Article by Bassem Khalil
Customer experience as a key differentiator has always been a challenge for retailers to remain relevant and competitive in this fast-evolving industry. Retailers need to completely rethink their business processes. It is not enough to digitize traditional processes and put together solutions that bring digital and physical together, they also have to exploit new technologies and adopt cultural changes that improve customer engagement, involve employees, optimize operations, transform products and finally stimulate growth and opportunities for the business. So how AI is bringing retail experience to the next level, read our article.
AI and Analytics:
It is for the first time in decades that technologies (e.g. cognitive capabilities of machines, cloud computing, Edge computing, robotics, etc.) are evolving faster than business processes, increasing data volumes, advances in data analytics and intelligence are creating mature and efficient AI capabilities that are now able to cover a wide portion of a retailer journey; from inventory management to customer service. Retailers are also integrating business intelligence in all the possible interaction points of their business, enhancing replenishment calculation, improving sales predictions, reducing waste, optimizing online and in-store experience and product recommendations. It is becoming a must-have rather than a nice to have for retailers to meet the fluctuant and tremendous needs and expectations of consumers (same-day delivery, in-store hyper-personalization, online recommendation, virtual reality, gamification, etc.
Source: peak.ai
Remember, few years ago Bricks and Mortar retailers barely knew who their customers were. Imagine today, as AI goes hand in hand with data analytics, that in real time they’ll be able to know when a particular customer has entered the store, where exactly in the store that customer is and what he or she is looking at (which was more challenging then the online customer journey). Then combining that information with what the retailer already knows can let the retailer draw intelligent conclusions and take commercial actions such as upselling, cross-selling, etc.
Early retailers that will retain and distil the data that reveals more relevance among customers would be able to get valuable insights and will be the most successful in the hyper-personalization race.
AI for workforces:
AI will also impact operational activities, such as workforce management, driving the retailers to invest in collaborative communication tools and data-driven equipment that democratize access to information. Everyone in a company should be able to access analyses and new productivity tools (collaborative work, mobility, etc.) to offer a more personalized experience to customers.
In terms of intelligent supply chain, the use of robots turned out to be a controversial decision to be made by retailers. However, but it seems that the progress of this technology during the last decades led to a sort of equilibrium: retailers’ daily routine is being efficiently covered by robots and AI; however, human workers are redeployed in more value-added activities. This co-habitation with the human and robotic workforce is the next big challenge for retailers’ HR and IT to ensure a continuous and sustainable partnership between the two workforces. Are we then reaching an operational efficiency? The answer would be yes, and more than ever, creating a service level that would be a key differentiator for retailers, not only in terms of intelligent supply chain but also in terms of an incentive for front-line workforce to be passionate about products, capable of solving any problem and then deliver a first class service for consumers.
AI in the Supply chain: Covering the last delivery mile:
The major challenge dealing with last mile delivery is the high cost – representing up to 53% of all the delivery expenses (businessinsider.com) due to the high complexity of infrastructure, routing, security and lack of control.
Source: paragonrouting.com
Thanks to AI, retailers are now able to start building an integrated and automated fulfillment network, creating an optimum operating model for delivery and increasing customer satisfaction with fast and controlled delivery. Retailers are also leveraging data-driven planning and adaptive control to finally be able to ensure a ‘same day delivery’ or free shipping with a significantly reduced cost.
AI empowering voice interaction: the most humanized cognitive channel
Customers are continuously looking for a simple and efficient channel to interact with retailers. Retailers want to be understood and be able to deliver the closest human experience at scale. AI has brought such interactions to a new level, introducing deep learning cognitive capabilities which have led to voice being used as a new channel that retailers can present, sell or even upsell their products on.
Thanks to optimized cognitive capabilities, pronunciation analysis, keywords recognition and all the evolution of machine deep learning, AI can now easily understand customers’ orders, place them and in some cases recommend other options that might fit customer’s needs.
Amazon Alexa leads this technology niche and introduced a B2B business model that allows retailers to embed voice capabilities as a built-in feature into their apps & websites, making Alexa the most humanized tool for shopping.
Use case: Alexa + Atom ticketing: Order cinema tickets by voice, understand customer preferences and recommend content.
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Source : https://www.atomtickets.com/legal/amazon-alexa