What Is Driving E-commerce in 2022?

Over the next four years, the value of conversational commerce will grow by more than 590%, to $290 billion. And chat and voicebots will account for 50% of spending on this type of online sales. Will intelligent automation make it possible to increase profits in e-commerce?

Conversational commerce uses innovative technology, including artificial intelligence, to automate transactions and payments through channels such as chat and voicebots, emails, phone calls, messaging apps and digital voice assistants. It enables valuable dialogue between companies and prospective customers across different levels and multiple channels. As a result, it drives deeper customer relationships with brands and, in turn, increases sales.

Effectiveness of activities

In practice, however, handling all communication channels requires committing substantial company resources. And the more companies invest and dedicate to achieve given metrics and planned targets, the less efficiency they gain.

- The fewer resources and team effort you devote to routine and monotonous tasks, the more motivated and effective your team is. As a result, key performance indicators in your processes rise. The more automation you introduce in your organization, the more space you give your employees for creative and strategic tasks. Communication automation enables companies to achieve both multichannel reach and efficiency, which translates into a higher return on investment. – says Bartosz Malinowski, Head of Voicebot Department at APIFONICA.com

However, according to Sales Insight Lab research, as many as 50% of all leads contacted by the sales department are characterized by low quality and a low likelihood of closing sales conversations. Meanwhile, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, as much as 65% of a salesperson's working time consists of activities that do not generate revenue, and actual selling accounts for only 35% of salespeople's time.

Automation of sales activities in practice

What is driving e-commerce in 2022? Practical applications of conversational commerce

That is why companies automate the sales process so that the sales department can devote more time to actual selling and, as a result, increase sales. An interesting example of how companies use intelligent communication automation to analyze and optimize processes is Intercars. It is the largest importer and distributor of spare parts for passenger and commercial vehicles in Central and Eastern Europe. Phone calls are one of the main communication channels with customers, so measuring and tracking call activity is crucial.

- With them in mind, we introduced a solution known as phone number masking. Intercars uses more than 10,000 different phone numbers to track incoming calls from various sources. This is because one phone number is assigned to an individual marketing activity or tool – mix, i.e. each advertisement, website, country, etc. Thanks to this, the customer knows which resources generate sales and which do not. Investing in the activities and channels that achieve the best results and eliminating those that perform worse makes it possible to increase return on investment. – adds Malinowski.

Another example of how companies automate the sales process, e.g. processing incoming leads, is the e-learning platform Foxford.com. Before implementing the system, the response speed to a new contact averaged 8 minutes per lead. After implementing automation, the voicebot calls the prospective contact just one minute after information about them appears in the CRM. In addition, the intelligent system asks preliminary questions, collects answers itself or, at the customer's request, schedules a later conversation time. Lead responses are placed by the voicebot itself in the appropriate fields in the CRM. It also assigns a status to each contact in the CRM, assigning it to a specific department.

Practical data showed that over a period of 2 months, about 30% of contacts were completely unreachable. In total, there were as many as 2,500 invalid phone numbers in the databases, no answers, etc. As a result of implementing the Apifonica Voicebot, Foxford saved 333 person-hours. Automation made it possible not only to save resources, but also helped maintain a high conversion rate and increase return on investment, or ROI, helping to retain the company's most valuable resource – its employees.

The data on conversational commerce comes from a Juniper Research report.