Three ways to elevate your customers’ experience with AI
How can you bridge the gap between digital and physical retail to provide customers the personalized, seamless experiences they expect—so you can not just survive, but thrive in the current retail renaissance?
To help you answer that question, you can read our just-released e-book: “AI for Retail.”
In it, you’ll learn how you can take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) to amplify human ingenuity so you can win with your customers and stay ahead of your competition. It includes several examples—from conversational chatbots that can be there for your customers when your employees can’t, to cognitive services that can empower your employees to provide more customized, cohesive shopping experiences, to machine learning that can help you transform your retail operations.
As a preview, here are three ways you can elevate your customers’ experiences with AI that are covered in the whitepaper:
Be always on
When a customer is on a social network at 2 a.m. on a Sunday and sees one of your products that he or she has question about, a chatbot—often referred to as a virtual agent—can answer questions, put an item on hold in the store, or help facilitate the customer’s journey in some other way.
And that’s exactly what today’s digital natives expect—being able to engage with your brand at any time of day with omnichannel follow-through.
Your brand can use chatbots as part of a cohesive solution that works with your teams and other systems so you can be always on for your customers—which is what Macy’s is doing. Its virtual agent can look up orders and more because it’s integrated with Macy’s other systems: and if it can’t answer a customer’s question, the customer is automatically transferred to a human agent.
Be relevant
Along the customer journey—which includes much more than point of entry to point of sale—context awareness is everything.
AI can help you provide experiences that are relevant to a customer’s needs at the point in time when they’re interacting with your brand. Your employees or chatbots can use insight from cognitive services to make recommendations to customers based on their location, recent interests, behaviors, and ratings, and even who they know. You can also use AI so that when a customer enters a store or goes online, they’re met with content and rewards personalized for them.
Be seamless
Whether customers are shopping online or in stores, they expect a seamless experience where both human sales associates and virtual agents know their history and preferences.
You can empower your in-store employees with AI tools that recognize shoppers so that they can offer personalized support and upsell opportunities based on that individual’s purchase and browsing history.
For example, in the past, Dixons Carphone customers who researched products online before coming to a store had to start from scratch when seeking assistance from a store associate. But its chatbot, Cami, can now help bridge that gap by enabling employees to see what the customer was looking for online so they can direct them to that product or to other ones they might like equally or even more.
You can be a leader in the retail renaissance by being what your customers expect—and more.
To help you take advantage of AI to do so, read the e-book “AI for Retail.” In it, you can not only find out how you can elevate your customers’ experiences, but how you can transform your retail operations with intelligent, connected platforms.
