From Chat To Checkout: How WhatsApp And AI Are Shaping The Future Of Ecommerce — Giorgio Pagliara | Why Commerce Shifts To Conversational AI, How AI Creates Personal Shopping Journeys, What Makes WhatsApp Key For Ecom, How Spoki Grew A Brand By 50% (#435)

In this episode, we explore how to boost engagement and recover sales by moving from clicks to conversations. 

Giorgio Pagliari, CEO of Spoki, shares how his platform uses WhatsApp and AI to deliver instant customer support, automate communications, and drive revenue growth for ecommerce businesses. 

He also explains how AI is creating a new era of conversational commerce.

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• Why transactional emails are no longer an effective way to communicate with customers.
• What makes WhatsApp a powerful communication tool for e-commerce.
• How to use AI to automate 80% of customer support inquiries.
• What Spoki does to recover abandoned carts and increase sales.
• How AI can create a personalized shopping experience for customers.
• Why the future of commerce is conversational and AI-driven.
• How to train Spoki's AI agent with your brand's specific language.
• How a food e-commerce brand increased its revenue by 50% using Spoki.
• Why a merchant needs a dedicated phone number to get started with Spoki.
• What a customer-centric approach means for e-commerce success.

Links & Resources 

Website: https://spoki.it/en/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/spokiapp/
Instagram: https://www.facebook.com/spokiapp
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spokiapp

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at https://tinyurl.com/m4c8wsvn

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Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:18:16
Unknown
Hello and welcome to another episode of the eCommerce Coffee Break podcast. Shoppers don't want more emails. They want answers right now. Today we are looking at one of the biggest shifts in e-commerce moving from clicks to conversations. In this episode, we explore how to use what's up in AI to boost engagement, recover more sales, and deliver instant support.

00:00:18:18 - 00:00:36:16
Unknown
Joining me today is Jojo Pagliaro. He's the CEO of spooky, a platform that turns WhatsApp into marketing, sales and service powerhouse. Jojo has more than ten years of experience building and scaling businesses, so he knows what's working in e-commerce right now. Let's get started. Jojo, welcome to the show.

00:00:36:18 - 00:01:05:18
Unknown
Thank you. Thank you, Klaus, and thank you for having me, Jojo. What problems do merchants face today with customer communication? You know what? I think there is a big gap in communication between, e-commerce platform and their customers because, we still, as a business, we still use email mainly to communicate and try to engage our customers.

00:01:05:20 - 00:01:36:16
Unknown
But, emails are not the way we communicate to each other. You know, we engage each other using, chats. We engage mainly WhatsApp. And so I think that businesses needs to be where their customers are. And, we believe in the the importance of the communication of the, engagement that businesses need to have with their customers.

00:01:36:18 - 00:02:19:14
Unknown
And, I think that, in one way called, transactional email is no more value communication channel. We need to use, two way communication channel. We need to engage our customers. Otherwise, any e-commerce, can become a commodity because, anyone is looking for, the lower price available on, on the internet. And, but they believe that, it's very important for any commerce to to create royalty, with their customers.

00:02:19:16 - 00:02:44:16
Unknown
Establishing a relationship with, with their customers. And this means that, I guess a two way communication is mandatory. Now, I totally agree. Email is a little bit slower. You know, service providers make it more difficult to receive emails a lot of emails end up in the spam or promotion folder. And as you said you should be there where your customers when it comes to communications.

00:02:44:18 - 00:03:02:02
Unknown
So we want to talk today about what's up and what's up is a powerhouse when it comes to communication. I'm pretty much I do everything on what's up. And there's a lot of countries where what's up, I think is the communication channel number one and what's up can be facilitated. And used very heavily when you're doing e-commerce.

00:03:02:04 - 00:03:08:05
Unknown
Tell me why. What's up is such a powerful tool.

00:03:08:07 - 00:03:42:18
Unknown
What's up? It's the the the the let's say the the application we use to communicate to each other. So we use it everyday as, in consumer to engage with friends, family and also businesses. And, it has a completely different, way of interaction. And I would say also the, there is a very different opening rate of the messages.

00:03:42:20 - 00:04:17:06
Unknown
When you send an email, you expect something between, 15, 20% of opening rate. When you send a WhatsApp, it's like 98, almost 100% of, reading rate, you know? So it's completely different, results. You you get something completely. It's another level. We use WhatsApp, every day, every five minutes. So when you send a message, your customers will read the message within five minutes.

00:04:17:08 - 00:04:38:18
Unknown
It's awesome. And that brings us to speed customer communication. So it's it's it's a two way street there. So now obviously I can imagine WhatsApp can be used for auto confirmations for your delivery confirmations and all of that. But it goes in both ways. And there's many, many more layers and much more, solutions for online sellers.

