The retail industry is constantly evolving, providing the gradual, incremental improvements required to satisfy the customers’ ever-changing needs. Since the dawn of the internet age, however, the industry has been thrust into a techno-driven revolution challenging every rule in the retail handbook. The latest disruptive force, artificial intelligence (AI), is like nothing we’ve seen in the last twenty years. AI’s potential to revolutionize every industry, especially retail, is mind-numbing considering its ability to autonomously enhance its performance and capabilities over time. Not since my internet pioneer days in the mid-90s have I seen such turbulent waters in the sea of retail change. And that’s saying a lot, given the twenty-year technical tsunami we’ve endured.
We are now at the point where competitive advantage will derive from the ability to capture, analyze, and utilize personalized customer data at scale and from the use of AI to understand, shape, customize, and optimize the customer journey.
I’ll write much more about my vision of AI’s impact on the retail industry, but I wanted to share this fascinating article from The Harvard Business Review. In keeping with my penchant for retail personalization, this article explores how cutting-edge companies build AI-powered intelligent experience engines to assemble unprecedented, high-quality customer experiences at scale using customer data. The sheer volume of data, systems, processes, and analysis required to provide a hyper-personalized customer experience is overwhelmingly complex. But AI-powered intelligent experience engines are proving they can handle the load. They design end-to-end solutions—for example, finding a location, scheduling an appointment, sending appointment reminders, providing directions, and guiding users through any necessary follow-up—that proactively lead customers toward achieving their goals. They also combine human enablers (cross-functional, agile teams) with data and technology for rapid self-learning and optimization.
Personalizing an end-to-end customer experience requires orchestration across channels—a capability that no brand has fully mastered. But merging the flow of customers’ physical and digital experiences may be the only way challenger brands can compete against digital natives like Amazon and Google.
Building an intelligent experience engine is time-consuming, expensive, and technologically complex. But the results allow companies to deliver personalization at a scale we could only have imagined a decade ago and may be the only way challenger brands can compete against digital natives like Amazon and Google.
By David C. Edelman and Mark Abraham – Harvard Business Review – March|April 2022
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