Customer Experience Boosted By Tech Solutions
According to The Wall Street Journal, 78% of consumers expect a personalized shopping experience. In the past, this need could be easily met in offline stores: meet a customer, serve a glass of champagne, and provide excellent customer service. In the wake of the pandemic and the boom in online shopping, all that changed. It’s time to seek out modern approaches, and to use new technologies.
Here are several examples of how to use technical solutions to increase sales and quality:
- Connected commerce.
This means combining lively human interaction with the convenience of e-commerce.
For example, using a combination of “QVC (short for Quality and Convenience”), Facebook Live, and e-commerce”. This form of trading has existed since 2018 and was only actively used in the Asian market. Alibaba’s $74.1 billion revenue during the 11-day Global Shopping Festival in 2020 changed all of that. Western brands like Gucci and H&M’s Monki have already embraced this idea.
- Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
It is commonly used to integrate multichannel brand offerings.
For example, this was done for the German cosmetics retailer Douglas. Douglas’ team created Let’s Do It Nicely 3D virtual exhibit using Web JL and Three.JS technologies. The department created a completely virtual space, which was perceived as physical as in a museum gallery.
- Social media combined with the new digital format.
According to Backlinko, the number of social media users as of July 2021 is 4.48 billion. This means almost 5 billion potential buyers.
That’s why fashion brand ASOS together with digital agency created the #AySauce TikTok campaign. The team used a custom track, interactive augmented reality with signature TikTok effects, and launched a hashtag challenge with 28 popular UK and US creators.
- Empowering the product.
Work on improving functionality or portability, for example, as was done with Delta Group’s Innergie brand, a leading provider of consumer energy products.
The brand has developed the Innergie C3 Duo USB-C power adapter, which has two reversible USB-C ports for fast charging and can reach up to 30W of power when used to charge one device. It can also simultaneously charge several small devices like smartphones or tablets. For example, Duo charges iPhone Pro Max twice as fast as a regular charger.
What can stop us?
The cost of large-scale developments and competitors.
This is noticeable in the example of the OpenAI GPT-3 language model, created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory. It is a large, mathematically modeled neural network that was loaded with huge amounts of text from the Internet. GPT-3 can find statistical patterns that are extremely accurate in predicting which words should follow others. GPT-3 can work with tasks like answering questions, generalizing text, and correcting grammatical errors. In some respects, it is 1000 times superior to its predecessor GPT-2.
But the GPT-3 training costs nearly $5 million. It’s certainly not the figures available for small businesses.
Don’t give up! Usually, rising costs motivate people to find better ways to train AI algorithms. A lot of companies are working on specialized computer chips for both training and running AI programs.
And we at ABC Assembly are ready to help you with figuring that out. Let’s cooperate to improve your products using new technologies.