Data and AI Are Transforming the Customer Experience in Retail Stores and Online. Here’s How
Create retail customer experiences that build brand love and increase efficiency.
What do retailers known for excellent customer experiences have in common? They keep shoppers coming back for more.
But today, understanding and delivering at every touchpoint across the retail customer experience is more complicated than ever. Shoppers engage with their favorite retailers on apps, in stores and pop-up shops, online, over the phone, and more. And as customer expectations continue to rise, the pressure to win wallet share grows more intense every year.
71% of consumers switched brands at least once since 2021, citing better deals, product quality, and customer service.
Take loyalty from predictable to personal.
What is retail customer experience?
What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?
Why is the retail customer experience so important?
How to improve your retail customer experience
To improve your retail customer experience, make it easy for customers to discover products, ask questions, complete transactions, schedule deliveries, solve problems, and exchange or return purchases. Here’s where AI is already changing retail customer experiences for the better: With AI, you can amplify the impact of your marketing, commerce, and service toolkits and deliver the attentive, personalized interactions your customers expect — in stores, online, on mobile, and everywhere in between.
To create a consistent customer journey across touchpoints and make the most of AI-powered opportunities:
Upgrade and modernize your technology
To maximize AI’s capabilities, unite data from marketing, commerce, and service on one shared platform. AI tools, when integrated in your workflows, improve and accelerate time to insights, support data-driven decision-making, and nurture consistent customer journeys.
In marketing, AI will help you find target audiences, draft personalized marketing messages, optimize campaign offers, and iterate on the results faster. Commerce pros will appreciate the higher conversion rates that result from personalized product recommendations and intelligent post-purchase experiences for customers. Store reps, when equipped with the right tools, will be able to provide efficient service faster. And in service, AI can power next-generation chatbots and virtual assistants, answering customer questions and completing transactions with more relevance and speed than ever before.
Create a consistent customer journey in real time
The right technology unifies your online and in-store experiences, merges your data sources, and enables AI-based capabilities that increase efficiency and drive profitable growth. This allows you to:
- Recognize customers when they interact with your brand, enabling you to tailor experiences to your customers’ needs and preferences
- Ensure store associates can pick up communications at the same place digital encounters leave off — and vice versa
- Connect digital and real-world paths-to-purchase, like enabling QR codes, opening store layout maps, and making purchases from displays
- Give in-store associates the visibility they need to serve customers from discovery to fulfillment
- Acquire and engage loyal customers with personalized interactions based on zero- and first-party data
Deliver hyper-personalization
Data, AI, and predictive analytics will help you segment and target the right audiences with highly relevant, customized experiences. Intelligent, data-driven insights that streamline and personalize customer interactions improve shopper experiences and increase marketing spend efficiency, because you’ll be able to target the right customers with the right offers in the right moments.
Although retailers already use segmentation to attract customers, hyper-personalization takes this further, by using broader market trends, past interactions, and third-party data to find and take action on even deeper insights. For example, anticipate shoppers’ needs and tailor interactions by texting a discount offer for a product saved to their wish list.