Customer experience has become one of the most important competitive differentiators in retail and financial services as consumers increasingly judge brands not just by what they sell, but by how interactions make them feel. Advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing are now allowing companies to anticipate customer preferences with remarkable accuracy, creating more personalized and intuitive shopping experiences. As technologies like IBM Watson continue to evolve, businesses are moving closer to a future where digital assistants can predict consumer needs and deliver highly tailored recommendations in real time.
Rating the way we were made to feel when embarking upon, working through, and bringing a purchase to conclusion is a relatively new state of awareness for many of us. We’ve come to pay attention and to note how we feel when we undertake even the simplest transactions. Merchants have responded with better tools for improving the experience, time after time. The article captures the essence of the effort, and the broad categories in which machines are learning the human emotional triggers and how we appreciate our needs being anticipated.
Retailer North Face uses IBM Watson’s natural language processing to create the expert personal shopper. On the North Face website you can purely type in “I’m going on a cabin trip to Iceland in December” and with information about weather and other data the app will surface and identify the right product for you. This reminds me of a show I’ve been watching on the Syfy network called “Incorporated” which takes place 60 years from now. On the show you get glimpses of what the writers foresee the future will be like, and in one scene the main character sits in his self-driven car where he uses a voice activated program to buy his wife jewelry–product suggestions are projected onto the windshield—the screen. The character immediately buys the suggested product as the product was exactly what he wanted. Your personal shoppers know you better and can more easily predict your taste and style.
It is not lost on Mercator Advisory Group that IBM Watson technology, originally tasked with addressing the diagnosis of human disease and illness, has found application in further addressing other aspects of the human condition. On this trajectory, the level of service automation will make every one of us the Lord or Lady of our own Downton Abbey, having our needs met at the moment or in some cases immediately prior, to our awareness of them. FIs must take notice of this trend and map a course enabling them to make available desirable options for the customer at the moment they are relevant and actionable.
Overview by Joseph Walent, Associate Director, Customer Interactions Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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