Conversational commerce has gained popularity because it sits at the intersection of two booming areas of digital activity among consumers: mobile shopping and messaging (both text and voice).

According to most projections, conversational commerce is poised for significant growth. Gartner research estimates that in 2022, 70 per cent of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies, such as machine learning (ML) applications, chatbots, and mobile messaging (up from 15 per cent in 2018).

Sales made via conversational commerce channels like chatbots, digital voice assistants, and messaging will grow more than sevenfold from USD 41 billion in 2021 to USD 290 billion by 2025, according to Juniper Research.
In a panel discussion at ET CX+ Summit 2024, organised by ETBrandEquity.com, session chaired by Varun Markande, senior executive – content communities at ETBrandEquity engaged with panellists Mohit Singh, product lead – engineering, Ubona Technologies; Tanvi Jain, head – customer success at Sprinklr; Ashish Pawar, head of marketing, Tata Mutual Fund; Jyoti Arora, head – customer experience, Borosil; Abhay Tandon, digital innovation and partnerships officer, TVS Motor Company and Kinjal Shah, head – digital business, analytics and marketing, Kotak Mutual Fund to understand the trend shift in consumer preferences and turning chats into sales.

Sprinklr’s Jain remarked, “People shouldn’t have to worry about where they started the conversation, who they started with, they have to worry about the outcome. How do they get their problem resolved and that is what we do.”

Ubona Technologies’ Singh spoke about the framework of omnichannel strategy to engage with the customer. “Voice is still a very important conversational channel for India primarily because of two reasons, one is larger demography is included in this. Second is the immense linguistic diversity of our country where the voice channels make it very convenient for the customer across India,” he added.

There are some limitations to certain aspects of conversational commerce, however.
Singh highlighted the importance of intelligently using different channels at different stages of the sales.

From a customer’s point of view, investing is supposed to be boring but Shah from Kotak Mutual Funds shared the opportunities and challenges that eliminates the friction for the customers to get their hands on, easily.

“When we look at conversation commerce, it has started with awareness as a category. It is still at a very high level of awareness and consideration. Conversations are happening maybe to an extent when it is about investments,” Shah added.

Shah stated, “The challenges in terms of having an end to end journey for conversions on conversation right now, it’s still far fledged when it comes to investment.”

Tata Mutual Funds’ Pawar added to the same stating, “There are a lot of regulatory guidelines which allow us to do certain things and not do certain things. While getting transactions, the first thing we should listen to is we need to make sure that we need to try to solve the customer’s problem.”
Presently, the regulatory landscape is evolving and the marketers’ are betting on the platform thinking that it might be an opportunity to bring in the conversions to customers to enable commerce on the platform.

Borosil’s Arora mentioned the reason to use WhatsApp as their conversational channel, which is a direct channel.

She stated, “A lot of customers were primarily homemakers. We also have a lot of customers from tier two and tier three cities wherein some part of a sales is online, but primarily it’s all offline. Getting data from these customers and being able to push that communication. WhatsApp is the easiest channel because everybody uses WhatsApp and understands it.”

Arora highlighted the challenge in gathering customer data. She said, “For communicating with the customer, you also need a lot of customer data. We sell a lot of lines through the Amazon and Flipkarts of the world. Gathering the customer data is a challenge.”

The journey if it can be completed enough to clicks then WhatsApp becomes a key channel to drive conversational commerce.

Traditionally, there was a human agent to bring a nuance and carry the customer to the end of the journey. Now, with AI and GenAI that part of the journey and its complexity have been shifted at some level.

Jain stated, “With AI, we can visualise a world where everything is personalised but that is the middle of the journey. It is all about understanding the intent and then engaging with it depending on the context.”

“Intent detections at scale and even closing a conversation, it’s all possible through AI,” she added.

