Traditional communication channels, like email and phone calls, are increasingly seen as impersonal and slow. Today's consumers demand a more engaging and immediate experience. This is where conversational commerce comes in.
Conversational commerce leverages messaging platforms like WhatsApp and SMS to facilitate two-way communication between businesses and customers. This allows for a more personal and convenient experience, fostering stronger customer relationships and boosting sales. However, managing these conversations at scale can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
By integrating AI capabilities into conversational commerce platforms, businesses can unlock a new level of efficiency and effectiveness. Generative AI, a specific type of AI that can create human-quality text, is taking things to another level.
In the latest advancements of conversational commerce, Vonage, a cloud communications provider under Ericsson, today announced generative AI integration within its Conversational Commerce platform, powered by Jumper.ai.
With Vonage Conversational Commerce, powered by Jumper.ai, brands build trust by engaging consumers throughout their buying journeys on the channels they love. The integration of generative AI enhances customer connections across platforms, streamlines operations and generates valuable data.
The core feature is AI-powered live chat assistance. Traditional live chat can leave agents juggling repetitive tasks and struggling to personalize responses. This AI integration acts as a virtual assistant and suggests tailored responses and rephrasing options. This frees agents to focus on complex problems and nuanced situations, which boosts their productivity. Overall, AI-powered assistance elevates the entire communication experience.
A content generator for WhatsApp marketing templates allows brands to quickly and easily create diverse marketing content. The result is a reduced marketing team workload. Faster production ensures messages resonate with individual customers, which drives lead generation and profitability.
The offering's AI-powered knowledge base reduces human intervention. An AI bot interprets user queries, analyzes knowledge base documents and delivers personalized answers directly. Impersonal canned responses are eliminated.
Other capabilities include referral marketing and Conversational Commerce APIs.
With referral marketing, Vonage Conversational Commerce users can now initiate WhatsApp referral campaigns right from the dashboard. This feature gives them the ability to acquire new customers without additional marketing overhead costs.
For example, HolidayPirates, an international travel company using Vonage Conversational Commerce, has seen success in identifying and marketing to its most engaged customers through WhatsApp. Kamila Skötsch, global CRM team lead for HolidayPirates, stated that they can now target their top 25% of active subscribers more effectively. These WhatsApp users are quicker to respond to deals compared to other channels, driving significant traffic to partners with click-through rates reaching 40%. Additionally, some messages boast open rates as high as 97%.
With Conversational Commerce APIs, connect third-party applications to the Jumper.ai dashboard for conversational marketing and commerce through platforms like MoEngage and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These APIs enable marketers to leverage Vonage's capabilities for richer customer interactions, product sharing and transaction completion.
“We are seeing a significant increase in demand for integrated AI capabilities that can easily be expanded across platforms as businesses recognize the efficiency and customization possibilities that generative AI offers,” said Savinay Berry, EVP product and engineering for Vonage. “By integrating state-of-the-art generative AI capabilities with our Conversational Commerce solution, we are empowering users to generate creative content, automate tasks and improve the overall user experience.”
These generative AI enhancements to Vonage Conversational Commerce are currently in beta and will be generally available in Q2 2024.
