Excellent customer service can help you attract and retain customers. That is why chatbots are increasingly becoming vital in customer service, especially in eCommerce. Bots can help you order pizza, book a hotel, flight, and many more. These can even answer customer queries immediately.

Chatbots are driving conversational marketing taking customer experience to the next level. Advanced ones powered by AI can handle more complex tasks, including lead generation, selling, product recommendation, getting feedback, etc.

Chatbot marketing automates customer service, reducing the need for human agents. So, it reduces sales and online marketing costs while driving a superior eCommerce experience across various channels.

AI Shopify chatbots can now drive superior customer engagement and experience to increase your Shopify store’s revenue. Besides driving reliable and excellent customer service, it can lead to over 60% sales.

You can leverage an AI chatbot to scale your online sales.

This article talks about Shopify AI chatbots and how they operate.

What Are AI-Powered Shopify Chatbots?

AI Shopify chatbots are intelligent software that acts as virtual customer service assistants in your Shopify store. They are advanced, running on AI, hence are capable of handling additional tasks like lead generation, making sales, tracking orders, etc. In overview, you can improve your store’s efficiency and drive sales using a Shopify chatbot.

There are two categories of chatbots in eCommerce and other sectors:

Rule-based chatbots: It’s the simplest form of chatbot that follows pre-determined flow or rules. They’re more suitable for answering FAQs than complex customer queries. It comes as a chat widget at your screen’s right corner.

AI Chatbot: These bots work through natural language processing or NLP and are capable of being conversational. With this, these bots can give out more intelligent answers than just the predetermined ones.

Here’s how the two compare:

How Do They Work?

These bots are built to enable businesses to interact with humans without a human agent.

When the AI Shopify chatbot receives a request from a customer, it breaks it down into intents and entities.

Intent– It is the information or action the user wants, e.g., order status, transaction history, etc.

Entity– It is the extra data about the intent. It can be a date, color, shape, location, etc.

Take this example: Do you have black Converse size 9?

In this user request, the intent is “Converse,” and entities are “size 9” and “black.”

Hence, the AI chatbot follows the following steps:

• Marks the user’s intent.
• It extracts key entities.
• Analyze the “intents” and “entities” against available inventory data.
• Provide relevant responses.

Chatbots follow these classification methods to perform a task;

Pattern Matching

The chatbot uses pattern matching for grouping the user’s text. It will react to anything similar to the pattern. The standard structured model under Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) makes pattern matching possible.

Natural Language Understanding

The natural language understanding (NLU) technique makes the chatbot understand human language. It processes the user’s input, text, voice, etc., into structured data understandable by the machine.

It contains:

• A dictionary to get word meanings.
• Syntax analysis to determine if text follows language rules. It uses a parser to achieve this.
• Grammar rules. It breaks down user requests based on punctuation and sentence structure.

Natural Language Generation

After the machine processes and analyzes input data, it gives an output or relevant response in structured data.

The response is given to the customer through a conversational interface in text, voice, etc. The natural language generation (NLG) technique changes structured data into human-readable text.

NLU and NLG are part of natural language processing (NLP), a subset of AI technology that drives AI chatbots.

NLP has additional step-by-step functions as follows;

• It breaks down requests into paragraphs, sentences, and words. It’s also known as lexical analysis.
• It checks for typos and reformats them into standard form, e.g., “tmrw” will be changed to “tomorrow.”
• Entity recognition. Involves keyword analysis to get user intent and main conversational topics.
• Semantic Analysis. It involves processing sentences to grasp the meaning of each word and its relation to the sentence’s structure.

Hence, the following technologies power AI chatbots;

Machine learning (ML). Chatbots use ML to learn about customer requests and inputs. It’s critical in helping chatbots learn by themselves from customer data and identify patterns. As a result, they can respond to user requests with no or limited human help.

1. It is the mimicking of human intelligence. It makes chatbots offer human-like conversations to users. It makes the bot grasp users’ context, tone, and mood to be able to mimic a more human-like response.

Natural language processing. It helps bots understand and process human speech, voice, or gesture to provide a relevant response in a human-readable format. NLP and ML are both subsets of AI technology.

Benefits of AI Shopify Chatbots

Increased Quality Lead Generation

AI chatbots offer high-quality leads by collecting customers’ data to understand their unique needs. Hence, you can offer more time to quality leads that will convert. They can collect lead data, qualify, and even set sales appointments.

Increased Conversion Rates Through Prompt Response

Most customers will abandon their cart if their questions are not answered quickly. AI Shopify chatbot increases your response time within seconds. It intervenes to help customers where they’re stuck.

Whether they have questions on return policy, product size, etc., the chatbot will provide the relevant information to help you close more sales.

Nurture Quality Long-Term Customer Relationships

AI Shopify leverages quality data in Shopify to offer hyper-personalized solutions to prospects in real-time. They can automate returns, check product status, process refunds and order status in seconds. Such a personalized experience increases customer satisfaction and ultimately leads to customer loyalty.

Take Away

AI chatbot in online marketing provides an unrivaled personalized customer experience across several sectors. You can use the AI Shopify chatbot to go beyond just addressing generic prospects’ questions.

You can improve customer service, engagement and scale your Shopify store. It leverages AI, ML, and NLP that enable store automation for increased efficiency and revenue. You’ll also save more time focusing on other critical aspects of your business.

There are several AI chatbots for various uses. Check out a comprehensive chatbots review to learn more about which one can best suit your needs.