In the fast-paced world of ecommerce, retailers must provide personalized experiences to meet customer expectations. This webinar explores how AI and machine learning are transforming the customer journey, increasing satisfaction and lifetime value.
What we learned:
- How AI enhances customer experience through personalization
- How AI can improve productivity
- Best practices for leveraging AI for customer experience optimization
Speakers:
- Ann Marie Ippoliti, VP Digital Commerce, Michael Kors
- Hani Batla, CIO/CTO, Adorama
- Michelle Pacynski, VP, Digital Innovation, Ulta Beauty
- Matt Gould, Chief Commerce Officer, Apply Digital
- Meghan Stabler, Senior Vice President Marketing, BigCommerce
- Moderated by: Allan Dick, Co-Founder, CommerceNext
Watch the replay recap below.
How AI Enhances Customer Experience Through Personalization
AI enhances customer experience through personalization by leveraging high-quality data to deliver tailored interactions.
It’s essential to focus on the basics: ensuring data quality and avoiding the “garbage in, garbage out” scenario. AI helps in collecting and refining data, leading to more accurate personalization. Understanding why customers disengage is crucial and AI can identify these pain points. However, it’s important to pair AI’s power with exceptional user experience (UX). This includes product findability, discoverability and content quality. Additionally, drawing inspiration from industry leaders and tech innovators can help implement AI effectively without overwhelming efforts. Starting small and learning from successful peers can guide retailers in creating frictionless, enriching customer experiences.
How AI Can Improve Productivity
AI has the potential to significantly improve productivity by enhancing knowledge, operations and engagement. An AI-first approach begins with education, ensuring that all employees, regardless of their role, understand the basics of AI and can utilize its tools.
Matt Gould at Apply Digital put it best, “This foundational knowledge empowers the entire workforce to leverage AI effectively.”
Additionally, applying AI to internal operations helps identify and eliminate bottlenecks and outdated processes, thereby improving the internal user experience, optimizing workflows, reducing labor-intensive tasks and accelerating productivity. It’s also important to address employees’ concerns about AI and automation by demonstrating how AI can free them from certain tasks and allow them to focus on more meaningful work. This allows businesses to enhance job satisfaction and maximize their team’s potential. AI enables rapid, personalized responses and actions, adapting to individual behaviors in real time. This precision in task execution not only boosts productivity but also ensures continuous improvement, making AI an invaluable tool for modern businesses.
Best Practices Of Leveraging AI For Customer Experience Optimization
Implementing AI has been successful for companies like Michael Kors and Ulta Beauty, which prioritize customer experience.
Michael Kors uses advanced technology to create tailored experiences for their customers based on their behaviors and preferences. This strategy enhances their ability to listen to their customers and respond to their needs more effectively.
“We leverage AI to analyze customer signals across our site, allowing us to deliver more relevant content at scale than ever before.” — Ann Marie Ippoliti, Michael Kors
For Ulta Beauty, AI is crucial for harnessing its unique dataset. By mining this data intelligently, they provide highly personalized recommendations. For example, their acquisitions of QM Scientific and Glam Street, two technology startups in artificial intelligence let the company combine AI and AR to improve customer experience. Their virtual try-on feature, Glam Lab, sees over 85 million shade trials annually from 11.5 million beauty enthusiasts. They offer tailored recommendations based on users’ visual characteristics, ensuring a highly personalized shopping experience.
For Adorama, AI is integral across various aspects of their website, from the homepage to checkout. They have focused on using AI to personalize the entire customer journey. Their recent initiative with PayPal aimed to make the checkout process more frictionless by offering the best default payment methods and personalized shipping terms for loyal members. Additionally, they enhanced search functionality using Google’s Cloud Retail Search, ensuring customers find the most relevant products quickly, based on their search history and preferences.
Finally, at BigCommerce, by adding and cleaning data from various sources, they ensure that each consumer receives personalized and relevant content. AI helps them to improve every stage, from search and product discovery to checkout and shipping, ensuring a seamless experience. Integration across channels like Instagram, TikTok and marketplaces ensures consistency.
To delve deeper into AI use cases in ecommerce and marketing, join us at the 2024 CommerceNext Growth Show on June 11-13th in NYC. Register now to secure your spot!
