True Conversational Commerce: The Future of Commerce is Personal, at Scale

Conversational Commerce is poised to transform the future of commerce for businesses around the world. Companies that embrace c-commerce today are the pioneers and leaders who will benefit most from this technology. 

It has been almost a decade since Conversational Commerce emerged as a concept. Consumers at the time were just beginning to spend more time on their phones, less on their laptops. Their attention was on just a few apps–most of them social. Conversational Commerce was to deliver convenience, personalization, and recommendations to users conversationally, on-the-go, when they have very little attention to spare. 

Attention is a scarce resource, and has become more fragmented over time. We constantly jump from one app to another, with one constant: checking messages. In most countries outside the US, people spend most of their time on messaging apps like WhatsApp–longer than even YouTube or Tik Tok. Today, that is where the attention is. 

When consumer attention turned to devices, something was lost. As commerce evolved, we moved from shopping at stores to shopping on screens. The first was personalized, but not scalable, the second scalable, but not personalized. Conversational Commerce combines the best of in-person commerce with the best of digital commerce, while meeting consumers where they are today. Businesses can build personalized relationships with customers, offering every touchpoint, from marketing, customer service, and sales, in one place instead of across many. 

In reality, we are just at the beginning of this journey. Today, most conversational experiences in the market resemble the early years of the first e-commerce sites: here are the ads, the products, and answers to some of your questions, but call us or come into a store to make a purchase. It was assumed that nothing could disrupt a brick and mortar retail industry worth trillions of dollars. Today, e-commerce accounts for more than 20% of purchases made globally. Imagine, for a moment, if companies like Amazon had stopped innovating in 2000, after just a decade of reimagining e-commerce. 

That is exactly what is happening in most messaging experiences today. The focus for most messaging solutions in today’s market is on sharing business information and automating customer service, but not on generating sales through conversation. We are just at the beginning of what will be an enormous transformation in commerce, and an opportunity for enormous growth for your business.

Yalo already sees amazing success in conversational sales today. We have customers for whom messaging already represents more than 30% of their sales. Some have increased their conversion rate 4x by introducing messaging into their omnichannel strategy. 

The future of true Conversational Commerce–focused on sales–is where we see the biggest opportunity. 

What does this look like?

First, it’s personalized. Businesses converse one-on-one with their customers through a sophisticated combination of automation and human interaction. Why segment customers when you can talk to them and personalize their experience individually?

Second, it’s contextual. Every interaction continues a customer conversation, rather than starting one. When we talk to a friend, we open messages and continue, with the context of all previous conversations. In the same way, Conversational Commerce is contextual, connected with all other experiences in and outside the channel.

Most importantly, it's simple. Everyone knows how to have a conversation on a messaging app, and how to use the app. There’s nothing new for them to learn.

How does Yalo accomplish this? With three pillars that create personalized, contextual, simple commerce:

A Conversational Commerce Engine

In the same way that commerce on websites had to be adapted to commerce on mobile apps, businesses must adapt commerce experiences to messaging. This requires a conversationally native, end-to-end commerce platform that supports customers across their entire journey. It also requires headless infrastructure so that your unique shopping experience can be translated and exist as messages, a catalog, or any format that best serves your customers. Additionally, it must integrate easily to the systems you already have, and adapt them to a conversational modality.

A Journey Builder

Like any in-person conversation with a customer, customers want to get all their needs met on messaging, and as a business, you want to end your conversation in a sale. This means your business has to go beyond commerce and incorporate marketing, customer service, and any other customer experience that may lead to a better sales outcome into your messaging channel.

The journey builder on Yalo’s Studio Platform allows businesses to handle all customer needs from pre-sale to post-sale. In addition, it allows both developers and non-developers to program and improve the customer experience in real time. 

AI-first architecture

Customer personalization and context require a layer of data that not only generates insights, but allows you to take action right away. It ensures every customer receives the right message, with the right product, at the right time. 

What is unique is the new set of data made available through customer conversations. Websites don’t talk, and in-person sales will never know exactly what a customer said, or what they answered back in response. In messaging, this is possible. When you combine conversational data with sales and consumer journey data, you can create magical customer experiences. 

With these three key pillars, Yalo is building a future where Conversational Commerce is the most impactful customer touchpoint for the businesses we work with. This includes consumer goods businesses and distributors like Mondelez, Coca Cola FEMSA, Nestle, and Unilever who use it to increase product sales to small business owners, and grow their networks. In fact, Yalo has the only Conversational Solution in the market adapted to this B2B use case.

It also includes businesses like Dominos, Sears, Burger King, and Palacio de Hierro, who use it to increase sales to customers. With Yalo, they are able to translate their unique brand to an end-to-end conversational experience on the channel where their customers already are, and that they prefer.

Let's imagine a future where every business can have personalized conversations with millions of customers across the world, all managed from one place. That's what we build here every day. 

We would love to help you build it too. To learn more about Conversational Commerce with Yalo, click here.