AI enables retailers to impress their customers, outperform their rivals, and maximize their revenues. Read this article to find out exactly how the retail industry can benefit from AI.
AI enables retailers to get a competitive edge over their rivals. Businesses that have already integrated AI and ML-powered solutions attract more customers, make more sales, and get higher revenues. In this article, you’ll find real-life examples of using artificial intelligence in retail. You’ll get to know exactly what AI can do to help retailers grow and thrive.
Create Customer-Centric Search
Customer-centric search relies on natural language processing to narrow, contextualize, and improve search results. Thanks to advanced image and video recognition, businesses learn to see the world through their clients’ eyes.
This is what AI-powered solutions can do:
Automatically tag relevant content
Label features of an image or video
Organize content so that the client can easily find what they need
AI creates models to optimize search patterns and continuously updates them. It can help customers to find matching and complementary products based on metrics such as size, color, shape, fabric, or brand.
Retarget Potential Customers
On average, sales reps fail to follow one-third of all potential customers. Many of these consumers are genuinely interested in the products or services that this business offers — but fail to buy them simply because the company’s representatives are not too enthusiastic about helping them. Businesses gather a lot of miscellaneous information about consumers that they don’t know how to systematize and use.
If there are cameras with facial recognition technology in a shop, AI can detect if a certain person spends a lot of time next to a specific product. When the client comes back to the shop, AI will know which items to suggest to them. Plus, this technology can prevent shoplifting: when AI detects a visitor who has stolen something, they will warn the shop’s staff.
Empower Store Workers
In online shops, chatbots successfully replace human reps. In brick-and-mortar stores, AI-powered shopping assistants can help customers in the following ways:
Greet them at the door
Guide them around the store
Source relevant product information
Plus, they can assist employees with inventory management. Experienced human workers, meanwhile, can concentrate on more meaningful interactions with customers.
Work with Intelligent Agents
Intelligence agents are highly efficient at performing the following types of tasks:
Matching buyers and sellers
Facilitating transactions
Providing institutional infrastructure
The agents are completely automated and use their own communication language. They can react to their environment as well as set targets for themselves.
Build Assortment Intelligence Tools
Assortment intelligence tools enable businesses to stay aware of what their competitors do. They enable companies to analyze the product ranges and pricing of their rivals. You’ll be able to find answers to the following questions:
How much does your product range overlap with what your competitors offer?
Which products might you want to offer to your audience so it doesn’t need to use the services of other retailers?
How should you fine tune your pricing?
The better you align your pricing with your product offering, the more clients you’ll be able to attract and retain.
Bridge the Gap Between Personalization and Privacy
Clients highly value customized products. To get such items, they need to share their private details with retailers. But how can they be sure that their sensitive data will be kept 100 percent confidential? Some people might hesitate to share information about themselves with retailers, even if the latter employ advanced tools to ensure data security.
To alleviate stress, businesses might offer consumers something valuable in return for their private information. For instance, a user can tell their voice assistant about their plans for today—and the device can inform them about potential traffic jams on their way or discounts in their favorite shops.
Generate Sales Through Wearable Technology
Compared to sites and apps, wearables can collect much more information about consumers. Here are a few examples of what exactly wearables can do:
See what products you view
Define your taste
Instantly recommend personalized items
Add in physical data such as vital statistics, measurements, and pupil dilation rate to customize the recommendations even further
Wearables facilitate cashless payments. In the future, they should be able to integrate with many technologies that retailers will embrace.
Tackle Fake Reviews
When buying goods online, consumers can’t touch, taste, or test them. That’s why around 90 percent of buyers confess that online reviews influence their purchasing decisions. In an ideal world, all reviews would be unbiased and informative. In reality, many brands hire writers to share positive reviews about them. Some unscrupulous businesses might commission negative reviews to tarnish their competitor’s reputations. The practice of creating false reviews that look like real ones and misguide consumers is known as astroturfing.
AI can help businesses and their clients detect and eliminate astroturfing. A machine learning system can boost the prominence and weight of verified customer purchase reviews that help consumers make informed decisions.
Combat Counterfeit Products
From the consumer viewpoint, it might be tricky to tell a counterfeit product from a legit one. They might discover the difference only after they purchase the item. But the quality of counterfeit products is usually poorer than that of the originals. Such a purchase might undermine the person’s trust in the brand and they won’t dare to buy its goods anymore.
AI can draw on data from multiple online marketplaces and analyze the following parameters to determine which products are counterfeit:
Posting rate of an account
What kind of items it sells
Potentially fake reviews on listed items
Consumers should be able to submit claims with a marketplace to have the counterfeit products removed.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you better understand how AI can help retailers grow and thrive. AI-powered solutions enable businesses to benefit from customer-centric search by empowering store workers and retargeting potential clients. Retailers can work with intelligent agents, build assortment intelligence tools, and bridge gaps between personalization and privacy. AI comes in handy for tackling fake reviews, combating counterfeit products, and generating sales through wearable technologies. All these achievements should allow retailers to get a significant competitive edge.