Chatbots changing Middle East retail

Data from Juniper Research suggests that chatbots leveraged for customer service have a strong potential to reduce costs, with deployments realising annual savings for retailers of $439 million globally by 2023, up from just $7 million in 2019.

Souffiane Houti, founder and COO of Viafone Technologies, highlighted these and many other poignant points concerning the retail industry.

Chatbots' growth has been prominent across a number of industries, to the point where 1.4 billion people worldwide now use them on a fairly regular basis. According to the chatbot statistics, by the end of 2019, almost a quarter of the global population will be using some kind of chatbot support on a daily basis.

Moreover, chatbots can cut operational costs by up to 30 per cent and 50 per cent of businesses plan to spend more on chatbots than on mobile apps.

"One of the biggest changes happening in customer service right now is in automating the customer experience," Houti said.

"Whether it's after-sales support, providing information or launching a rewards program, the idea is to automate as much of the process as possible and to achieve a seamless interaction with customers which is fast, easy and intuitive. And AI chatbots that engage with customers in two-way communication is the answer to these as it opens a whole new world of possibilities for businesses to build a more interactive and personalised customer experience," said Houti.

Businesses now need to connect with customers through channels they are most active with including messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook messenger, which have surpassed social media applications. Users spend daily more than 3 hours on average on WhatsApp and that's why it becomes all the more critical that businesses shift their presence to channels which consumers use to engage.

Creating positive interactions with customers using chatbots will be crucial to customer retention and driving sales. Chatbots bridge the gap of how users want to communicate and how organisations are communicating via non-messaging channels. More importantly, they reduce by 90 per cent the communication errors of limited customer-service and the difficulty of handling millions of conversations in parallel.