Improving effectiveness of chatbots for e-commerce marketplaces

Abstract

Shoppers are increasingly buying at online marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm Mall, Tata CliQ, etc. With growing demand, the ability of a platform to help a customer in deciding what to buy (pre-purchase), how to buy (purchase) & further aid them in resolving post-purchase issues (e.g., payment, order tracking, refunds, etc.) will differentiate them (Wang, X., 2017). With increasing internet & e-commerce penetration in India, manually handling individual customer experience has become nearly impossible. Some players realized this long ago and have thus introduced chatbots, an automated application for conducting one-to-one customer interaction, in their platforms at different user interfaces. Chatbots not only reduce average customer interaction time by eliminating the waiting time, but they also exponentially lower the cost of human-provided telephone support (Kaczorowska-Spychalska, D., 2019). But at present, a tiny fraction of Indian customers engages with chatbots. The ability of these marketplaces to increase the effectiveness of chatbots will prove vital for future success.