Successful retail chatbot interactions to grow 10-fold by 2023

New York – New data from Juniper Research found the global number of successful retail chatbot interactions will reach 22 billion by 2023, up from an estimated 2.6 billion in 2019. Retail sales resulting from chatbot-based interactions will reach 112 billion dollars by 2023.

According to Juniper’s new research ‘AI in Retail: Segment Analysis, Vendor Positioning & Market Forecasts 2019-2023’ chatbot use by retailers will enable effective automated customer interactions for retailers.

This can deliver high quality user experiences in a low-resource way, boosting customer retention and satisfaction whilst also reducing operating costs. A crucial enabler of this will be improvements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which will dramatically reduce the failure rate of chatbot interactions, by making them more natural and valuable for customers.

Retailers who don’t integrate chatbots in their omnichannel strategy risk becoming laggards

In a note to market, Juniper anticipates that retailers who do not adopt chatbots will face strong challenges from more technologically-adept disruptors, who will use chatbots as an extension to the omnichannel retail experience.

Research author Nick Maynard explained: “By embracing automated customer service with chatbots, retailers can act in a more flexible and efficient way. The wider retail market means that chatbots are no longer a luxury, they are essential”.

The report emphasised that while retailers must adopt chatbots for ease of use (and to reduce consumer churn), their return on investment will come from efficiencies, rather than new income.

The research also found that chatbots leveraged for customer service have a strong potential to reduce costs. Juniper estimates that deploying chatbots will help retailers realise annual savings of 439 million dollars globally by 2023, up from 7 million dollars in 2019.

Meanwhile, retail sales resulting from chatbot-based interactions will reach 112 billion dollars by 2023, up from 7.3 billion dollars in 2019. The latter represents an annual growth rate of 98 percent.

Nevertheless, chatbots won’t be the sole responsible of this increase in sales, but a leading factor.The sales improvement will largely be a result of migration from other channels, rather than a new revenue stream.

Image: Chatbot. Credits: Mohammed Hassan, Pixabay