Artificial intelligence has paved a way for digital marketers to watch their customers’ decision-making process, closely and carefully; to understand their needs and preferences and predict how they change due to measurable factors. The number of user behavior predictors have increased tremendously in the recent years, as numerous types of digital touchpoints have been introduced.
Novel and powerful machine learning approaches has made it possible to dive deep into understanding users at personal level. Measure customer’s satisfaction level based on implicit expression of their feelings and opinions as part of a text review or vocal communication with a voice assistant device or software is quite effortless and natural. Respectively, the person feels less driven by the marketer during a conversational commerce journey.
In fact, the natural communication between the voice assistant and the user is what makes it stand out among all the other digital touchpoints. Voice assistant is not only present in the form of generic smart speakers or smart phone assistants such as Cortana, Google Assistant, Siri or Alexa, but it can be a chatbot within your favorite messenger app. Therefore, each user carries a digital assistant within their pocket that communicate with them via natural language, reacts to their feelings and personalize their commerce journey.
The user rarely needs to make any effort to visit an online shop, look for the reviews, do comparison or type down their own review. Seamless integration of voice assistants with smart phones, the rapid growth in users’ proclivity for mobile commerce (as seen in the image above), the expanding market for the smart speakers and increasing tendency of the users to use their voice assistant for shopping, further reveals the important role of conversational commerce in the future of digital marketing.