The term “Conversational Commerce” is clearly gaining momentum in business and technology circles. We, at Opus, have spent considerable time defining what “conversation” means, how “commerce” brings it all together, and even staked our claim in an eponymous conference being held in San Francisco this September.

Throughout the discussion is a means to anchor how natural language understanding, machine learning, and, dare we say, AI, are fundamentally changing how businesses interact with consumers. To prove the point, the industry needs a whole new set of metrics and value propositions in order to measure the effectiveness of Conversational Commerce.

In a newly released case study, Automat, providers of conversational marketing technologies, have outlined how the global cosmetic skincare brand Vichy uses conversational technologies in Facebook Messenger to accelerate e-commerce growth, personalize consumer experiences, and increase engagement. In building a “digital dermo-advisor” named Vicky, the cosmetic brand unleashed a bot featured in the Facebook Discovery tab and Messenger plugin that helped educate potential buyers with skincare diagnostics, videos, and personalized recommendations.

The trial developed for the Canadian market produced some impressive metrics and could serve a precursor for the value proposition of conversational messaging models. According to statistics provided by Automat, ROI datapoints include:

• 87% of users made it to personalized product recommendation
• 4X better than the web in average session duration
• 74% – Growth number of items added to cart compared to website
• 35% – Increased average revenue generated per diagnostic taker compared to website
• 10X more email opt-ins than on website (59%)
• 92% – Customer satisfaction

Conversational marketing for e-commerce is gaining traction among brands and retailers. Another provider of enterprise-grade conversational marketing platform solutions, Snaps, announced this week a partnership with True Fit to help the footwear brand in search, advertising, and digital assistance. The ever-growing number of case studies should help underscore the value of Conversational Commerce in messaging platforms in driving consumer transactions and creating customer loyalty.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Mobile + Location, Articles