ChatGPT and, more broadly, artificial intelligence for natural language processing, is the hottest thing in the technology market. For Brazilian e-commerce, however, this is still a world away. According to a study, only 12% of the main digital retailers in the country had chatbots equipped with a real ability to understand their customers during Black Friday 2022.
The study, developed by the consultancy R/GA at the request of Google Cloud, shows that most stores offered a very limited experience of chatbots to their consumers. The survey points out, among other findings, that most sites are still limited to very basic chatbots, capable only of answering predefined questions. Only 3 of the 25 sites tracked had the ability to go beyond what was on the roadmap.
In addition, none of the monitored platforms was able to answer questions about deliveries or items in the shopping cart through the robot. Thus, they were unable to answer questions and solve simple consumer problems.
To make matters worse, they showed little ability to perceive their own limitations and understand the customer’s frustration to refer them to human assistance when necessary.
This lag can detract from a customer’s experience and cause a store to lose a sale. Marco Bravo, head of Google Cloud in Brazil, points to a second study, conducted by The Harris Poll, in which it is estimated that Brazilian retailers lose BRL 1.6 trillion per year due to search abandonment, something that could be minimized with the reduction of technological failures.
More problems on Black Friday
Research commissioned by Google Cloud points to a series of failures by stores during Black Friday 2022 so that they can better prepare for the event in 2023.
One of the most serious and quite recurrent failures is that of infrastructure: of the 25 sites monitored, seven had an error that made the site unavailable to the client due to high demand.
Also noteworthy is the page loading time. On average, during the analyzed period, none of the monitored e-commerces managed to load the main content of the homepage in the ideal time, in less than 2.5 seconds.
In addition to the infrastructure, the survey points to other common flaws in the online shopping experience that drive consumers away. One of the most serious was the fact that 11 of the 25 sites were not able to identify a search when it contained a typing error and did not present a satisfactory result. To further complicate the purchase, 18 of the sites do not even offer an alternative when a search term is not found on the platform.
