Black Friday is one of the biggest days of the year for e-commerce. The last notable Black Friday was in 2020 where consumers spent a record $9 billion online over the weekend. While all businesses want to get the most out of this big-spending period, most are not considering what technology can do to help. The answer is not employing more staff or human agents, the solution lies in automation!

Black Friday is not just about online shopping

We already know that Black Friday is when most brands take an aggressive approach to their growth strategies, but that's just the beginning. Consider these objectives that leverage the high traffic that Black Friday brings to online stores and websites:

• Generate new registrations
• Sign up new subscriptions
• Increase newsletter sign-ups
• Build brand awareness
• Develop a strong pipeline of future customers

To survive the Black Friday craze, you need creative strategies as well. This is where AI chatbots come in; not just any AI chatbots, but bots that also have conversion tools built into them. Any interaction you have with a customer should be an opportunity to offer them value.

AI chatbots, built with conversion in mind, allow you to directly engage with visitors to your website. Interaction is the first step in turning a conversation into a sale. Chatbots facilitate that entire user journey. Follow-up campaigns can be automated to continue to engage with your customers after they've left your website. .

5 Reasons You Need A Chatbot To Survive Black Friday

Goal: Convert high volumes of shopping traffic into quality paying customers

Solution: AI chatbots are the best way to convert passive shoppers into engaged shoppers. They offer instant, intuitive, personalized assistance to each visitor on your website

Conversational commerce is intended to recreate the in-store shopping experience in a digital environment. The most effective format of conversational commerce are AI chatbots. They blend AI, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and on-site analytics to create profound experiences for shoppers that motivate them to go further in their journey with your brand.

To help you incorporate the practice of conversational commerce into your Black Friday plans, here are some of the top benefits derived from using them. The added bonus is that you can also maintain your chatbot year-round for more optimized site experiences and improved customer support.

1. Offer personalized product recommendations

To be a successful e-commerce brand, personalization is absolutely critical. Surveyed online shoppers were asked about the importance of personalized shopping experiences, and 80% said it was absolutely necessary for online stores to provide those experiences to earn their business.

Read about how Hertz use their chatbot to offer personalized product recommendations here.

2. Empower your customer support team

Black Friday is the ultimate "all hands on deck" experience for customer support teams. But in today's strained economic climate, the answer is not to employ more support staff. Neither should your support staff spend all their energy on fielding common questions and FAQs. They have more value to offer your customers than that!

The only addition to your CS team should be an AI chatbot. Chatbots greet customers, offer instant support, handle all FAQs, and direct customers to human agents if need be.

AI chatbots also direct people to pages, products, or services that help address their concerns, all while guiding them to complete their purchase. With this critical support function covered, CS teams are now freed up to focus their efforts on more complex tasks.

Read about how Thon Hotels reduced the number of questions CS teams had to deal with here.

3. Offer special discounts and promotions

Black Friday is a day when people are willing to buy in bulk if the right offer is made available. AI chatbots create personalized shopping experiences, and along with data analytics, you can monitor what products appeal best to shoppers.

More insight results in more personalization. Rather than simply giving shoppers general discounts, you can personalize the discounts they receive. There's no way human agents can do this but an AI chatbot does this easily, and at scale. And when Black Friday rolls around next year, you can incentivize more shoppers to buy with special discounts on some of your most popular items to drive even more sales.

4. Reduce operational costs

Since full-time customer support staff is a limited group, it’s not uncommon for brands to hire temporary support staff during busy shopping weekends like Black Friday. With an AI chatbot, there's no need to do that! Chatbots handle the bulk of all incoming inquiries.

AI chatbots interact with all new shoppers that arrive on your website. They can be programed to greet shoppers when they begin a new session, or to be deployed at the optimal time depending on your needs.

Read how Helthjem use their AI chatbot to handle inquiries, shipments, deliveries and support questions here.

5. Speedy resolutions

It's no surprise that there's a strong correlation between the quality of service customers experience and their loyalty to a brand. Almost two thirds of shoppers admit that waiting on hold, and having to deal with more than one human agent, are the most frustrating parts of dealing with any service department.

Why infuriate your customers, especially on a day like Black Friday? Implement an AI chatbot! You business simply cannot survive if you give your customers sub-par service or only offer antiquated channels to communicate with you. You can automate all of these processes with an AI chatbot; a bot that looks good and works hard for you.

Read about how Elkjøp (one of the busiest Black Friday brands) saw an 80% improvement to overall customer satisfaction because they invested in a chatbot.

Start preparing for Black Friday 2023 by getting in touch with us. We're ready and waiting to help you maximize all the potential of this big-spending period.

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