Rapid adoption of AI in e-commerce delivers humanized customer experience

AI offers a multitude of opportunities in optimizing online sales – such as hyper-personalization, sales performance, campaign optimization, customer support and fraud detection – to name a few.

Being one of the most data-driven activities, e-commerce is already benefiting significantly from the power of AI and machine learning. AI helps improve several key parameters, such as online traffic, conversion rate, bounce rate, course analysis, conversion tunnels, SEO, SEA, tag management, logging, CRM connections and data management platform. E-commerce is fundamentally a data factory and AI will help organizations exploit this data to a level never reached before, from sales prediction and robotization of supply chain to predictive marketing.

Today, conversational assistants have invaded merchant e-commerce sites. After product recommendation, this is one of the fastest-growing AI topics that e-merchants have launched, adding an overlay of automation to already-deployed chatbots. Unexpectedly, the trend has not run out of steam. The conversational assistant is an alternative to categorization or form search, which is more natural, fluid, and fast. Depending on its level of complexity, it will be able to provide answers as per the context of the discussion. For example: a customer asks for kids’ jeans, then a t-shirt, without providing additional information about size, etc. and the AI assistant offers children’s t-shirts without asking any questions.

Identify sales opportunities and contextualize messages, products, and offer prices

Whichever option you choose, it is better to plan to switch to a human when the bot reaches its limits. But even after this step, AI can still be useful. For example, an AI solution calls from the call center to identify weak commercial signals. In the case of a travel platform, the solution understands that the main subject of the conversation is a visit to Lisbon, but at the turn of a sentence, if the speaker refers to a travel project in Italy, the application captures this signal and recommends a commercial action to turn this opportunity into a lead leveraging its appeal report.

Another AI solution that we deployed for one of our retail clients in the textile sector captures the latest trends in fashion from social networks. Information is then fed into the learning patterns of the clothing site alongside the session data and purchase history. The objective is to come up with product proposals based on the visitor’s taste in terms of style at a given time T. Always depending on the visitor’s activity on a site, a different AI solution tries to recreate impulse buying behavior by determining the emotional or rational personality of the visitor, it then pushes the messages, products, and prices accordingly.

AI rehumanizes customer experience across all touchpoints and channels

AI is a powerful means by which to humanize the brand/customer interactions driving loyalty and growth and facilitating employees’ work to improve operational efficiency. Our recent report “Impact of AI for Customer Experience” describes how AI is improving the quality of life for the individual customer and employee while creating a wealth of new opportunities for businesses to increase their operational efficiency, grow sales and loyalty, improve and speed up decision making, and become more relevant and innovative in product and services.

AI is helping organizations improve efficiency of their customer-facing functions including marketing, sales, commerce and services. Specifically, AI-based e-commerce solutions optimize and deliver targeted promotion with segmentation and anticipate future purchases. Promotional campaign is a key domain where AI is disrupting e-commerce market helping organizations that apply segmentation around personalization of e-mails and other ways of advertising their products and services. Finally, e-merchants, such as banks and financial services players, leverage machine learning to fight fraud. The algorithms can detect unusual behavior on e-commerce sites and can anticipate contentious purchases. The sessions identified as questionable are then blocked in the upstream transactions. Overall, AI and machine learning applications offer huge potential to drive growth and improve bottom-line of e-commerce players.

Simon Bachelet - AI-in-CX Offer Lead, France

To know more, read Capgemini recent point-of-view paper “Impact of AI for Customer Experience”