TVS Motor Company’s Tandon shared how organisations have a process of persistent memories of a customer. “WhatsApp is just one channel and for driving the sales you need to have multiple channels in the game,” he added.
Tandon further added, “With the intelligence that we have developed over the years [we have based on that. We create a journey. We try to reach out to the customer with the appropriate channel. And for some cases it could just be a single channel, but in majority of cases, it’s generally two or more channels and we ensure that the data is synced across the channel so that the customer has the same experience across channels and not all the channels are running in silos.”

Arora shared that these incidents are one of the challenges every industry faces. There’s also an out calling or outreach that is planned,” she added.

Arora said, “We will let it rest for a while because that data will keep churning. If it’s not happen today, it’ll happen tomorrow. So maybe one week down the line, there’ll be another match. We definitely try not to bombard the customers’ channel.”

CX+ Summit 2024: CEOs dwell on CX as a pillar of growth

Customer experience has emerged as a key differentiator for brands in every industry. Today, brands are focused on engaging their customers for a lifetime, making them more resilient to competition and economic headwinds. At the ET CX+ Summit 2024, Puneet Gupt, COO of Times Internet, engaged business leaders to explore how CX is driving their business forward.

“,”next_sibling”:[{“msid”:108316799,”title”:”Bollywood celebs team up with PETA India for cruelty-free cosmetics”,”entity_type”:”ARTICLE”,”link”:”/news/marketing/bollywood-celebs-team-up-with-peta-india-for-cruelty-free-cosmetics/108316799″,”category_name”:null,”category_name_seo”:”marketing”}],”related_content”:[],”seoschemas”:false,”msid”:108320839,”entity_type”:”ARTICLE”,”title”:”Conversational commerce: The art of turning chats into sales”,”synopsis”:”Conversational commerce, also known as chat commerce or conversational marketing, represents a way for online retailers to unleash the potential of conversation to sell their products and services. A recent survey has found over 80 per cent of customers are willing to pay more to get a better experience, suggesting that in the modern world of commerce, it is not always the products or prices that have the most significant impact on conversion but the positive customer experience a brand delivers.”,”titleseo”:”marketing/conversational-commerce-the-art-of-turning-chats-into-sales”,”status”:”ACTIVE”,”authors”:[{“author_name”:”BE Staff”,”author_link”:”/author/479256949/be-staff”,”author_image”:”https://etimg.etb2bimg.com/authorthumb/479256949.cms?width=250&height=250″,”author_additional”:{“thumbsize”:false,”msid”:479256949,”author_name”:”BE Staff”,”author_seo_name”:”be-staff”,”designation”:”Staff Writer”,”agency”:false}}],”Alttitle”:{“minfo”:””},”artag”:”ETBrandEquity”,”artdate”:”2024-03-08 13:00:00″,”lastupd”:”2024-03-08 13:00:08″,”breadcrumbTags”:[“Conversational commerce”,”ubona technologies”,”tvs motor company”,”tata mutual funds pawar”,”ET CX+ Summit 2024″,”CX+ Summit”,”CX+ Summit 2024″,”customer experience”],”secinfo”:{“seolocation”:”marketing/conversational-commerce-the-art-of-turning-chats-into-sales”}}” data-authors=”[” be data-category-name=”Marketing” data-category_id=”381″ data-date=”2024-03-08″ data-index=”article_1″ readability=”28.120820875238″>

Conversational commerce, also known as chat commerce or conversational marketing, represents a way for online retailers to unleash the potential of conversation to sell their products and services. A recent survey has found over 80 per cent of customers are willing to pay more to get a better experience, suggesting that in the modern world of commerce, it is not always the products or prices that have the most significant impact on conversion but the positive customer experience a brand delivers.

• Updated On Mar 8, 2024 at 01:00 PM IST

Conversational commerce has gained popularity because it sits at the intersection of two booming areas of digital activity among consumers: mobile shopping and messaging (both text and voice).

According to most projections, conversational commerce is poised for significant growth. Gartner research estimates that in 2022, 70 per cent of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies, such as machine learning (ML) applications, chatbots, and mobile messaging (up from 15 per cent in 2018).