00:04:38:20 - 00:05:10:02
Unknown
But start with some support. How can you use what's up for sort of the simplest tasks in your support? Yeah. There are many ways to use, WhatsApp. You can do it. If you are a small, business, you may use it manually. WhatsApp is on, WhatsApp for business application. I think, you already heard about it, and, but it's good.

00:05:10:02 - 00:05:41:19
Unknown
It's a valid solution for small businesses that need to do everything manually. But it's not more feasible as soon as you scale your numbers. Growth, you have more clients. You want to automate transactional messages. For your e-commerce, it became, simply not scalable. Let's say, you know, at least you can pay a person to to do that all day long.

00:05:41:21 - 00:06:10:18
Unknown
So, WhatsApp released, a third product, let's say, that is a WhatsApp. Business platform that are basically the possibility, for businesses like us to integrate, WhatsApp in their solution to create, solution that, match e-commerce needs, for instance. So there is the possibility to integrate your e-commerce with WhatsApp to respond, of course.

00:06:10:20 - 00:06:38:11
Unknown
So it reads where WhatsApp, your e-commerce flows to automate all the communication transactional messages to, to your customers. And then you have the possibility to send, also marketing messages in also in bulk. So you can have your, customers cost of your customers and then send them, specific communication for, we are near to Black Friday.

00:06:38:11 - 00:07:16:03
Unknown
So for the Friday for instance, special offers. And also you can do customer support through WhatsApp, both in a, an automatic way and old fashioned human, in the loop. So human can reply manually, but also thanks to the AI, agents that can reply back to your customers giving, let's say, the possibility to, to automatically reply 80% of the questions, you know, and then left to the human.

00:07:16:07 - 00:07:38:04
Unknown
The most challenging one, the, for less than the work total. I think it's not a good idea to hire somebody just to answer WhatsApp messages. And now we talking about AI. One of my favorite topics. And Sparky obviously is an AI agent's helping you there. And you said it's a marketing tool. It's a support tool, but it's also a sales tool.

00:07:38:04 - 00:07:57:23
Unknown
And I think that's where a lot of our listeners are interested in, so that you basically can create through conversations, more sales for your store to talk me through what's happening. If somebody comes on the store and then he takes over and basically is your sales assistant, how does it work?

00:07:58:01 - 00:08:32:06
Unknown
Yeah, basically, very often it happens that, the user come to your store is interested in something maybe put also something in, in the cart, an item in the cart, but then somehow, it get distracted. Yes. Some doubt. You have a question and answer. Question not answered questions. And then you left. What you can do just book is automatically send, WhatsApp message about this, about donut cart and then try to recover it.

00:08:32:08 - 00:09:13:15
Unknown
And then, you have the possibility also to connect, our AI tool, for instance, to Shopify to let the AI give suggestions. Answer is at the beginning to answer to the questions that, the user may have, but also suggest I recommend products, if they, connect can have access to the work catalog. You can also generate, checkout directly on WhatsApp and then the user, by what's what's the what they want.

00:09:13:17 - 00:09:28:00
Unknown
That's an interesting fact that you mentioned there that you basically can check out on WhatsApp. Now spark is integrated with an app into Shopify. But let's talk about the on the checkout on WhatsApp. I haven't seen that. How does it work.

00:09:28:02 - 00:10:03:05
Unknown
It's really it's really easy, from the same backend side so that the, the business need to integrate, Shopify is just, a couple of clicks, let's say, and then we will do the make the magic in the background. So we will, read the whole catalog. We will able to, answer about, all the, the question we have all the catalog availability, we have all this information inside the AI knowledge.

00:10:03:07 - 00:10:31:14
Unknown
Okay. And then when a user, free you on, on WhatsApp, the AI is able to read all this knowledge. So all your items, the description, everything. And then suggest the right item to the right person. So if you are looking for this, give an example. If you're looking for, a black, shirt prices.

00:10:31:16 - 00:10:50:19
Unknown
Okay. You may ask, okay. I want a black shirt and I. Okay. And of course we have we have some of them. We have three these three options. What do you like the most. And then you say, okay, like the first one. And then I say, okay, that sounds good. What's your, the size.

00:10:50:21 - 00:11:31:15
Unknown
Oh, yeah. And you say, okay. And I'm, it's fine for me. That's perfect. And then I may also improve this interaction. Say, do some, let's say, cross-selling, upselling and stuff like that and say, okay, usually do you want also add a belt to pair with this shirt you want, but as of shoes or whatever. And and at the end of the the word conversation, you create, the, the cost directly on Shopify with just the link for the user to go and think it seems magic, but, it's real.

