Opportunities to maximize shopping season 2021 during uncertainties

NRF Converge 2021 event, held in July 2021, was attended by well-known names and brands in the retail industry. One key takeaway from the event was that “Retailers who are ready to experiment, automate, innovate their services, data using Machine learning will be better equipped to maximize in the new normal”

Retail Customers will favor Retailers who take efforts to understand the behavioral changes in the retail customers in the last 2 years and respond to them through appropriate retail solutions.

Retailers need to take purposeful actions to build a Great Customer Experience, scale it, and weave in a contactless shopping experience for an empathetic, scalable, and safe shopping experience.

Also, this great customer experience needs to go all along from searching/browsing to shopping, payments, and customer support experience. 

Great customer experience, needs to listen to customers carefully to understand their intents and sentiments, understand their shopping needs, how it’s tied to their emotions. It needs to empathize with the customer, so as to accurately understand their needs.

A truly great customer experience will help the retailer unearth hidden opportunities, e.g. Providing an easy and delightful shopping experience to Senior/Disabled customers, thus attracting those new categories of customers.

Traditionally approaches to online customer interactions used chatbots, which felt mechanical using preset options. Conversational AI has transformed the world of interaction.

Virtual Sales Assistants build using Conversational AI, NLP, NLG can be a great way to extend this experience to online and in-store customers seamlessly. It can give almost the same experience as talking to a sales rep in a bring and mortar store. It’s a great way to transcend customer experience boundaries between online and in-store experiences.

It can provide sophisticated interactions with visitors by answering questions in a natural conversation, recommending products and services, helping them make buying decisions, helping in payments, smooth curbside handoffs, BOPIS(Buy online pick in-store).

How are you planning to maximize the shopping season 2021?