What makes a consumer buy a product from one brand over another? The answer used to be brand loyalty and quality of product, but the landscape for consumer goods companies has recently flipped upside down. Anymore, consumer goods companies gain and retain loyalty from customers because of the experiences they provide. Thankfully, generative AI has brought about the acceleration of experience creation and allowed companies to dive into new levels of personalization. 

Gen AI has the potential to revolutionize customer engagement by creating personalized marketing assets and experiences. For consumer goods companies, these assets can be generated to subtly promote the brand and its products and make it easy for the customer to make the decision to purchase. 

Improved Customer Service Fueled by AI 

Chatbots have been around for several years, but their limitations have still left customers wanting the human touch. Generative AI has the power to improve that customer experience while still lowering call volumes and costs for consumer goods companies. It is now much more possible for customers to get answers to even the most obscure questions that could not have been predicted by engineers setting up questions and answers in chatbots. 

When armed with comprehensive information on products, inventory, and more, the best generative AI tools can pull the requested information without hallucinations (making up information when there is a lack of information), the fear of which has caused many companies to hesitate in implementing AI before. 

Hyper-Personalizing the Experience 

Gen AI can analyze a wealth of customer data including purchase history, preferences, and behavioral patterns. By leveraging this information, consumer goods companies can create tailored experiences for individual customers.  

For instance, generative AI algorithms can provide personalized meal plans that suit the specific dietary needs and preferences of each consumer, and then recommend the company’s products as part of that meal plan. This not only ensures customer satisfaction and convenience but also establishes a deeper connection between the brand and its customers. The same approach can be used for building a customized grocery list, fitness plan, or home improvement plan – the possibilities are only limited by the imagination – that answers to that specific customer’s needs and recommends the company’s products as part of the solution. 

By building an experience with the brand that fosters consumer loyalty, companies can transform from hard-selling entities to trusted advisors and partners to their customers. 

Enabling Seamless Operations 

Gen AI can significantly impact the operational efficiency of consumer goods companies. By analyzing customer data, AI algorithms can identify trends and patterns, enabling better inventory management. This data-driven approach allows companies to forecast demand accurately, reducing waste and optimizing resources. Such streamlined operations positively impact the overall customer experience, leading to increased loyalty and retention. 

Taking Marketing to the Next Level 

Gen AI enables consumer goods companies to create compelling marketing campaigns. By analyzing browsing and purchase histories, AI algorithms can generate targeted advertisements that resonate with individual customers. This personalized approach not only captures the attention of consumers but also increases the likelihood of conversion. By aligning their offerings with customer needs, consumer goods companies can influence purchase decisions and drive sales. 

Revolutionize Consumer Goods with Gen AI 

Consumer goods companies have the potential to revolutionize their customer experience, loyalty, operations, and sales with generative AI. The ability to deliver tailored experiences will take consumer goods companies to the next level and allow their products to become a part of immersive, personalized experiences across all aspects of the consumer’s life.  

Provide unparalleled value to customers with Perficient’s generative AI and consumer goods expertise. 

Creating unified customer experiences across all touchpoints and channels is a common goal among retailers, and organizations often talk about being customer-centric and driving towards a personalized, consistent experience. Despite these priorities, many can’t deliver. At our Retail Innovation Conference and Expo workshop “What Should I Do Now Vs. Next: How to Prioritize Your Unified Commerce Capabilities,” we helped retail leaders assess where their companies currently stand and where they can improve when it comes to commerce. 

Within these capabilities, there are six major trends driving the overall transformation of the industry towards customer-centricity. 

1: Shipping Delivery and Transparency 

Ever since one-click purchases and speedy delivery began taking over online shopping, customers have been anxious to receive all their products on demand. The ideal scenario is that time from purchase to delivery is fully optimized, but even if shipping is taking longer than desired, transparency throughout the process keeps customers satisfied. Real-time updates through online dashboards, emails, and SMS keep customers in tune with their purchases and your brand.  

Anymore, this level of transparency is standard. To get ahead, retail leaders should begin implementing capabilities for customers to reroute, hold, cancel, and modify their deliveries at the touch of a button. Further, any exceptions that have altered shipping should have automated notifications for customers. 

2: Hyper-Personalization 

Nurturing customers as individuals is vitally important to gaining and maintaining their loyalty. A hyper-personalized approach across every touchpoint will set your organization apart from the crowd and increase sales significantly.  

Right now, it is table stakes to offer your customers personalized communications and products tailored to their individual preferences, but that will no longer be enough. The next step is to time customize recommendations at the peak moment the customer is most likely to engage. Further, you’ll want to utilize emerging technologies like generative AI and predictive analytics so that you offer a recommendation before a customer even has the need for it. 

3: Innovation in Blending the Physical and Digital Worlds 

Online and in-person shopping has not been mutually exclusive since the omnichannel evolution, but customers have still mainly experienced the two shopping modes separately. Transformation in the industry now allows the digital and physical experiences to elevate and amplify each other in new and exciting ways.  

Retailers are already taking advantage of trends like social selling, where influencers promote their products online and customers can click to purchase directly from a post. The next level is to innovate new blended experiences such as virtual events, live product demonstrations, augmented reality, and more. 

4: Data Safety 

Time and time again, retailers have become victims of cybercrime and lost customer data to malicious actors. Data safety is more important than ever to organizations and individuals alike with online and digital payment options. Customers are even becoming hyper-aware of the way they allow companies to collect their information through cookies and form submissions. 

