

Brand Image

A well responsive and an intelligent Chatbot can greatly improve the brand image of an ecommerce store. Chatbot further introduces consistency in experience. This will help clients trust the brand to have a similar experience every time they interact.

Expanding to global markets

Setting up a global store has its own challenges. One major challenge among them is to adopt the local language. A Chatbot can quickly adapt the new language with the help of a mere translator. The same Chatbot can also serve as a customer assistant. If the same scenario needs to be executed by a human team, there are many challenges.

Handle rapid growth

As an eCommerce store grows, the number of customer requests grows proportionally. With Chatbot, the incremental cost of this growth is minimal. This can help the eStore company to build a sustainable growth sales channel which does not eat into its profits.
How can we help you
i95Dev has an in-house team which developed the entire workflow from the scratch. Our team consists of members who can take the functional requirements and turn them into features of your Messenger store. For more information on this or for a quick demo, drop us a mail on info@i95dev.com.