Introducing AI

Automated, personalized shopping experiences – that’s where it’s all about these days. AI (Artificial Intelligence) does that. AI is continuously collecting data on how a customer shops when they purchase products and what exactly they’re looking for in a product or a service. This piece of technology can’t be replicated with in-store shopping. With AI, you learn so much more about shoppers. 

At Whisbi, we’re also offering this option to our Whisbi Sell customers with our Whisbi Boost solution. We use visitor intelligence to capture every lead and behavioral targeting to close the sale. With Whisbi Boost, we can predict the likelihood of purchase for any given website visitor with our AI engine, powered by NowInteract’s machine-learning algorithm. It helps you find unexpected revenue potential, which means:

• Capture all appropriate traffic – incremental volume: target pools of web visitors with a high probability of purchase that are currently not being exposed to the Whisbi experience.
• Improve the quality of leads: do not expose the Whisbi experience to users who are not likely to convert. This improves your conversion rates as it only delivers ready-to-buy sales leads to your agents.
• Decrease drop-off and friction points in the customer journey: offer the Whisbi experience to users who are at key friction points on the website.
• Avoid cannibalization of other online sales channels: do not disturb visitors who are highly likely to convert on their own through your e-commerce platform or other self-service channels. 
• Improve your online sales conversion rates: providing lead qualification information to your sales agents in real-time; directly related to their propensity to purchase.

The importance of AI

With AI, enterprises can obtain insights into their operations that they might not have been aware of before. AI can even perform tasks better than humans in some cases. Because this technology is highly efficient, it opens many new opportunities for larger enterprises. They use AI to improve their operations and gain an advantage over their competitors. The benefits are that AI reduces the time for data-heavy tasks, it delivers consistent results and AI-powered virtual agents are always available. 

Customizable bots powered by IBM Watson

A good alternative to AI chatbots is decision tree/hierarchy chatbots. At Whisbi, we are a big fan of these, instead of using machine learning chatbots. How does it work? IBM Watson is a service that enables customers to customize chatbots related to their business. Reliability and scalability were the two key factors when choosing to integrate our chatbot with IBM Watson. The Watson server is designed to handle multiple accounts at once, so Whisbi can scale the volume of chatbots and keep up with the customer demand, when needed.

Trending: online marketplaces

‘An online marketplace is a type of e-Commerce website where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel e-Commerce and can be a way to streamline the production process.’ This is the definition according to Wikipedia. Marketplaces are booming, it’s one of the most rapidly changing industries, and therefore a big trend we’re seeing this year. They’re booming because it’s literally a dream come true for retailers and customers: you can find anything in the same conditions because all product pages are very similar. Saleslayer defines the 5 main types of marketplaces right now: 

• On-demand: offering an instant response to users’ demands with a network of suppliers – like Uber or Deliveroo
• Managed: manufacturers and distributors offer their products in a platform managed by a third party, which manages the sales processes, seller’s commissions, and additional storage, shipping, and logistic analysis support – take companies like Amazon or Rakuten as an example
• Community-driven: a community-building environment, with smaller sellers and artisans who personally manage sales processes, deliveries, returns, and customer service – like Etsy
• SAAS: free and open-source software is attractive for small businesses and sellers who want to build their own website inside a bigger platform – think about Slack, Atlassian etc.
• Decentralized: Anyone can sell and buy anything, without third party surveillance – like Craigslist and eBay