Sales made via conversational commerce channels like chatbots, digital voice assistants, and messaging will grow more than sevenfold from USD 41 billion in 2021 to USD 290 billion by 2025, according to Juniper Research.
In a panel discussion at ET CX+ Summit 2024, organised by ETBrandEquity.com, session chaired by Varun Markande, senior executive – content communities at ETBrandEquity engaged with panellists Mohit Singh, product lead – engineering, Ubona Technologies; Tanvi Jain, head – customer success at Sprinklr; Ashish Pawar, head of marketing, Tata Mutual Fund; Jyoti Arora, head – customer experience, Borosil; Abhay Tandon, digital innovation and partnerships officer, TVS Motor Company and Kinjal Shah, head – digital business, analytics and marketing, Kotak Mutual Fund to understand the trend shift in consumer preferences and turning chats into sales.

Sprinklr’s Jain remarked, “People shouldn’t have to worry about where they started the conversation, who they started with, they have to worry about the outcome. How do they get their problem resolved and that is what we do.”

Ubona Technologies’ Singh spoke about the framework of omnichannel strategy to engage with the customer. “Voice is still a very important conversational channel for India primarily because of two reasons, one is larger demography is included in this. Second is the immense linguistic diversity of our country where the voice channels make it very convenient for the customer across India,” he added.

There are some limitations to certain aspects of conversational commerce, however.
Singh highlighted the importance of intelligently using different channels at different stages of the sales.

From a customer’s point of view, investing is supposed to be boring but Shah from Kotak Mutual Funds shared the opportunities and challenges that eliminates the friction for the customers to get their hands on, easily.

“When we look at conversation commerce, it has started with awareness as a category. It is still at a very high level of awareness and consideration. Conversations are happening maybe to an extent when it is about investments,” Shah added.

Shah stated, “The challenges in terms of having an end to end journey for conversions on conversation right now, it’s still far fledged when it comes to investment.”

Tata Mutual Funds’ Pawar added to the same stating, “There are a lot of regulatory guidelines which allow us to do certain things and not do certain things. While getting transactions, the first thing we should listen to is we need to make sure that we need to try to solve the customer’s problem.”
Presently, the regulatory landscape is evolving and the marketers’ are betting on the platform thinking that it might be an opportunity to bring in the conversions to customers to enable commerce on the platform.

Borosil’s Arora mentioned the reason to use WhatsApp as their conversational channel, which is a direct channel.

She stated, “A lot of customers were primarily homemakers. We also have a lot of customers from tier two and tier three cities wherein some part of a sales is online, but primarily it’s all offline. Getting data from these customers and being able to push that communication. WhatsApp is the easiest channel because everybody uses WhatsApp and understands it.”

Arora highlighted the challenge in gathering customer data. She said, “For communicating with the customer, you also need a lot of customer data. We sell a lot of lines through the Amazon and Flipkarts of the world. Gathering the customer data is a challenge.”

The journey if it can be completed enough to clicks then WhatsApp becomes a key channel to drive conversational commerce.

Traditionally, there was a human agent to bring a nuance and carry the customer to the end of the journey. Now, with AI and GenAI that part of the journey and its complexity have been shifted at some level.

Jain stated, “With AI, we can visualise a world where everything is personalised but that is the middle of the journey. It is all about understanding the intent and then engaging with it depending on the context.”

“Intent detections at scale and even closing a conversation, it’s all possible through AI,” she added.

TVS Motor Company’s Tandon shared how organisations have a process of persistent memories of a customer. “WhatsApp is just one channel and for driving the sales you need to have multiple channels in the game,” he added.
Tandon further added, “With the intelligence that we have developed over the years [we have based on that. We create a journey. We try to reach out to the customer with the appropriate channel. And for some cases it could just be a single channel, but in majority of cases, it’s generally two or more channels and we ensure that the data is synced across the channel so that the customer has the same experience across channels and not all the channels are running in silos.”

