Aditya Birla Online Fashion (Abof), an India online fashion retailer, is utilizing IBM Cloud and Watson to enhance shopping experience.
ABOF is already a customer of IBM.
ABOF customers can use natural language questions within ABOF’s enhanced eCommerce platform and receive greater personalization and product recommendations.
The new online retail feature enables shoppers to interact and ask natural language questions about abof’s product assortment, receiving custom responses to their inquiries.
For example, a customer could type, “where can I find a red floral dress?” or type a combination of price and product inquiry such as, “show me black shoes below INR 2000.” IBM Watson recognizes these inquiries on abof’s website to recommend top matches to the online shopper.
The e-commerce website utilizes Watson’s Natural Language Classifier, as well as Retrieve and Rank delivered on the IBM Cloud to ensure the best customer engagement through a question and answer interface.
IBM Global Business Services and IBM Research worked with abof to introduce the service and help create a more engaging and intuitive shopping experience for customers.
“Our aim is to create convenient shopping experiences for our customers in the digital world. This is a start of our cognitive journey and we plan to implement more Watson-enabled solutions in the future to continue our momentum,” said Prashant Gupta, president and CEO of abof.com.
“There is an exponential growth in online sales in the India fashion industry and companies need to drive deeper understanding, better engagement and leverage data more efficiently to enhance the customers’ shopping experiences,” saidPrativa Mohapatra, vice president, Watson Platform, IBM India / SA.
In 2016, Abof started using IBM’s e-commerce platform, order fulfillment options, and customer engagement features such as a 3D virtual trial room enabling customers to input their body measurements and virtually try on any apparel before placing an order.