Small and mid-sized retailers should tap chatbots to pitch in on make-or-break sales days

A highly anticipated event for both consumers and sellers on the platform, Amazon Prime Day is like Christmas in July (July 11 to be precise!), with members clamouring to snag the best deals. While Amazon owns this day in the e-commerce space, it also provides opportunities for their third-party vendors to thrive.

So, in light of this unofficial discounted shopping holiday, I’m offering these small businesses three tips on how to leverage this opportunity to sell, sell, sell:

Harness the power of chatbots

Fast delivery service and a seamless shopping experience have set the bar high when it comes to customer expectations. As a small business, it’s crucial to meet or exceed these expectations.

Consider incorporating chatbots into your customer engagement strategy. Chatbots can help handle customer queries, provide support in real-time and offer personalized recommendations. Speed has long been the gold standard for customer service, but recent data reveals it’s more nuanced than that.

Consumers want fast resolutions for simple issues resolvable via chat, but for more complex issues they’re willing to wait for the right answer.

By offering prompt and helpful responses, you can ensure customers have a positive experience with your brand and enable you to make better use of your customer support agents by reserving them for more complex issues. Moreover, chatbots can help gather valuable customer insights, allowing you to tailor your offerings to meet their needs effectively and even route customers to the agent who can help them most.

Seamlessly Integrate operations and logistics

Efficient operations and logistics are vital for meeting customer expectations, especially during high-demand events. To deliver a high level of service as a small business, it’s essential to integrate your customer experience technologies with your operational and logistical platforms.

Consider using AI-powered systems to provide up-to-date status updates on deliveries. Proactively sharing this information with customers can reduce delivery-related queries. Leveraging AI to identify potential delays and communicate them to customers ahead of time, can enable you to manage customer expectations.

Enable customers to self-serve through chatbots by changing their delivery address or changing an order before it ships, all without human involvement. Closely aligning your tech stack with your operations can streamline processes and provide a seamless customer experience.

Drive Customers to your business

While selling through a large platform offers exposure and access to a wide customer base, it’s still essential to build your own brand identity and drive customers to your business. By delivering exceptional service and using the latest tech, you can entice customers to explore your offerings beyond the marketplace.

One effective strategy is to guide customers to your website or other platforms where you can engage with them directly and proactively help them navigate your products, increasing the potential of a sale.

Implement chatbots on your website to initiate these proactive conversations at scale and provide personalized recommendations. By proactively engaging customers, you can build loyalty to help encourage repeat business.

Small businesses face the challenge of meeting high customer expectations. Using chatbots and AI can help level the playing field so you can break through the noise on Prime Day. Get ready to snag some deals…