When The Body Shop tasked SMACK with creating an online diagnostics tool that assisted customers in choosing the best products for their beauty regime, little did the beauty brand – and indeed all brands that operate both online and in physical stores – know just how crucial the adoption of artificial intelligence would be to how they did business in the coming years.
As an innovative creative digital agency, we know AI is the future of retail. We were confident that this diagnostic tool would help our client – The Body Shop – significantly increase their basket value. Our knowledge on the benefits of artificial intelligence further boosted this belief. The end result was the client doubling the size of the average online customer shopping basket.
Yet, no one could have anticipated COVID-19 and the total shutdown of most brick-and-mortar retail outlets that it has forced, therefore increasing the dependency on online tools such as AI personal shoppers and chatbots seemingly overnight.
As vital as e-commerce has become to business operations, most people in the UK still – when possible – choose to make purchases offline, in-store in the physical. What the brightest brands have done is either integrate digital experiences with the physical, or tried to replicate the in-store experience virtually.
In industries such as beauty where customers are used to going in-store and communicating the individual variables that determine the products they purchase to shopping assistants or beauty experts (e.g. skin type, skin condition, skin tone, allergies, age, sex, and so on), it’s important that businesses provide a digital experience that replicates this personalised shopping experience when the customer is not able to visit a store, as is the case with the coronavirus pandemic.
Don’t let the formal title ‘diagnostics tool’ fool you: the digital experience SMACK built for The Body Shop is for all intents and purposes an AI shopping assistant or AI personal shopper who – just like a helpful human assistant would – makes individualised product recommendations based on the answers a customer provides to a set of questions (like those involving the aforementioned variables).
In essence, for customers, AI shoppers and other AI tools provide an online version of the physical, personalised interactions with businesses that a global pandemic such as the coronavirus has put on pause.
Brands that have made it a priority to create such digital experiences and have anticipated the impact of technology on how business will be done in the future are now able to showcase the edge they have over competitors, especially with the world on lockdown.
But even outside of a global pandemic (burns sage and crosses fingers and toes hoping it will end very soon), AI shoppers, assistants, and other such digital solutions allow brands to offer seamless offline and online, digital and in-store experiences to customers.
Digital customer experience – which is the multiple interactions customers have with businesses – can occur both online and in-store. In fact, customers expect this as part of their customer journey which can begin online and be completed in-store.
AI shoppers are great because they can exist both online and in-store as part of this journey and be very effective.
As an example, after the success of the AI tool SMACK built for The Body Shop’s website, the beauty brand tasked us with building a version for in-store usage. We were able to create a version that suited the in-store environment.
But not only that, with this version being created for sixteen territories, it was important the questions asked by the AI personal shopper reflect the climate, culture, and lifestyle of each one. This allowed this in-store version of the customer experience to still be personalised and maintain the same bespoke feel of the website version.
Online or in-store, no matter where a customer’s purchase journey is taking place, AI shoppers and tools can help them move forward.
If you’re planning a marketing campaign for a new product, AI offers the opportunity to achieve your objectives in an innovative way.
When Superdrug wanted to launch “B is for Beauty”, its new in-house skincare line, the beauty brand sought out SMACK to build a website that featured – at its core – a diagnostics tool. This AI shopper helped customers find and view new products that fit their individual skin type.
This provided an engaging, interactive digital experience that helped Superdrug achieve their objective of being seen as the standout retailer in their sector while also raising awareness of B is for Beauty.
Machine learning can be defined as the algorithms that allow machines to use statistics to discover patterns in huge amounts of data. Think of how Netflix recommends certain content specific to you or the suggested posts that appear on your social media feed. In relation to AI, machine learning can help improve AI functionality and accuracy.
With machine learning developing every day and big tech companies such as Google investing so much in it, we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the things it can do to improve artificial intelligence, things that will have an impact on what AI is going to be able to do for businesses across all sectors. Machine learning will help facilitate the full scope of the advantages of artificial intelligence to businesses, allowing for AI that is more authentic or human in its interaction with customers. Artificial intelligence assistants and customer service tools such as chatbots are starting to reflect this.
The more AI understands humans and the nuances of consumer behaviour, the more it will be able to provide real-time, multi-layered, responses to customers and therefore help them cure their customer pain point. There’s also the added bonus that machine learning will make AI further reduce the human errors that can occur when a customer is interacting with a business.
Here at SMACK, we stay at the cutting edge of AI technology, constantly researching and developing ways it can help our clients achieve their marketing objectives. Contact us today to find out how AI can provide great digital experiences for your customers while helping you achieve your marketing goals.