E-commerce Virtual Assistants are a valuable support for customers browsing products in your store. They let you inexpensively improve customer service, improving user experience and site usability.
As a busy e-commerce business owner, you may not have the time to reply to every request yourself. Hiring people to do this, on the other hand, is quite expensive, negatively impacting the ROI of your operations.
Plus, it would be hard to be able to serve every customer, 24/7, in all time-zones, even with a huge customer service team.
Learn what e-commerce virtual assistants can do and how they affect your store’s usability.
What is E-commerce Virtual Assistant?
E-commerce virtual assistants are bots that use machine learning and natural language processing to perform various tasks, including understanding user queries, providing them with relevant information, or even creating product descriptions.
For you, using virtual assistants mean less manual work. For your customers, bots offer 24/7 customer service, improving the overall experience of your website.
What can virtual assistants do?
First, let’s see what else can virtual assistants do for you and your business. In short, we talk about significant task automation, including:
- Product research
- Product description writing
- Image editing
- Product listing and optimisation
- Managing inventory
- Handling order processing
- Assistance in returns and exchanges
The previously-mentioned bots’ capabilities, offered by, e.g. Acelerar virtual assistant, will save you a lot of time and money while running your e-commerce platform.
For people entering your store, it means quick and easy access to the information they need. Human to computer interactions increases, as the popularity of online shopping now surpasses traditional bricks-and-mortar.
How virtual assistants impact your store’s usability?
Researchers from Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf, Germany, examined how virtual assistant (VA) implementation impacts user satisfaction. In their paper, they included VAs with various capabilities, including machine learning and NLP, regardless if we call them virtual assistants, bots, or chatbots. What’s more, VAs can be either anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, caricatured, or purely-functional.
What researchers found is that people trust virtual assistants and enjoy using them. The usefulness of bots can even increase the likelihood of the user coming back to the website in the future! For e-commerce platforms, this is a fundamental lesson to bear in mind.
The effectiveness of the virtual assistant can be measured by how well it understands user queries, and how relevant the response is. Choosing a bot for your business, or developing one yourself, remember that levels of effectiveness will impact usability the most.
Summing up
Designing a website, be it creating a user experience or focusing on high visual assets, it’s easy to forget about one crucial aspect – interactions.
Of course, we can include micro-interactions that will make design sleek or funny. Or to design user flow, so the website makes it easy to navigate and take the desired action.
There are, however, many moments when the users would like to interact with human-level support. Hence the importance of enabling human-to-human or human-to-computer interactions – especially in e-commerce.
Choosing an e-commerce virtual assistant, focus on its usefulness, effectiveness, and – most of all – make the experience enjoyable.
Do you want to implement a virtual assistant in your online store? We partner with Softwarehut developers to support our clients with custom IT solutions. Let’s talk!
