ecommerce ai
guide on how to level up cX post COVID-19
What have businesses learned and implemented over the past year? How have the market leaders updated and improved the online experience for customers? KPMG in its continuing series of reports on CX in many disciplines identifies eight capabilities and how they have changed over the past year. In this post we want to focus on Experience Centricity by Design because it nicely captures the idea of brand promise and how consistent delivery of this promise across all platforms drives better customer happiness.
Matt Holt, Chief Strategy Officer at Digitas UK, in his most recent article notes that design thinking is crucial to make transactions frictionless and fast but never at the expense of memorability. Memorability in design is a key feature of successful transitions to a better customer journey. Although any customer journey framework contains many decisions and touchpoints to consider for better experiences, we want to suggest some ways to improve product discovery – the process of searching for and finding a product that brings satisfaction.
Jack Ma once joked that in the early days, Alibaba often delivered products different from what was ordered, and customers enjoyed the surprise. We are sure you need to go to this extreme to please your customers but thinking about the experience from the viewpoint of your customers, even if those experiences are not what you anticipate it is always a sure-fire way to increase brand value.
Competition is about experience
Digital transformation has changed the game for many businesses and this pace has accelerated with more customers using digital ways of finding products. Consumer expectations have gone through the roof and are asking what brands can do for them to create a better digital experience. Consumers now expect you have exactly what they want even if you don’t have it! One method to help customers achieve the “perfect find” is to build some of the experiences around ML or AI tools.
Some companies offer predictive analytics, some offer complicated customer journeys for brands to use. Companies like Delvify help brands to deliver the experience of the perfect find through its Visual AI tool. By matching what someone wants to the closest item in your store, customers are given the seamless feeling of finding that perfect item. This personalized experience becomes memorable and accrues brand value.
Not touchpoints, but need-points
Consumers have more choices to go where they want, when they want. When it comes to online shopping, the next website is only a click away and social media has taught customers to follow their impulses and urges. Instead of fighting this behavior, it is important that our customer journeys are designed less as touchpoints but rather decision points. By displaying options for consumers to make decisions at variuos points on the path to conversion, we can give them whatever outcome they intend to have.
When a customer is browsing offline, they often wander and look at many items. Some are gathered for later consideration and some are discarded. By designing this into your website, customers can enjoy an iterative product discovery. The easiest way to implement this is through product recommendations. Amazon was a pioneer in this but today, although most sites can have a simple “best-selling” recommendation bar, they should be demanding from their service providers more interesting recommendation tools such as what goes well together, links to FAQs or information about the sustainability of the products. These customer experiences stand out because they are better than ordinary or memorable.
As companies aim to be more customer-centric, they have to understand that these journeys “start and end with the outcome customers are trying to achieve: Their intended purpose.”
Is this different from my everyday?
Personalized experiences are memorable when they fit into our existing patterns of behavior and make them better. For a brand, we only consider how to make positive personalized experiences. Brands must create journeys that align with what their customers are looking for. The formula to influence customers is no longer like the past, it should be designed as a path to purpose for the customers. From having purpose, brands will then be able to design the experience for customers to achieve what they are ultimately looking for.
Today it would be very rare to find a shopper without a high-powered camera connected to a fast computer in their pocket. The development of the smart phone has given us a new way to help customers discover what they might like.
Delvify’s Visual AI helps bring out the extraordinary from the ordinary. When on the street or at a shopping mall, inspiration may strike. By giving your customer a way to capture an image on their phone and no matter what that image is, match it to your products is a fun and memorable way to engage your customers. Do they like the coat of fur on their cat? We can now bring a similar pattern in the product line ups. Just point, shoot, and shop.
Get in touch with our team today if your brand would like to see how Delvify’s Visual AI solutions can help you be more customer-centric!
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