Arora shared that these incidents are one of the challenges every industry faces. There’s also an out calling or outreach that is planned,” she added.

Arora said, “We will let it rest for a while because that data will keep churning. If it’s not happen today, it’ll happen tomorrow. So maybe one week down the line, there’ll be another match. We definitely try not to bombard the customers’ channel.”

Customer experience has emerged as a key differentiator for brands in every industry. Today, brands are focused on engaging their customers for a lifetime, making them more resilient to competition and economic headwinds. At the ET CX+ Summit 2024, Puneet Gupt, COO of Times Internet, engaged business leaders to explore how CX is driving their business forward.

• Published On Mar 8, 2024 at 01:00 PM IST

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Conversational commerce has gained popularity because it sits at the intersection of two booming areas of digital activity among consumers: mobile shopping and messaging (both text and voice).

According to most projections, conversational commerce is poised for significant growth. Gartner research estimates that in 2022, 70 per cent of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies, such as machine learning (ML) applications, chatbots, and mobile messaging (up from 15 per cent in 2018).

Sales made via conversational commerce channels like chatbots, digital voice assistants, and messaging will grow more than sevenfold from USD 41 billion in 2021 to USD 290 billion by 2025, according to Juniper Research.
In a panel discussion at ET CX+ Summit 2024, organised by ETBrandEquity.com, session chaired by Varun Markande, senior executive – content communities at ETBrandEquity engaged with panellists Mohit Singh, product lead – engineering, Ubona Technologies; Tanvi Jain, head – customer success at Sprinklr; Ashish Pawar, head of marketing, Tata Mutual Fund; Jyoti Arora, head – customer experience, Borosil; Abhay Tandon, digital innovation and partnerships officer, TVS Motor Company and Kinjal Shah, head – digital business, analytics and marketing, Kotak Mutual Fund to understand the trend shift in consumer preferences and turning chats into sales.

Sprinklr’s Jain remarked, “People shouldn’t have to worry about where they started the conversation, who they started with, they have to worry about the outcome. How do they get their problem resolved and that is what we do.”

Ubona Technologies’ Singh spoke about the framework of omnichannel strategy to engage with the customer. “Voice is still a very important conversational channel for India primarily because of two reasons, one is larger demography is included in this. Second is the immense linguistic diversity of our country where the voice channels make it very convenient for the customer across India,” he added.

There are some limitations to certain aspects of conversational commerce, however.
Singh highlighted the importance of intelligently using different channels at different stages of the sales.

From a customer’s point of view, investing is supposed to be boring but Shah from Kotak Mutual Funds shared the opportunities and challenges that eliminates the friction for the customers to get their hands on, easily.

“When we look at conversation commerce, it has started with awareness as a category. It is still at a very high level of awareness and consideration. Conversations are happening maybe to an extent when it is about investments,” Shah added.

Shah stated, “The challenges in terms of having an end to end journey for conversions on conversation right now, it’s still far fledged when it comes to investment.”

Tata Mutual Funds’ Pawar added to the same stating, “There are a lot of regulatory guidelines which allow us to do certain things and not do certain things. While getting transactions, the first thing we should listen to is we need to make sure that we need to try to solve the customer’s problem.”
Presently, the regulatory landscape is evolving and the marketers’ are betting on the platform thinking that it might be an opportunity to bring in the conversions to customers to enable commerce on the platform.

Borosil’s Arora mentioned the reason to use WhatsApp as their conversational channel, which is a direct channel.

She stated, “A lot of customers were primarily homemakers. We also have a lot of customers from tier two and tier three cities wherein some part of a sales is online, but primarily it’s all offline. Getting data from these customers and being able to push that communication. WhatsApp is the easiest channel because everybody uses WhatsApp and understands it.”

