IBM has bagged a deal from Lotte Group, a retail chain in Korea, to provide cloud-based IBM Watson solutions to maximize insights from customer data and enhance business.
Lotte Group provides products and services to its customers via online channels, mobile services and offline department stores, marts, convenience stores and duty-free shops in Korea.
Lotte Group will use Watson technologies to maximize insights from structured and unstructured customer data collected through its channels, including the Lotte Members program, deriving learnings about customer preferences and product feedback.
“With cognitive technology, Lotte will new value and innovation for the future. IBM has consistently made long-term investments in cognitive computing which is backed by a broad portfolio of industry solutions and services from consulting to enterprise-class computing, system integration and IT operations,” said Lotte Group CEO Hwang Gak-gyu.
Lotte and IBM will create an Intelligent Shopping Advisor for customers and an internal employee Cognitive Business Decision Advisor for the Group’s retail affiliates.
Lotte will introduce the Intelligent Shopping Adviser at Lotte’s department stores. This means Lottte retail customers will have their own virtual personal assistant offering help from product recommendations, shop location guidance, to support for online pickup service.
A shopper can ask a question like “my 12-year-old daughter’s birthday is next week. She likes reading and fashion, what is popular now and how can I purchase this gift?”
The IBM Watson service will be designed to offer tailored recommendations, transaction support, advance notifications for customer’s important life events and learn to recognize an individual’s interests. With relevant choices and purchase knowledge, customers will not need to search and save their time and resources.
Lotte will adopt a Cognitive Business Decision Advisor that employees can leverage for new product development. Using Watson technologies, Lotte will gain new insights for better decision making with the analysis of data from various sources like social media, blogs, news articles and customer data from point of sale terminals.
Lotte plans to build and upgrade its artificial intelligence-based application for business innovation to support personalized services throughout the customer life cycle within the next five years. These initiatives are part of Lotte Group’s technology roadmap to expand the introduction of IBM Watson to all affiliates from retail to food, chemical, tourism and finance.
editor@infotechlead.com