00:11:31:17 - 00:12:24:18
Unknown
It's magic. And I think there is a future in e-commerce, and I think it's very coming soon that people completely bypass the store. The product detail page, collections page, and basically the whole shopping process happens through an AI agent. Is that right? What's your opinion on that? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We we foresee this future where, the future of commerce is, conversational and, yeah, I will play, the say, key role here because, agenda today we are all different human beings with different needs and is the AI is able to, to treat each one of us individually with our needs and, to satisfy exactly our needs.

00:12:24:20 - 00:13:03:16
Unknown
And this is I guess that's because, when you go on the physical store, I guess you go to the, to the person of the store and ask for suggestions, and they give you. Okay, I can show you this one. This item is made of shoes. These other and it's I think you are happy to do to to have this interaction, you know, and e-commerce lost this interaction because there is no possibility to have this interaction with regular email or conventional channels, one way channels, of course.

00:13:03:18 - 00:13:29:19
Unknown
This conversational tools like spoken give you back this possibility, this, experience to your customers. And it's, I think, what they deserve. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think we're coming. Really. E360 full circle there, from having back to the time you went to a shop, as you mentioned, and you got the the time of a static web page with some sort of was a boring one way road to go.

00:13:29:19 - 00:13:54:05
Unknown
And now we have the full communication again and again with what's up the power of communicating on the channel that you use. Anyway, now some of our listeners might ask themselves, it's like, I have a specific language, the specific lingo that I use for my brand. How do you train Sparky with the your brand's language? Okay.

00:13:57:18 - 00:14:31:20
Unknown
I it's, it's evolving pretty fast. You may give, spark itself is multi-language platform. So we do support many different languages, in the platform itself. But we do support any basically any language, any, any I can, can support, so the, the agents, can understand the language we are speaking and then reply back on the same language.

00:14:31:22 - 00:14:47:08
Unknown
So, it's very common for us with customers that they spoke, for different languages Italian, Deutsche and French and so on.

00:14:47:10 - 00:15:03:01
Unknown
The agent doesn't know if the customer came from, China. So speak Italian or speak French. As soon as you start to speak. Yeah, I understand. Oh, it's, it's French. And reply back in French.

00:15:03:03 - 00:15:28:03
Unknown
It's very, very powerful. Now I want to talk a little bit about the technical implementation. You said, Sparky is gathering all the data. How does the implementation work? How long does the training of the AI work and how long, or how many steps do you need to go through on during the onboarding? Okay. Very few actually.

00:15:28:05 - 00:15:51:20
Unknown
When you let's let's suppose you have not, you have still to sign up on Spotify. Okay. You you just discovered spooky. You go on the website, okay? It's cool, I want it, and you just sign up, and then you have to, connect your, WhatsApp through meta. There is a meta workflow that we have to follow, okay?

00:15:51:20 - 00:16:23:15
Unknown
Because as you may know, WhatsApp is owned by meta. Okay. You need to be a business. Of course, you need to have, a number and so on. And then, you got once you have this connection between spoken, the number and specific number that you would use, with, spoken for, for WhatsApp and you have to exchange the API key with your Shopify.

00:16:23:17 - 00:16:50:20
Unknown
Okay. So your e-commerce platform and that's it. I think more and after few, few minutes, few seconds, all is set. Okay. That's very, very straightforward. Can you give some examples of success stories? With friends you don't need to name the brand was businesses that you have worked with and what kind of results they saw.

00:16:50:22 - 00:17:27:23
Unknown
Okay. This is this brand that is, a food e-commerce. Okay. They started to use, WhatsApp manually. They have, they had, person that, yeah. They just wanted to test the channel, you know, and after a short period of, testing, they understood that, it was a a good channel, you know, and, and so back then, they came to us and say, okay, WhatsApp works.

00:17:28:01 - 00:18:03:20
Unknown
We want to use this because, we cannot, reply to everyone, manually anymore. And now they increased, the revenue by, 50%. So now 50% more or less 50% of their revenue scam, thanks to spoken, they use buggy for, abundant character covering. They use buggy for, promotion, marketing campaigns to send or the world customers campaigns.

00:18:03:21 - 00:18:37:00
Unknown
They use buggy for, customer support. If a customer receive an item, need support from that. And, they basically have a rows of, 21 x, for them that it's not a huge e-commerce, but for them we mean that they increased by 300 K the revenues. That's insane. This is awesome. That's that's really I mean, this talks about the power of AI and WhatsApp as a channel.

00:18:37:00 - 00:19:00:00
Unknown
I mean, this is I think some of our listeners would just think, look at their own business and what they can do was by going up these numbers so that that's absolutely insane. Their who's your perfect customer? What kind of industries on these work you do? You work best with? Okay. We are, pretty okay. Giving that our best customers are e-commerce one.

