Conversational AI can handle order confirmation for you… and more.
Tags: ai, vscode
Published: 2021-09-09 15:21:45

Originally posted on dasha.ai/en-us/blog/order-confirmation-ai

A new wave of conversational AI helps automate order confirmation — and potentially save your company money and time. All while skyrocketing your customer experience.

The conversational AI market is booming. If you’ve been following developments, you’ll know that it goes by a lot of different names — chatbots, voicebots, personal assistants, etc. But at the end of the day, everyone agrees to use conversational AI as a cheaper and more accessible way to interact with users. One of the ways companies use conversational AI is to automate their order confirmation process.

Grubhub, for instance, gets over 620,000 orders per day, and that’s just one food ordering app. UPS delivered 21.1 million packages on average in 2020. With such huge numbers of deliveries per day, it's essential for companies to make sure they can accurately and efficiently confirm the order and the delivery details.

Why traditional order confirmation ways aren't efficient
While some companies have implemented traditional order confirmation via text message or email, there are many drawbacks. The ability to confirm the order in real-time changes the entire customer experience. It saves time and money for the customer and improves their experience with the company. An order confirmation text is not the best method for companies that deliver perishable goods like flowers or food.

What if the flowers arrive but the customer didn’t get the text? What if the food delivery was made to the wrong address? What if the right information wasn't provided correctly? Conversational AI tackles these issues by allowing you to easily and efficiently confirm orders in real-time. This article will explain how conversational AI can be used for order confirmation, and how you can automate it for your company.

The order confirmation option is available in most apps right now. The customer and the delivery company both get a notification, and both parties can see the confirmation. However, some apps give the delivery company access to the order details, and not the customer. This can be problematic for the customer. The customer might not even realize their order was placed, and it would be very difficult to cancel and get a refund. Besides, it's not uncommon for the customer to have ordered something they didn't mean to order, be it an extra pizza, or jeans in the wrong size. The best way to avoid such errors is by calling the person who placed an order right after it has been placed. And you can do just that with an automated conversational AI order confirmation app.

Why conversational AI is the best way to confirm orders
In the U.S, online spending amounted to around $900 billion in 2020. With such a huge amount of spending, companies have to keep their order confirmation process as efficient as possible, and that’s what conversational AI does. If a company chooses to automate its order confirmation process, it doesn’t mean that it has to spend lots of time creating a conversational AI app. In fact, it only takes a couple of hours to write an order confirmation app with Dasha AI. Once done, your company will no longer need to bother with hiring personnel to handle order confirmation calls, conversational AI will do it in their stead.

Besides, one of the greatest benefits of conversational AI apps is that you can not only automate the order confirmation process. The app can help you create the best customer experience by not only automatically confirming orders, but also ask customer experience and/or NPS survey questions such as,

“Are you satisfied with your order?",
"How would you rate the delivery process?",
"Did the size of the [item ordered] fit you?",
"Would you recommend [brand name] to your friends?."
The applications of conversational AI apps are virtually limitless. Why waste time and money on a team of customer service people when you can "hire" a conversational AI app to do the work for you?

With the right app, you can automate the process of connecting with customers and building an immediate rapport, since the person will hear a human voice on the other side of the phone. The best part is that, with conversational AI, you don’t need to create a separate app for every category of products. Whether it’s customer service, delivery confirmation, or product search or recommendation, the app can be created once and then used across different use cases.

Benefits of automating processes with conversational AI
There are several benefits to conversational AI automation:

Increase customer satisfaction.
Most companies see conversational AI as an opportunity for you to connect with your customers in a human-like, most natural manner. In turn, they get happier and more engaged. Moreover, you can nudge your customers to respond to questions and/or requests as they come in.

Increase customer retention and loyalty.
Newer, smarter customers have become harder to retain. If you want to win back these customers, you have to offer a better experience. You can use Dasha AI to make calls that are more personal and specific to the customer. For example, you can ask if they would be happy with a discount, or you can send a generous promo code in case they weren't fully satisfied with the previous order.

Gaining new customers with conversational AI.
Baymard Institute states that nearly 70% of carts get abandoned. Whole 7 out of 10 potential customers leave the purchasing process mid-way. Yet conversational AI could be a game-changer. With Dasha, you could create a conversational AI app that would call those potential customers. Dasha will remind them about the unfinished order, thus reducing the abandoned cart rate and increasing the conversion rate.

Also, your company can analyze customer behavior and know that they’d be most likely to purchase a product if they have already got similar ones. Then, you can mark these new customers as potential prospects, create a compelling personalized offer.

Get honest feedback.
The best way to learn if your company is doing well is by asking your customers about their experience. Use a conversational AI app to ask questions about their opinion on their order, or even ask feed company and how you could improve the experience. Take a look at how NPS surveys are automated with a conversational AI app in this post.

Reduce cancellations.
When your customer places an order and gets a confirmation from the merchant, they feel reassured and are more likely to complete the transaction. However, many times, the customer realizes that they made a mistake during the ordering process. It could be because the company changed prices, or a different product was ordered. But as a result of having paid for it, the customer would want to get a refund. With conversational AI, the customer would not only be able to revise their food delivery, clothes, or tech device order, but cancel it right after the purchase was complete, shall they have a change of heart.

How the conversational AI order confirmation process works
With Dasha, the interactions with customers aren't troublesome to automate. Companies can focus more on other things while conversational AI does most of the work dealing with customers.

Before I get into describing the process, I encourage you to take a look at this how-to post on how I created an order delivery conversational AI app in just a couple of hours.

Without further ado, with Dasha, the order confirmation process is done as follows:

Once your company gets an order request, they will be given a call from Dasha and the person on the other line will sound like a human. At this point Dasha will already have all the necessary information needed such as ordered items, customer's name, and delivery address, to proceed with the order confirmation.

Next, Dasha will proceed conversing with the customer regarding their order and say things like: "Hi Jessica, this is Dasha from [company name] calling to confirm your order. I see you've ordered [item 1] and [item 2] to be delivered to [customer's address]. Would you like to change anything about your order?" and go from there.

Dasha conversational AI can also ask the customer about their preferred paying method and shall it be a card, process the payment right there and then.

Once Dasha has confirmed the order, the order can then be passed on to the fulfillment team to prepare the order.

The order is then delivered (or shipped) to your customer's address. Once the shipping/delivery process is initiated, Dasha can call back the customer to confirm that the package or the delivery is on its way.

This, in essence, is how conversational AI saves your company time and money, by taking care of the customer service aspect of the order, thus allowing companies to spend more time improving their other services.

Develop an AI ordering system yourself (it's easy!)
Take a look at how the conversation would go once you create the order confirmation app:

https://youtu.be/J4JuK6ds8PE

Since creating an order confirmation conversational AI app takes only a couple of hours, I encourage you to try developing an app yourself! You don't need a team of developers to write it, using Dasha is intuitive and doesn't require any programming knowledge, so come as you are! In case you run into any difficulties, we're always here to help you in Dasha Developer Community, so join us! :)