The chat commerce revolution: Turning conversations into customer conversions

Author: Jonathan Elcock, co-founder and CEO at rather.chat

As your manager drones on about punctuality (oh, the irony), you suddenly remember you forgot to get a quick hair trim earlier this week. Panic sets in. You want to look your best for tonight, but you can’t step out to call your hairdresser, and this meeting shows no signs of ending soon.

Desperate, you check the website of your usual salon, Stylers Inc. The only contact options? A landline and an email. The odds of getting a quick response to an email? Almost zero.

You start browsing for alternatives and find The Snip Spot, a salon closer to home. A WhatsApp number is listed – perfect! You send a message asking to make an appointment for a summer trim at 5pm, expecting to wait a few minutes for a human on the other end to answer. Instead, you get an instant reply, with recommendations of various summer trim style options as well what styles are currently trending in South Africa, but no availability for your preferred time. The Whatsapp number instead offers two stylists for a 5:30pm slot. You proceed to choose your preferred stylist, and the smartbot confirms the booking and price.

All of this took less than a minute, saving you the frustration of waiting until your meeting ends and hoping someone picks up the phone at the salon.

Instead, you engaged with an AI-powered chatbot, otherwise known as a smartbot – the latest wave of technology that has dramatically redefined the e-commerce landscape by bringing products and financial services much closer to the customer than ever before through Whatsapp chat, meeting the customer on their terms and in their time, and by engaging customers in an active, linear conversation without the scripted responses that have characterised the chatbots of yesteryear.

With the general customer class of 2025 now fully exposed to online shopping, digital services, and social media, this ‘electronic overload’ has reconditioned humans to desire instant gratification – a far cry from the customer class of 25 years ago, who still relied on physical shopping, and perhaps more patience.

Businesses can no longer rely on just selling a product or service. More and more are realising that to outcompete rivals, they must also sell convenience. It is now the difference between a sale, and a loss, with Stylers Inc losing a customer to The Snip Spot within seconds.

E-commerce alone will not cut it anymore. With customer demand and patience moving further in opposite directions, online browsing for products and services is also becoming a tiresome exercise. Smartbots are instrumental in realigning convenience in this evolving digital age and helping customers get to their desires a lot faster through chat commerce.

Whatsapp has been an influential platform in fully realising the scalability of smartbots and has become the face of chat commerce. The app has moved beyond just a messaging platform and has essentially become a new trusted digital marketplace by housing smartbots for businesses.

While it is understandable that old habits die hard, businesses are still relying on traditional customer sales channels such as SMS, emails and call centres that are perceived as a cheaper alternative to newer technologies. However, when companies do try to call their customers, they fail to reach 30% to 40% of their clients (even with multiple attempts). This is because people don't pick up the phone, they are busy or are sick of spam calls. Apps such as TruCaller only further compound the low answer rates. This results in a low return of investment, forcing businesses to invest more heavily on top of funnel activity by allocating more resources to increase customer leads to counterbalance the lost conversions. This effectively becomes a vicious cycle of profit burning, and risks the business becoming redundant.

On the other side of the coin, smartbots can significantly boost engagement and enhance customer satisfaction, leading to a potential 300% increase in customer leads.

While smartbots deliver instant gratification for the customer, there are other advantages for businesses that are even more groundbreaking.

Because we live in a digital-to-information age, customer data becomes an even more powerful commodity. Whether it is their preferences, characteristics, or purchase behaviour – this valuable data needs to be stored and analysed to leverage tailored and targeted sales and advertising. When customers engage with a smartbot, they are willingly inputting data into the model. Through AI technology, this data can be crunched to single out trends, such as successful or failing products or services, and provide businesses with evidence-based information to make key operational, marketing and sales decisions.

Think of how The Snip Spot’s smartbot automatically picks up a trend that there were approximately 10 new customers that requested a trim in the same month as you. From this information, Snip Spot can decide to ensure the Whatsapp smartbot contacts those same new customers in about two months’ time, offering them all a tailored discount on another trim. This draws these new (and possibly hesitant) customers back to the same business, cementing further customer sales conversions over time.

Smartbot technology has become the principal sales conversion tool of successful businesses. Customers are demanding faster results. It is up to businesses whether they want to give it to them.