Customers today are much more commanding and demanding when it comes to online shopping. They have all the means to explore, research and share their online shopping desire or experience . It takes a minute for them to leave your site and go to another to buy their choice of product. Now, in situations like this, new algorithms, computer technologies and access to digital information are creating significant opportunities and possibilities to delight and retain such customers online.
Thankfully, one such technology, artificial intelligence is really helping the e-commerce sector to satisfy the personalisation demand of customers now. In fact, as per Gartner, almost 85% of interactions with a customer will be handled without a human by 2020. The AI will be able to deliver such a unique experience to customers that so far has only been achieved by brick-and-mortar stores. Further, with AI solving customer problems, personalising product recommendations and increasing their engagement, the problem of shopping cart abandonment will be solved to a great extent. Let’s see how exactly AI is benefitting the e-commerce sector.
1. Chat bots
Chatbots are AI-powered interactive messaging applications that can simulate conversations. In e-commerce, customers generally get stuck with payment or exit procedures and end up looking for some personal assistant like chatbots to help them. Chat bots understand, imitate natural language, and looks like an interact with a human on another end. This automated communication task simplifies many queries of customers and falls way cheaper than a live chat operator. It has proven to be a better assistance to customers with accelerated service and happy endings to problems.
2. Personal shopping assistants
They are the AI-powered applications that process tons of data to know more than the customer’s basic choice or capacity to pay. They track down the trend of customer purchasing or the time when mostly the site is visited by them. They observe the behaviour and identify separate specific persona of the customer and accordingly put forward the suggestions for the purchase. These online personal assistants help the customer by providing personalised product suggestions so that they don’t have to hunt a lot for what they want.
3. Easy search
An extensive product assortment and flexible site search are absolutely unavoidable for online web stores. But what more pleases the customers is the enhanced semantic-based search. Now AI-powered search systems understand the natural language, recognise the synonyms and in their own way process the queries to come up with more relevant results.
4. Fraud detection
Using the AI technologies, the machines can now even spot suspicious behaviour also. The systems understand the customers, their choices and the information they generally feed or look for. Now if there is any deviation in this pattern, the set algorithms automatically work on it to avoid any kind of false action.
5. Supply chain management
AI also helps to organise and transform tons of data into actionable insights. With AI technologies, demand forecasting is precise, replenishment planning is easier and optimum inventory levels are maintained smoothly. But to process the data, the AI systems need to access it and to make it happen, the shopping cart, the data on orders, products and customers should be integrated well with the AI-powered tools.
