According to a report by Statista, the retail e-commerce sales in 2017 was 2.3 trillion US dollars and is projected to reach 4.88 trillion US dollars in 2021. The competition is tough, and the way to beat it is by building an e-commerce app that is secure, scalable, user-friendly and modern.
Up first in the stack is an e-commerce software that provides your customers and partners with a personalized, seamless shopping experience. WebSphere Commerce is a robust eCommerce Engine that allows clients to position their product line digitally across channels including web and mobile. It is part of the Commerce Brand at IBM that includes other powerful products such as Sterling Commerce, Campaign Management and Analytics product line, thus giving IBM clients technologies to build a holistic customer experience. A lot of these products have been successfully integrated with Artificial intelligence (AI) features and thus rebranded as IBM Watson Commerce.
A Conversational approach – for the best e-commerce experience
A wave of e-commerce Chatbots has gripped the industry and is transforming the online shopping experience for customers. This Chatbot wave emerged over the last year and become stronger. Read on how AI-powered chatbots have mesmerized with innovative user experience and are set to transform the e-commerce industry.
Chatbots – the New Wave:
As we already discussed- the trend that has emerged over the last year and promises powerful ROI is the AI-powered chatbots. A combination of the mobile wave, huge penetration of messaging platforms and advancements in the Natural Language Processing area has created a perfect breeding ground for Chatbots to take a center stage for client interactions. According to a recent report by Gartner “By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human”. Businesses that start building and training bots early on will stand to gain and retain clients leveraging this very powerful channel. The key is to build Bots that give a seamless experience across channels and facilitate frictionless transactions. The Bots have to offer more than just the FAQs for customers to interact with them – unless the Bots are wired with the backend systems of records and can provide details such as product catalog, product details, offers, facilitate the purchase and answer queries about order fulfillment, their adoption is minimal.
Streebo Chatbot Builder – pre-wired with IBM Commerce Systems:
At Streebo Research Labs we have a long history of working closely with the IBM Product teams to build complementary and robust products such as Mobile Forms, Digital Experience Accelerator, and now Streebo Chatbot Builder. Many of these products are powered by top industry platforms such as IBM Digital Experience Manager, IBM MobileFirst (previously known as Worklight) and leading NLP engines such as IBM Watson Assistant thus making them secure and stable. Our latest offering i.e. Streebo Chatbot Builder allows LOB and IT folks with little or no AI experience to rapidly assemble Chatbots with minimal or no coding. The drag and drop tool help build – not only FAQ type chatbots but also robust backend integrated Bots that give meaningful information such as latest product offerings, and bots that offer personalized content and can easily facilitate an end to end transaction for your end customer. These bots are not only pre-wired with the IBM Commerce systems, but also trained with a variety of intents across industries such as Banking, Insurance, and Retail. They cover a wide variety of conversations in multiple languages thus extending a ready to go package for businesses. This will quickly enable businesses to tap into a variety of channels such as Voice, Web, Mobile and the various messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Skype among others. All this from a single code base and all using a point and click interface. This allows businesses to not only roll out the Bot quickly but also to adapt to the changing requirements and market conditions.
On an average, our clients cut down their development time by over 50% during the first rollout and over 70% of subsequent change requests. Streebo Chatbot Builder is readily integrated with a variety of backend web services of both IBM WebSphere Commerce and is incrementally getting integrated with the likes of Sterling Commerce and such – it is powered by Industry leading IBM Digital Experience Manager product line which is also part of the IBM Commerce Brand thus allowing our clients to easily integrate the variety of IBM products to build a comprehensive solution for the end client.
Want a personal demo or have a question about the above offering? Drop us a note and one of our lab engineers will reach out to provide more information.
