Maybe even two decades ago, many enterprises across the world depended on traditional IVRs to indulge in customer engagement. However, traversing through the menu tree was an exhaustive process for many customers seeking the assistance of an organization. With the advent of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, popularly known as AI in the recent times, many organizations realized that the traditional IVR needs to be shunned to accommodate more cognitive conversational platforms. The greatest disadvantage of the traditional IVR is the fact that it lacks contextual understanding and can’t switch between topics while conversing with a user, far different from human conversations. Although the automated conversation system was invented to alleviate branch visits, it has seldom been satisfactory to most users. Many AI experts felt that virtual platforms should converse with users like how any human would and toiled hard to produce cutting-edge conversational solutions. This thought spurred the inception of many conversational tools in the recent times, one such popular example being chatbots. Applications such as chatbots have proved to be disruptive, especially to the e-commerce sector.

The current era is popular for virtual shopping platforms and retailers are leaving no stone unturned to allure visitors and make their web interfaces more captivating. Many retail companies have been embedding conversational and most importantly cognitive tools such as chatbots into their websites to answer queries of their clients, respond at lightning speed. Thus, conversational platforms have been really helpful in customer retention, amplification of brand value and satisfaction of those seeking the services of the enterprise. Going by the current popularity of disciplines like AI, conversational platforms are here to stay and are in a way going to determine the success of organizations selling their products virtually.