00:19:00:02 - 00:19:32:22
Unknown
Okay. Any any kind of e-commerce. We started from the smaller one, but now we are able to, satisfy also, enterprise, businesses, because we implemented many stuff that are needed for enterprise solution. I can say that, we are pretty agnostic. We have many customers that does not even have an e-commerce, but, they just need to engage, their customers.

00:19:33:00 - 00:20:16:05
Unknown
We have, education, we have finance, we have beauty, wellness, automotive and many others. But e-commerce, I think the, the most interesting one and the one that, can leverage the power of okay, since day one because they are all digital. So it's a digital tool. They miss the physical interaction, that you can try to, let's say rebuild with, two way conversation or channel, so they can leverage all the power since the beginning.

00:20:16:07 - 00:20:25:23
Unknown
Is any kind of homework that a merchant needs to do before they can get started?

00:20:26:00 - 00:21:04:17
Unknown
They need to, let's say, the at the very, The one that is really needed is that, they need to have a phone number that can, that can they can use with WhatsApp. Should be a phone number without any WhatsApp associated. Okay. Because must be specific for speaking and they need to have, the meta, business manager, they are the only two prerequisites that are really needed.

00:21:04:19 - 00:21:45:07
Unknown
Then if you want to be, really powerful and, you want to be really ready from day one, but it's not mandatory. You can do that. Later on in the process, you may have your fake, documentation of all your official documentation of, all your, stuff, the, questions that may be useful in the customer support, phase, you know, but it's not, again, it's not, something that you have to do since day one also, because, our AI is able to to scan the website.

00:21:45:07 - 00:22:03:10
Unknown
So if you have all this information already inside your website, you just type your website and then we do that for you. Yeah. Again, the power of I, I find that information where it already is and you don't have to type it again and start from scratch as it was in the past. Tell me about your pricing structure.

00:22:03:11 - 00:22:06:10
Unknown
How do you charge?

00:22:06:12 - 00:22:35:22
Unknown
Okay. You have two components. The first one is first. Okay. It's, subscription that, starts as low as, €24 per month and, grows as grow as the business grow. Okay. The more, conversation you're going to have, the more you will pay. But this proportionate. The second part is for the channel itself.

00:22:36:00 - 00:23:00:10
Unknown
We are talking mainly about WhatsApp. WhatsApp itself has its own free methods fee. We, charge for metas fee. You have a wallet inside spoken that you recharge and then we pay meta with with that money. There are, other channels in such. Okay. Like, two way SMS. We are adding, also one way, it's a message.

00:23:00:10 - 00:23:24:23
Unknown
We are adding voice with I also. So you will be able to call also your customers and this jungle, not for free since I is, it's not so cheap. Okay, so we will then pay the channel as 1 to 1 as we would pay you. You would pay. Okay, well, that's a very straightforward.

00:23:24:23 - 00:23:45:12
Unknown
Basically, as you grow, you pay a little bit more, but you can start relatively affordable and easy going there. Yes. And of course we have a free a free, frame plan, of course. So you can start for free. You can try the platform for free, and then you can start for doing customer support for free.

00:23:45:14 - 00:24:18:13
Unknown
That's a no brainer. So for our listeners, go and try it out. I'm sure you will be blown away by the results. You see, now, Jonjo, before our coffee break comes to an end, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? Maybe if I, if if I may, give a, let's say, an advice to, to those that, those entrepreneurs or, companies that want to succeed in the e-commerce is to put the customer relationship at the center.

00:24:18:15 - 00:24:45:12
Unknown
At the end of the day, the, Mr.. Jesse's don't look at chat, as a side channel, but, you, you have to leverage on the conversations and put them at the core of your store to create a relationship with, your customers. I think this is the the main thing because, it's not just, business.

00:24:45:12 - 00:25:05:09
Unknown
It's not what you said. It's, experience. You you give to your to your customers. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. It's not about being product centric. It's about customer centric. And basically the customer base know at the end of the day is should do everything to communicate them with them in the right way. What can people go and find out more about you and Sparky?

00:25:05:11 - 00:25:22:22
Unknown
Okay. You can go to our website, sparky.com and then they can now dive free. Did they come? They can also call us and we are very cool. I will put the links in the show notes and you just one click away don't you? I hope a lot of people will reach out to you. I hope a lot of people will try out Sparky.

00:25:22:22 - 00:25:40:19
Unknown
I see the power of what's up and I and the other channels that you mentioned. I think the future lies really in direct communication and not browsing around on the static product detail page. Thanks so much for your time today. Thank you for those.