Conversational Commerce : the Conversation of Tomorrow

Presented at the 14th 14th European Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance ECMLG 2018: From the article: 'Online shopping in The Netherlands is rapidly becoming more popular and many web-shops are aiming to develop improved customer journeys. As a consequence pure play web-shops switch to an Omni-channel approach while conventional businesses add ‘online’ to their offline sales. In The Netherlands fast growth of online sales is made possible by industry organisations such as ‘Thuiswinkel.org’, an organisation that supports their over 12.000 retail-members with knowledge, development and information on all possible aspects of online shopping. In 2017 these members raised the question whether it is possible to mimic the ‘traditional sales conversation’ to online environments by deploying AI based conversation technology. To research this question the specific actual benefits for consumers need to be determined of the conventional ‘offline-shopping sales conversation’. Next, the current online shopping opportunities presented by the B2C market of The Netherlands were studied including the level of interaction (conversation) that is technically provided. With so many industries active in the online arena it was decided to focus on the following industries: Electronics, Clothing, Food, and Financial services. This selection was made based on levels of online sales (highest for these sectors) and interests of Thuiswinkel.org members. Subsequently, the offline sales conversation benefits that were found as ‘most important’ in these industries, were used to construct online customer journeys. These are then used to formulate requirements for the comparison and selection of conversation systems. With this insight in how to achieve true conversational commerce in the defined customer journeys of the four industry’s the retailers’ question is answered. The outcome shows differences per industry in importance of a limited number of ‘e-sales conversation’ benefits. An important conclusion is that the current available technology cannot deploy all complex aspects of the offline sales conversation benefits in an online shopping environment. The technology still needs to progress significantly to adopt offline sales conversation aspects. On the other hand pure substitution of offline benefits may not be required. Further, the maturity of the functionality within each conversation system appears to be of importance as requirements differ per company. Additional research is required to extend on the differences and first insight found in the options to develop ‘e-sales conversation’.'