Generative AI for E-commerce: Revolutionizing Seller Operations and Customer Support

Generative AI for e-commerce is revolutionizing how businesses operate in Southeast Asia’s digital marketplace. With over 95% of SEA e-commerce sellers currently underserved by traditional support systems, artificial intelligence solutions are emerging as the game-changing technology that transforms seller operations. Moreover, these innovative platforms enhance customer experiences and drive unprecedented business growth across the region.

Major e-commerce platforms in SEA typically host 200K-600K sellers. However, only the top 1-5% sellers receive personalized assistance from account managers. Consequently, this leaves over 95% of SMB sellers with minimum support, thus creating a massive opportunity for generative AI for e-commerce solutions to bridge this gap.

How Generative AI for E-commerce Transforms Seller Operations

Despite the platform’s scale, underserved sellers are grappling with diverse challenges. For instance, new sellers may struggle with navigating onboarding and understanding platform features. Meanwhile, cross-border sellers find it challenging to venture into unfamiliar overseas markets. Additionally, sellers looking to scale their operations often find themselves at a loss, unsure of how to systematically grow their business.

Although platforms usually offer self-served text guides crafted by e-commerce professionals, these generic resources can overwhelm sellers. Furthermore, outsourcing seller operations and support to BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) companies is another common approach. Nevertheless, the extensive seller base and limited manpower make it challenging for sellers to obtain immediate assistance.

AI-Powered Personalized Account Management for Long-tail Sellers

Generative AI for e-commerce solutions revolutionize seller operations by automating customized support across the seller journey. In particular, these systems use industry best practices to guide previously underserved sellers. With AI-powered voicebots, it’s akin to every seller having their own personal account manager, efficiently addressing their specific concerns. As a result, this approach eradicates the need to sift through massive information or endure prolonged waiting times to reach a human agent.

In practice, voicebots handle tasks like calling new sellers and guiding them through the onboarding process. Additionally, they provide inventory management strategies based on trend forecasts and promote sales acceleration through platform growth mechanisms (free shipping, cashback), mega sales campaigns and advertising programs. Ultimately, the systematic guidance facilitates sellers’ growth from beginners into mature sellers, thereby aiding them in brand establishment and sales acceleration.

Boosting Parcel Fulfillment with AI-Powered Customer Engagement

The Challenge of High COD Delivery Failure Rates

Throughout Southeast Asia, COD (Cash-on-Delivery) is a dominant payment method. Subsequently, millions of COD parcels wait for delivery daily. However, the challenge arises from the high failure rate of COD deliveries, which can reach up to 30%. As a consequence, this results in logistics companies bearing the burden of $0.30 per failed delivery.

Notably, the root causes of high fulfillment failure rates include package receipt decline, inaccuracies in addresses, and customer unavailability. Therefore, confirming with each customer before parcel delivery becomes indispensable. Equally important is the need to engage with customers after every failed delivery to understand the reasons and decide the next steps.

Enhancing COD Success with Generative AI E-commerce Solutions

This is where scalable and interactive voicebots powered by generative AI for e-commerce come into play. Indeed, these AI-powered voicebots not only facilitate large-scale operations but also provide instant data feedback. Furthermore, they can quickly get customers’ responses during phone calls, ascertain which parcels are ready for delivery, which are not, and the reasons behind.

During the pre-delivery stage, AI voicebots undertake the crucial role of confirming order statuses with every customer. Specifically, each interactive call verifies several pivotal details: customer’s desire to receive the parcel, address accuracy, customer availability and payment confirmation. Importantly, parcels are dispatched for delivery only after these key details are verified.

Delighting Customers Through Generative AI-Powered E-commerce Service

Eliminating Long Wait Times with AI Customer Support

In order to address millions of e-commerce customers’ inquiries, platforms often rely on IVR and BPO agents to manage overwhelming call volumes. Unfortunately, this leads to unsatisfactory customer experiences. Instead of receiving quick help, customers find themselves in a maze of button presses, sorting through various question categories, listening to impersonal responses, or waiting for long periods to connect with human agents. Sometimes, wait times can extend to a staggering 72 hours.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction Through Immediate, Multilingual AI Support

Fortunately, 24/7 available generative AI-powered chatbots eliminate the need for pressing multiple buttons and waiting in long phone queues. Instead, they offer immediate responses, significantly improving customer satisfaction. Moreover, their comprehensive conversational capabilities allow them to handle multi-round dialogues in texts, covering a wide range of questions. Additionally, these chatbots support multiple languages, ensuring globally diverse customer bases are catered to.

The Future of E-commerce AI Technology

Currently, AI technologies necessitate human orchestration for designing workflow decision trees. Indeed, every step of automation is cultivated by humans behind the scenes.

However, as we look forward, we envision AI technology automating tasks in the e-commerce spectrum with minimum human intervention. That’s precisely where the unprecedented potential LLM agents can unlock their full capabilities. Unlike current systems, LLM agents can transcend mere conversational capabilities and apply knowledge to solve tangible problems.

For example, consider an LLM agent assisting with inventory management strategies. Not only can it inform sellers of trend forecasts and popular SKUs based on machine learning algorithms, but it can also aid sellers in procuring and restocking relevant SKUs. Furthermore, LLM agents with different roles can collaborate with each other, thereby creating a comprehensive generative AI for e-commerce ecosystem.

Autonomous Planning Capabilities of AI E-commerce Agents

Although LLM agents are still emerging, we already have early evidence demonstrating their capacity for autonomous planning. Through our meta prompt system, users no longer need to manually create prompts for LLMs to perform tasks. Instead, they simply provide an example of an input-output pair, and the system can swiftly generate a prompt capable of managing similar tasks within minutes.