Arora highlighted the challenge in gathering customer data. She said, “For communicating with the customer, you also need a lot of customer data. We sell a lot of lines through the Amazon and Flipkarts of the world. Gathering the customer data is a challenge.”

The journey if it can be completed enough to clicks then WhatsApp becomes a key channel to drive conversational commerce.

Traditionally, there was a human agent to bring a nuance and carry the customer to the end of the journey. Now, with AI and GenAI that part of the journey and its complexity have been shifted at some level.

Jain stated, “With AI, we can visualise a world where everything is personalised but that is the middle of the journey. It is all about understanding the intent and then engaging with it depending on the context.”

“Intent detections at scale and even closing a conversation, it’s all possible through AI,” she added.

TVS Motor Company’s Tandon shared how organisations have a process of persistent memories of a customer. “WhatsApp is just one channel and for driving the sales you need to have multiple channels in the game,” he added.
Tandon further added, “With the intelligence that we have developed over the years [we have based on that. We create a journey. We try to reach out to the customer with the appropriate channel. And for some cases it could just be a single channel, but in majority of cases, it’s generally two or more channels and we ensure that the data is synced across the channel so that the customer has the same experience across channels and not all the channels are running in silos.”

Arora shared that these incidents are one of the challenges every industry faces. There’s also an out calling or outreach that is planned,” she added.

Arora said, “We will let it rest for a while because that data will keep churning. If it’s not happen today, it’ll happen tomorrow. So maybe one week down the line, there’ll be another match. We definitely try not to bombard the customers’ channel.”

CX+ Summit 2024: CEOs dwell on CX as a pillar of growth

Customer experience has emerged as a key differentiator for brands in every industry. Today, brands are focused on engaging their customers for a lifetime, making them more resilient to competition and economic headwinds. At the ET CX+ Summit 2024, Puneet Gupt, COO of Times Internet, engaged business leaders to explore how CX is driving their business forward.

“,”next_sibling”:[{“msid”:108316799,”title”:”Bollywood celebs team up with PETA India for cruelty-free cosmetics”,”entity_type”:”ARTICLE”,”link”:”/news/marketing/bollywood-celebs-team-up-with-peta-india-for-cruelty-free-cosmetics/108316799″,”category_name”:null,”category_name_seo”:”marketing”}],”related_content”:[],”seoschemas”:false,”msid”:108320839,”entity_type”:”ARTICLE”,”title”:”Conversational commerce: The art of turning chats into sales”,”synopsis”:”Conversational commerce, also known as chat commerce or conversational marketing, represents a way for online retailers to unleash the potential of conversation to sell their products and services. A recent survey has found over 80 per cent of customers are willing to pay more to get a better experience, suggesting that in the modern world of commerce, it is not always the products or prices that have the most significant impact on conversion but the positive customer experience a brand delivers.”,”titleseo”:”marketing/conversational-commerce-the-art-of-turning-chats-into-sales”,”status”:”ACTIVE”,”authors”:[{“author_name”:”BE Staff”,”author_link”:”/author/479256949/be-staff”,”author_image”:”https://etimg.etb2bimg.com/authorthumb/479256949.cms?width=250&height=250″,”author_additional”:{“thumbsize”:false,”msid”:479256949,”author_name”:”BE Staff”,”author_seo_name”:”be-staff”,”designation”:”Staff Writer”,”agency”:false}}],”Alttitle”:{“minfo”:””},”artag”:”ETBrandEquity”,”artdate”:”2024-03-08 13:00:00″,”lastupd”:”2024-03-08 13:00:08″,”breadcrumbTags”:[“Conversational commerce”,”ubona technologies”,”tvs motor company”,”tata mutual funds pawar”,”ET CX+ Summit 2024″,”CX+ Summit”,”CX+ Summit 2024″,”customer experience”],”secinfo”:{“seolocation”:”marketing/conversational-commerce-the-art-of-turning-chats-into-sales”}}” data-news_link=”https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/conversational-commerce-the-art-of-turning-chats-into-sales/108320839″>