Innovative conversational commerce trends: empowering CX leaders to delight customers

India’s immense population, rapid digital adoption, and increasing mobile connectivity make it a crucial market for CX leaders to stay on top of the conversational commerce trends. With a rising middle class, growing eCommerce landscape, and a surge in online transactions, India offers significant market potential. By embracing conversational commerce, CX leaders can enhance customer relationships, drive business growth, and leverage the diverse linguistic landscape to cater to customers in their preferred languages, gaining a competitive edge in India’s evolving digital landscape.

The country saw digital transactions amounting to ₹32 billion ($387 million) between April and July 2022. Making it safe to say that the digital payment domain in the country has been transformed. In fact, the country has witnessed a continuous spike in digital transactions over the past few years.

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which represents about 70 million traders in India, says that during the Diwali shopping season for 2022, local shops on Amazon clocked a 2x spike and sold over 10 products every minute.

To make the most of this online boom, brands need to meet customer expectations and provide better end-to-end personalized experience.

And that’s where conversational commerce comes in, artificial intelligence mixed with rich messaging and powered by an omnichannel communications platform – leading to better experiences and more conversions.

Conversational commerce is not just a buzzword but an essential for ROI-generating customer experiences. While enabling the customers to chat with the brand, ask questions, get support and personalized promotions, all in real-time, it can also help enable making transactions – all from a single channel. Its convenience makes conversational commerce the next big thing that businesses must adapt to take their digital transformation to the next level.

Furthermore, the need for conversational commerce can be quantified by analyzing the customers’ readiness to enter purchase journeys with chatbots.

According to a study, of 15% of the customers who made purchases using a retail chatbot, and 81% said they would do it again. However, the success of conversational commerce will be facilitated by the development of CPaaS capabilities that are easily integrated with SaaS solutions.

According to the Infobip Messaging Trends 2023 Report, one of the major use cases for conversational commence in the India region is through engagement and assistance to the customers with two-way chatbot communication, and automating processes and answering FAQs with a keyword.

The report further states, evolving communication technology has shifted the role chatbots play in everyday business operations. Moving from support-only assistants to sales and marketing roles, chatbots are now being used for more than answering frequently asked questions. In fact, we see them being used to sell products and services or even complete entire processes such as account signups and card applications.

Rich messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Google’s Business Messages, Instagram, and Apple Messages for Business enable brands to use their chatbot across more stages of the customer journey – from discovery to purchase to support and retention.

CPaaS helps easy implementation of a channel and use cases enabling businesses to seamlessly build chatbots. The amalgamation of messaging and services creates an end-to-end experience for customers, where everything from acquisition, onboarding, conversations, promotions and transactions takes place on a single platform.

To deliver such an experience, CPaaS providers leverage conversational channels like WhatsApp Business Platform, Apple Messages for Business, Messenger, Telegram, WeChat, Viber, KakaoTalk and LINE, etc. Technologies such as conversational chatbots, video, carousels, geolocation, and quick response (QR) codes further help customers to move across the journey. These visual builders, chatbots, and conversational APIs also drive omnichannel experiences for them.

One such example is Uber’s chatbot on WhatsApp powered by Infobip. It enables users to order a ride over the channel. So, where they chat, they can book a ride, and get updates.

Additionally, a Gartner study also states that 80 percent of customer service organizations in 2025 will abandon native mobile apps and adopt omnichannel messaging to deliver a better customer experience.

In India, according to a study, while most people still prefer to talk to an actual person for customer service needs, this trend is reversing.

Chatbots on WhatsApp, RCS, and the brand’s website are popular in the region.

With all the technological developments around conversational commerce, chatbots have come a very long way from being a novelty when they first appeared on brand websites to being vital tools for businesses to attract new customers, provide a better service to more people, and make significant cost savings.

The future is to replicate the normal conversational experience between two humans. Through conversational design and chatbots which use natural language processing (NLP) to work out what the person is trying to achieve, in other words what their intent is.

CX leaders can expect even more robust CPaaS functionalities, especially to integrate payment options within the same conversational channel. Making the end-to-end experience abosolutely seamless and conversational commerce an absolute reality.

CPaaS providers, like Infobip, are in the works to make payments possible through chat apps without relying on third-party integrations. It will be a game-changer in conversational commerce for both brands and consumers.

From 2015, when the term conversational commerce was first coined, it’s been a few years for it to emerge globally into a practical reality. And going by the numbers it’s here, and ready to revolutionize the way we approach digital communications.

This new interactive way of shopping and engaging with brands has provided customers with the personalized experience they have been longing for. If businesses want to grow and build a loyal customer base, investing in the right technologies for conversational commerce is the way forward.