Conversational Commerce
Conversational Commerce tools are all the rage today- but if you're new to the topic, let me bring you up to speed...
Conversational commerce software that enables businesses to engage with customers through conversational interfaces such as chatbots, messaging apps, and social media platforms.
Many of these platforms use simple workflow logic which is frustrating because it doesn’t often follow the same thought processes as humans - but more advanced platforms use artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to interpret and respond to customer inquiries, provide personalized recommendations, and guide customers through the purchasing process, but one of them connects you with a real human who's a trained product expert (known as a remote concierge) to walk you through the shopping experience... more on that in a bit…
Conversational Commerce solutions also integrate with e-commerce platforms, payment gateways, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to provide a seamless shopping experience. Examples of Conversational Commerce tools would be Humankind, Live Person, Listrak, Attentive, and ManyChat.
You've probably interacted with one of these platforms (maybe even unknowingly) when you visited an online store and requested help from the little chat window in the bottom right-hand side of your screen. Maybe you wanted to speak to a personal shopper, had a product question that wasn't answered in the description, or you wondered if an order was going to arrive on time... whatever the inquiry was, it's likely that you were chatting with a Conversational Commerce tool.
Now let’s take a look at two of the leading players in the conversational commerce space- Humankind and Live Person. We'll look at the similarities and the differences to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
Now you may be thinking, "I've seen these comparisons before, you're just going to bash your competitor until I think you're the only logical choice..." Au contraire my friend- and that's not the case here. In our mind, that doesn't serve anyone- and, everyone feels a little slimy after bashing their competitors... so we're not going to do that.
We want to give you a real-world perspective of each platform so you can decide which one is right for you... but we're still a little biased, after all, we studied more than a million customer interactions before we built Humankind, so you'll have to forgive a little favoritism…
But if you're still with me... let's dive right in!
Humankind is a conversational commerce platform that offers businesses, primarily eCommerce brands, the ability to create 1:1 human connections between you and your shoppers. Using our platform, a trained remote concierge connects directly with a shopper to provide expert advice, product recommendations, reviews, order follow-up, and more.
Think of this like texting a friend.
Why did we take this customer-first approach? According to PwC, 82% of online shoppers want more human connection in the buying experience, so we made that a pillar core of our brand.
Live Person is a conversational commerce platform that provides businesses with a suite of tools to engage customers in real-time. It offers chatbots, virtual agents, and messaging options that are designed to supplement or replace customer service reps.
Using Live Person's conversational AI technology, businesses can automate conversations with customers for personalized service. So to reiterate, Live Person is primarily an automated Ai voice and messaging platform.
Now that you have a basic overview of each platform, let's get into the details...
Humankind created a platform to provide personalized, 1:1 concierge commerce and relationships at scale. But what does that mean?
In short, it means that a shopper can connect 1:1 with a real human who's been trained on your products and services and can provide not only an excellent shopping experience but also expert-level advice.
This is one of the biggest differentiating factors between Humankind and all of the platforms mentioned in the first section, Humankind's goal is human connections that lead to high-value transactions - and to accomplish this, we built a platform that empowers personal shoppers and remote concierges to connect with customers before, during, and after their purchase. This allows us to collect high-quality data (zero-party data) and matches the elongated consumer buying journey.
If you look at Live Person's platform, it's primarily built for immediate, one-call close assistance. This means that it's a great Ai sales chat tool for moment-in-time product help. But it requires a restart every time a customer leaves the site or has another inquiry.
I used the Ai chatbot on Live Person's own website and found this "restart" to be particularly frustrating. Luckily, the questions that I asked were answered quickly and efficiently, and the Ai seemed to use the keywords in my questions to quickly find answers.
Live Person's Ai chatbots can be triggered by keywords or questions which can help businesses reduce the amount of manual labor required to answer customer inquiries. This helps with scalability and cost-cutting, but it doesn't provide the same level of human connection as Humankind's platform.
When a customer first triggers a personal shopper, they're given a rich data survey that generates a customer profile. Once this is completed, the remote concierge will take over and walk the customer through personalized consultation and guide them through the rest of their shopping experience. This makes it more efficient for the customer and collects rich data for the brand.
When the products that fit the customer's needs are identified, the remote concierge delivers them via beautiful, custom-designed landing pages with recommendations, the context for those recommendations, and a single "add to cart" button - accessible anytime.
Once the purchase is made, the concierge can add follow-ups... but we'll get to that in a sec.
After testing several of the opening messages on different sites that use Live Person, I was met with, "What brings you here today?" “How can I help you,” or “What did you have in mind?” This seemed friendly enough and gave me a chance to ask my questions.
Before continuing the comparison - one distinction between Humankind and Live Person that I’d like to pause and point out is that I was unable to take my conversation off of Live Person. Support was only available while on the site. However, with Humankind I was able to start on the website and transition the conversation to SMS to get my questions answered on the go…
Something to consider in today’s busy world… but back to it.
