Digital transformation has touched almost every industry, and it has significantly contributed to industry growth and evolution. But one industry has witnessed the most extensive transformation, and that’s the retail sector. In fact, in 2020, the AI in retail market size stood at USD 3.75 billion, and it is projected to grow at a CAGR of 30.5%.
AI in retail has transformed the way retail businesses operate. With AI’s help, retail businesses can now offer customers a wholesome shopping experience. As a result, they can serve customers better and retain them too.
This post will give you an overview of how AI in retail is transforming your shopping experience. So, let’s get started!
AI in Retail – Solutions Aiding Transformation
AI has reached far and wide across different industries, and it aligns with almost every business environment. And when AI enters the retail industry, there are several aspects of retail that AI has made easier and seamless.
For example, retail customer services have greatly improved with the emergence of AI. One of the best AI Trends in Retail is AI-powered chatbots that can handle your basic customer queries. They can respond instantly, engage customers, and offer shopping assistance.
Further, AI solutions also help retailers to collect data, analyze them, and process troves of information to make better-informed decisions. In short, AI has helped retail take on a data-driven approach.
AI in retail market trends also fosters behavioural analytics. Emotion AI-powered shopper insights help retailers devise strategies based on consumer preferences. It also helps drive personalization by delivering deeper consumer insights. Also, you can improve business projections by analyzing marketing demographics information with AI.
In the next section, I’ll give you 6 ways in which AI in retail has transformed consumers’ shopping experience. Take a look!
6 Ways How AI Has Transformed Retail Shopping Experience
From product design to user experience, AI has transformed several aspects of retail businesses. Take a look at a few of them.
1. Enriched in-store customer experience
Who doesn’t love a hassle-free in-store shopping experience?! Everyone does. And AI makes it possible for retailers to deliver customers a perfect shopping experience.
Considering AI in Retail Market Trends, AI is the most sought-after technology to enhance customer/ user experience. Conversational AI chatbots can easily address customer queries in real-time. They assist customers by offering product recommendations, automating check-out counters, discounted prices, and much more. Moreover, AI bots also monitor stock replenishment through real-time monitoring.
2. Customer engagement and personalization
According to Semrush, 40 percent of sales and marketing strategies favour AI and machine learning over other technologies.
By leveraging Emotion AI technology, you can deliver personalized experiences to customers. AI enables you to collect user data and get deeper consumer insights, based on which you can provide personalized in-store experiences.
The idea behind intelligent retail shopping revolves around the personalization of the customer’s journey. With the help of AI, you can customize in-store product displays, prices, offers and discounts, and loyalty recognition using historical data.
Further, retailers can also boost online and offline sales with AI, predicting custom choices based on data like demographics, location, social media comments, reviews, and more.
3. Enhanced customer support
Your customer support team can work much better with AI in retail. Your AI-powered bots can easily handle customer queries and talk to them in human-like ways. In fact, according to research, chatbot chats have 90% satisfaction rates on average.
Retailers have improved the quality of customer support with AI chatbots. While chatbots handle customer queries, offer product recommendations, and address grievances in real-time, customer support agents can focus on the more complex aspects.
The best thing about implementing AI in retail customer support is that retailers can easily engage customers. AI chatbots respond faster and provide customers with all the information they’re looking for when they interact with customers.
4. AI store assistance
Often, customers prefer individuals guiding them to explore options. Before the rise of AI, retail personnel guided customers throughout their journey by recommending products based on quantity, preferred brands, and price.
With AI virtual assistants, retailers allow customers to narrow down purchase possibilities through price optimization, targeted content, and visual searches. These AI eCommerce benefits have allowed many retailers to boost conversion rates even during slow, offline sales.
5. Demand forecast
Market trends sway now and then. And keeping up with these changes is what makes businesses successful. AI in retail markets helps companies mine consumer and market insights from channels like the marketplace, surveys, competitor data, and others.
With these data, retailers can create forecast models to predict Retail Artificial Intelligence Trends. Thus, the forecasts can help you design products and procurement strategies correctly, considering what consumers demand.
6. Increased employee productivity
Lack of employee productivity is often seen across industries as a part of the workforce is constantly engaged in routine tasks. This gives employees little to no time to focus on the critical aspects of their departments.
AI in retail can help you reduce workload. Conversational AI can take up routine tasks, allowing your employees to focus on critical and strategic jobs.
For instance, in human resources management, AI bots can handle onboarding, form fill-ups, training, and query resolution without any human intervention. Similarly, with AI, support teams can clear their ticket backlogs and respond to customer requests in real-time.
In Conclusion
AI in retail trends is already in the spotlight, and many retailers have witnessed increasing revenue and gains by leveraging the power of AI. Hence, once you implement AI, you’ll know that it can take your business to the next level.
While AI can give you consumer data to perform better, emotion AI in retail can facilitate faster decision-making for retailers. It can help teams to research better, get consumer insights, and develop products that can address consumer needs.
So, in today’s business environment, it is crucial to leverage AI in retail to stay ahead of the crowd.