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Retail Chatbots Enhance the Online Customer Experience

Chatbots have become increasingly influential in day-to-day online life. These software applications are developed to automate a range of tasks, from simple banking transactions to answering customer care requests, and have been adopted across industries.

The potential use cases for chatbots will increase with advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology. It's likely that as AI capabilities evolve, chatbots will complete more complex tasks on behalf of a user without requiring assistance from human customer service agents.

Retail Chatbot Market Development

According to the latest worldwide market study by Juniper Research, consumer retail spending over chatbots will reach $142 billion by 2024 -- that's rising from $2.8 billion in 2019. This represents average annual growth of 400 percent over the next four years.

The Juniper analyst findings identified the retail sector as a primary beneficiary of advances in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies. They forecast that NLU would be essential in providing a valued retail experience for users.

NLU capabilities would establish chatbots as an essential retail channel, as it enables chatbots to reliably process human inputs and produces more accurate automated responses to the user.

Juniper analysts also forecast that advances in NLU capabilities will drive the effectiveness of chatbots. It anticipates that over 50 percent of retail chatbot interactions will be completed successfully by 2024, without the need for human intervention.


As a result, the research urges retailers to implement chatbots as part of a wider omnichannel retail strategy in order to maximize their presence on a number of key retail channels.

Additionally, the research found that 80 percent of global consumer spend over chatbots will be attributable to discrete chatbots by 2024.

These chatbots are embedded directly into a retailer’s mobile software app, rather than accessed online via a web browser or messaging application.

The research anticipates that control over development and the ability to retain company branding will drive discrete chatbots to become the most popular chatbot medium within the retail sector.

Outlook for Retail Chatbot Adoption Growth

Juniper has forecast that 70 percent of the global number of chatbots accessed by 2024 would be attributable to the Far East & China market.

Furthermore, over $80 billion will be spent via chatbots in China in 2024 -- accounting for over 55 percent of global chatbot spend in that year.

However, the research findings highlighted that this transaction activity will still only be around 4 percent of the total mobile and online spend on digital and physical goods in that region.

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