Chatbots will save retailers $439 million annually

Just AI has presented an overview of conversational AI in retail. The research includes Russian and Western analytics, trends, cases, and the opinions of retailers and vendors.

According to Juniper Research, by 2023 chatbots will save retailers $439 million annually compared to $7 million in 2019. Retail sales through this channel show an annual growth rate of 98% and will reach $112 billion in 2023 versus $7.3 billion in 2019.

"We are now seeing an increase in interest and demand from retailers to automate customer communication channels. The year 2020 has highlighted all the weakest aspects of communication with customers in retail, and because of this, companies have to restructure their business processes. Automation starts with MVPs, and rightly so, as this industry has many internal systems to integrate with, which requires resources from all project participants," comments Sintia Zakarot, Head of Customer and Partner Relationships at Just AI.

Another element of the digitalization that is gaining momentum is mobile applications. App downloads increased by 11% from January to April 2020 compared to the same period last year. And more than 45% of U.S. users would like to be able to interact with mobile apps by voice.

The habit of voice control has largely been shaped by smart speakers and screens. At the end of last year there were 400 million such devices in the world. 62% of smart speaker owners in the U.S. have ever made a purchase using their voice. Voice commerce sales in the U.S. market are expected to reach $40 billion by 2022.

"Our goal is not to build a wall in the form of a chatbot or smart IVR between the customer and the company, but to solve the issue as quickly and efficiently as possible. The voice or text assistant should eventually become a purely utilitarian problem-solving tool - fast, convenient and efficient," says Konrad Rudenok, technology development manager at M.Video.

"The prospects of conversational AI in retail, as well as in many other areas, are very high, since AI answers much faster than a live person, and customers quite often ask questions that can be fully answered with one template. Of course, an operator is also needed, as highly specialized queries occur. In my opinion, AI is rather the first echelon of customer assistance, which helps reduce the load on operators by freeing them from answering typical questions," comments Pavel Gurshal, IT product manager of "Site" at DNS.