Deliver Netflix Like Personalization With Product Recommendation Chatbots

Did you know that the Netflix show recommender system drives $ 1 billion in revenue to the company?

One of the key reasons why brands like Netflix, Amazon, Starbucks are growing fast is because they have a powerful product recommendation engine on their website.

Sadly, several companies are still not aware of it.

In this article, we are going to provide insights on what a product recommendation engine is, how eCommerce companies can personalize the shopping experience with product recommendation engines, and how product recommendation chatbots can boost sales.

Let’s get started.

What is a Product Recommendation Engine?

Product recommendation engine is an information and data filtering technology. It uses well-defined algorithms to display the right information, product, or piece of content to a user based on their demographics, buying behaviors, and previous interactions.

Product recommendation engines are used by Amazon, Netflix, and even dating apps (to filter the right match) to personalize the experience. By personalizing the experience, brands can engage users better, influence users to purchase faster, increase average order value, retain customers, and build brand loyalty.

The Need For Product Recommendation Engines

In today’s competitive business environment, driving traffic to a site is a humongous task, and to have customers bouncing off without making a purchase or abandon the carts before finishing the transaction kills all our efforts.

Hence, personalization takes the center stage for eCommerce brands as it allows them to get closer to the customers, serve better by learning their needs, delight them with personalized product recommendations, and drive them towards conversion.

Personalization further allows eCommerce brands to stay ahead of the competition, create more brand loyalty, and modernize the shopping experience.

Customers also expect some level of personalization from the brands. The below statistics from Gartner will explain it better.

Product recommendation engines can personalize the online shopping experience and increase sales in multiple ways. Some of the ways to use it are:

1. Welcome Messages – When visitors arrive at your site, product recommendation engines display new arrivals or an ongoing sale. This way visitors can instantly understand what’s going on.

2. Personalized Product Recommendation – By understanding the user’s inputs, demographics, and previous purchases, product recommendation engines can show various personalized products to the users.

3. Similar Products – Product recommendation engines can suggest similar products using logic such as category-based filtering and meta-data-based similarity.

4. Customers Who Bought/Viewed This… – This type of product recommendation is known as collaborative filtering and Amazon was the first company to do it. Collaborating filtering helps to sell different types of products.

5. Rating-Based Recommendation – Product recommendation engines help to display user ratings, reviews, and feedback. It builds trust among the customers as customers trust other customers more.

6. Cart-Page Recommendation – Recommending related products on the shopping cart page is an intelligent way to increase upsells and cross-sells. It boosts the average order value and drives more revenue.

7. Frequently Bought Together – Product recommendation engines can help you display the items that are often purchased by the customers together with the main item at the time of purchase.

8. Recently Viewed – In a browse abandonment situation, you can make product recommendation engines to remind customers on their next visit about the products they viewed recently and state the ongoing offers on the same to persuade them.

Chatbots as Product Recommendation Engine

Chatbots have come a long way. From simple rule-based bots to today’s conversational AI chatbots, the technology has evolved leaps and bounds and helps to personalize the online shopping experience in a great way.

Since AI chatbots are built using NLP (Natural Language Processing) and machine learning technologies, you can feed all the product categories and build chat flows to recommend personalized products for the users. Its deep learning abilities can act as a product recommendation engine based on user’s demographics, preferences, and previous interactions.

How Product Recommendation Chatbots Benefit Ecommerce Companies

1. Delivers Outstanding Customer Experience

Today, many brands focus on delivering outstanding customer experiences because they know it increases profitability. Product recommendation chatbots have the ability to engage customers by providing personalized experiences from start to finish. It proactively initiates a conversation, asks the right questions, and helps customers find the right information/product in a matter of seconds.

2. Converts More Customers

Product recommendation chatbots help convert more customers by offering personalized recommendations, deals, coupons, etc, and persuading customers to add items to the cart. Forbes stated that a 67% average sales increase was witnessed by business leaders using chatbots.

3. Faster Product Discovery

Ecommerce sites that offer a large number of products with a vast number of features and specifications, can put product recommendation chatbots to good use. It will help customers to find the right product in fewer steps and further shows rating-based recommendations, similar products, frequently bought together recommendations. A HubSpot study revealed that 57% of consumers are interested in getting information from chatbots when browsing a business’s website.

4. Increases Average Order Value

Making customers buy multiple items or more quantities brings more revenue for the companies. Product recommendation chatbots can help achieve this by performing upselling, cross-selling, “customers also bought” activities at the time of the checkouts. Average order value can be increased only if you recommend the right products that make real sense to your customers.

5. Reduces Cart Abandonment

Product recommendation chatbots can work specifically to reduce cart abandonment rates by reminding customers about the items left in the cart and answering customer’s questions/concerns at the time of check out. In fact, eCommerce companies witnessed a 7-25% increase in revenue by assisting customers using chatbots during checkouts.

6. Improves Customer Retention

For your customers to stay loyal to your brand, you need to provide an exemplary experience and achieve greater customer satisfaction. Product recommendation chatbots have the ability to remember your customer’s name, age, location, organization, previous purchases, buying habits, and assist them like your in-store sales rep. 87.2% of consumers rate their typical chatbot experience as within the range of neutral to positive.

7. Offers Faster Repeat Purchases

A repeat customer is someone who liked your products or offerings and would like to purchase them again. If you deliver the right experience for them, they will soon become your brand loyalists. Product recommendation chatbots can remember your returning customer’s previous interactions, past purchases, interests, etc., and allow them to reorder the items in few steps.

8. Increases ROI

Compared to other eCommerce personalization platforms, chatbots are cost-effective to build, scalable, easy to run and maintain. According to an Accenture report, 57% of businesses claim that chatbot delivers a big ROI on minimal investment. Further, its ability to interact with multiple customers at the same time and allowing customers to self-serve their common questions helps brands to reduce the burden on the support teams and save operational costs.

Above all, product recommendation chatbots show relevant products that best fit your buyer’s needs and reduces the returns rate.

To sum up,

Every eCommerce businesses determine to personalize the experience today but the biggest problem is they don’t have an effective, self-serving platform to implement it.

Personalized product recommendation chatbots can put eCommerce personalization into action with ease.

We built the RoundView conversation acceleration platform with one primary goal – to increase the conversion rates of eCommerce websites. Our AI chatbots are one of the principal applications of the conversation acceleration platform that is powered by a strong product recommendation engine.

Schedule a demo with us to witness its amazing capabilities.

The insights you get in our 10-minute demo can make you understand how RoundView chatbots help personalize your eCommerce experience with ease.

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