How Amazon Alexa can revolutionize Retail Industry

Today, every retailer is competing to give the best shopping experience to their customers. If we walk into a Nordstrom or Best Buy we have many employees lined up to explain the products or merchandise we are interested in. Even then, we end up waiting for these store employees to finish the discussion to get our questions answered. This often happens in the peak time, which also mean that employing more people to help is not a solution.

Next step is to have Touch Kiosk's and Price checking devices every corner but often this lacks the human touch and ends up doing more harm than the benefits or it is left in a corner without being used.

Another innovative solution is to train Alexa with the aisle information, article information, article counts in the store and product history. This would help the user interact with Alexa and get the information they need.

Let's take an example of a user walking into 'Best Buy' to purchase a 55" Television and he is left with several options to select. The customer would definitely need to choose between different manufacturers like Sony,Samsung, etc. If 'Best Buy' decide to deploy Alexa, personalized with the particular SKU (Product) details and attached the product or in the aisle, user can walk into the store and instead of waiting for the Store Manager to help them, they can ask questions to Alexa which is connected to AWS Lambda services and product database.

Skills are written either as a web service or directly to access lambda to give the user enough customized information based on their queries. Apart from the initial curiosity in interacting with the device, customers will feel happy and less dependent.

Initially published in my blog : Dhanesh Nair's Blog

Image Courtesy : post-gazette, Amazon

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