I asked the Ai agent on Live Person, "What's Live Person's best feature?" and it responded in 30- 45 seconds with this reply…
"LivePerson offers a variety of features to help brands and customers communicate more effectively. One of the best features is our advanced platform for any size organization, offering a slew of customization capabilities.
To ensure you are getting the most out of messaging, review how to manage a contact center that messages, and develop and set up your preferences in three areas; Customer experience; design what consumers will see when they interact with your brand by customizing the engagement window, including the banners, buttons and automatic text.
You can also start to add bots and automation to receive and respond to incoming conversations. Agent experience; create a personalized experience for agents with custom workflows, routing rules, and automated tasks.
And finally, analytics; measure the performance of your contact center with real-time analytics and reporting."
(It seems like I should've let the Live Person Ai agent write the portion of this article!) haha
But, what I saw reminded me of many of the other chatbots on the market - pre-programmed answers that lacked context - no survey, open-ended answers that were inefficient, and frankly a lot to read for a 5-word question. But I digress…
Now, if you've been in marketing circles for a while, you've heard it said, "The fortune is in the follow-up..."
What's the follow-up sequence for each platform look like?
When you make a purchase with a brand that's powered by Humankind, you're building a 2-way relationship that continues post-purchase. Remember when I said that the whole experience felt like texting a friend?
After the purchase, a remote concierge can text the customer and find out how they liked the product.
For instance, one of our customers is Cascadia Tents, they make all types of products for Overlanding enthusiasts - and for the purposes of this example, let’s say that you're a Jeep Wrangler owner who wants to purchase a rooftop tent for an Overlanding Trip that you have booked in a month.
When you get back from your trip, you receive a text from your remote concierge asking how the trip went, how you liked your tent, if there's anything they could have done better and even offering recommendations for upcoming trips.
But it gets better, when you add marketing automation to the mix, you can extend the brand CX (customer experience) and the relationships that form to increase AOV & LTV because they build trust and rapport with customers…
This is just one example of how powerful these post-purchase follow-ups can be. They're an invaluable touchpoint for brands to build trust with their customers and create repeat purchase opportunities.
No relationship post-purchase.
A remote concierge powered by Humankind can support more than 20 conversations at once and can guide 5- 6 shoppers through an excellent CX concurrently. When you include other factors like automated messaging, you have a shared conversational effort that scales.
Here's where chatbots shine. Ai guides can handle nearly unlimited requests because they don't require human interaction, and Live Person uses the world's largest dataset to automate conversations so they can offer assistance on almost any inquiry.
Once a human gets involved, the limiting factor is balancing synchronous time-boxed chats that only allow for 1-2 customers concurrently- this limits the output of each human expert.
Now, I may be missing this feature - but after scouring their website and video demos, I've found no marketing automation help after the sale or initial conversation.
If you think about the person who interacts with customers every day while representing your brand, you want them to be delightful, to create elegant personal shopping experiences in the digital world that wow your customers-
In fact, the best comment you'll ever get from someone is, "How do you do that? That's so cool..."
Wanna see it in action? Check out this link - to the right of the product is a little window that says, “Is this product right for me?” Click it and you’ll see how it works!
Humankind is a bespoke platform for conversational commerce, enabling sales experts, remote concierges, and personal shoppers to do their jobs consistently, delightfully, and scalably- that's why customers like REN skincare, Murad, and OLAPLEX swear by our platform... it's distinctly human- built for humans, by humans, to support an excellent human experience!
I found Live Person to be an excellent customer service platform. In fact, it seemed like an improvement over the traditional customer service model.
With a dedicated salesforce and customer service agent, you'd be able to respond to customers in a timely manner and resolve any inquiries or concerns.
In addition, the platform is easy-to-use and has great visuals that make the user experience enjoyable. This can help ensure customers remain engaged and satisfied with their results.
However, I took a look at several of the sites that Live Person claims to support and struggled to find the integration. Looking for help windows, chatbots, and chatboxes almost became a game of hide-and-seek. After visiting five of the customers listed on their website I couldn't find “help windows” for 3 of the 5...
So how do you decide between the two? Well, I think it depends on what you're trying to accomplish…
Humankind is a personalized, 1:1 concierge commerce and relationships at scale…
Live Person is a sales chat for moment-in-time product recommendations.
If you're looking to build long-term relationships with customers and increase AOV & LTV, then Humankind is probably the better choice. And if you just want quick customer service with fewer customer touch points, then Live Person might be the right fit for you.
Ultimately, it's up to you which platform fits your needs, as I said before, at Humankind we're a little biased and proud of what we've built- if you'd like to see how we help eCommerce brands build real long-term relationships with their customers that increase vital metrics that drive your bottom-line, book your demo of Humankind today!