If you’re leading the industry, your company is taking an assertive approach to security strategies and governance of data and technical infrastructure across the entire organization and throughout the whole life cycle of the customer. 

5: Self-Service Capabilities 

The concept of self-service in retail has existed for years, but the widespread need for the capability was amplified by global lockdowns and social distancing practices. Customers have also come to expect convenience and speed in all transactions, and self-checkout capabilities thrive in this landscape. Retailers on the edge of this trend are not only leaders in mobile checkouts but also curbside pickup and grab-and-go orders. 

6: Eco-Consciousness 

Sustainability is not a new trend, and a recent NielsenIQ study revealed that 78 percent of US consumers prioritize a sustainable lifestyle. Most brands have embraced sustainable practices, such as encouraging the reuse and recycling of products, to promote their fullest potential before being disposed of responsibly. After some brands have been exposed to less-than-eco-friendly practices, however, consumers are becoming more skeptical of “sustainable” brands.  

To gain the trust and loyalty of eco-conscious customers, your organization should encourage trade-in, refurbishment, and resale to help reduce the amount of waste that goes into the landfills. Further, your brand should engage in greener packaging solutions to conserve natural resources and maximize profits. 

Become a Leader with What’s Next in Retail 

Do any of these challenges and priorities sound familiar to your company? At Perficient, our retail and commerce experts can help you analyze your organization’s current capabilities and create a roadmap to the future. Ask us about our experience helping retailers implement advanced capabilities in hyper-personalization, shipping exception automation and management, grab-and-go checkout, digital product passports, data privacy passports, and augmented reality (AR) commerce. 

Lead the retail charge with Perficient’s retail expertise. 

Not long ago, requesting reviews for online purchases was one of your only options for getting feedback on products and services. Products purchased in-store were often reduced to an item on a receipt, and the only review a retailer received was if the customer needed to return the item. Now, big box stores like Home Depot have tapped into a new dimension of customer reviews, and it is powered by unified commerce. 

Looking at the Data

Recently, Home Depot customers began receiving emails prompting them to review items that they had purchased in-store. While this practice seems like a simple concept, the organization and utilization of data needed to effectively accomplish this are monumental. In their unified backend system, Home Depot is collecting and organizing valuable data such as which products were bought, who bought them, when, where, and more. Then, they’re leveraging this data to keep in touch with their customers through digital means.  

This data collection is much more familiar for online purchases, which naturally use this information for content and order management systems to operate. When it comes to in-store purchases, many stores do not have these capabilities. 

For the retail industry, this technological advancement has ironically used digital transformation to improve the physical store experience. Using unified commerce, retailers can simplify their backend processes to track and serve consumers across multiple channels, allowing a frictionless buyer journey, from keyboard to cash register, and offering personalized insights and conveniences. Unified commerce takes retailers a step closer to treating customers as more than just a number – they are identified as individuals with unique preferences and behaviors, and individualized marketing and sales initiatives are more easily accomplished.  

The Customer Experience

Like most customer experience and loyalty advancements, it will also soon come to be expected by customers in every transaction. Customers will expect their in-store register to immediately recognize them as important customers who might have had items in their digital cart or requested that their online orders be available for pickup that day. They’ll want to know that their loyalty programs and rewards are available to them regardless of where they choose to shop. They’ll expect their dedicated store mobile apps to help them find inventory in their local store, read reviews about it, confirm that it’s the product they need, and even check out digitally. Finally, they’ll be much more likely to provide feedback and reviews when they feel important to their favorite stores.  

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Coming Soon

On Tuesday, June 13, 2023, Perficient will deliver a workshop during the Retail Innovation Conf & Expo in Chicago. In this workshop, you’ll use our Now/New/Next framework to quickly benchmark and prioritize your unified commerce capabilities to determine: 

• Where you stand relative to customer expectations and competitive forces 
• Which priorities you should focus the most time, money, and attention on to drive your unified commerce objectives 

• How to balance your experience portfolio to make the most of limited time and resources 

Workshops are available as an add-on for retail and brand executives attending #RICE23. If you are interested in registering, click here and log into your account, and add Workshops to your cart. If you would like to meet with me or my colleagues Kim Williams-Czopek, general manager of global commerce at Perficient, and Rupa Amin, Director, Commerce Strategy, at the conference, please connect and let us know. 

Retailers have come under fire for lack of diversity in models, unattainable sizing and style expectations, and unsatisfactory in-store experiences. It’s not hard to understand why. Walking into a store and trying on clothing can be intimidating for anyone, but it’s also not ideal to guess sizing and hope for the best while online shopping. These inconveniences are worsened by difficult return policies and societal body image concerns. When your only options for purchasing clothing include seeing the product on one model or spending hours trying on sizes and styles at the store, many customers limit the number of times they’ll need to buy new clothing or rack up a high number of returns. 

AI and Body Scan Technology Make Fashion More Accessible 

Thankfully, there is a friendlier option for customers looking to buy new clothes, and it also speaks to the digital-first customer-centric retail experience demanded by modern consumers. Recently, Levi’s announced they would allow customers to see how every pair of jeans would fit all sizes, body types, ages, and skin tones using AI. Levi’s cited both diversity and inclusion as well as sustainability as key drivers for their choice to use AI for the digital solution. 

Pants are not the only product that creates buyer hesitation due to sizing and style concerns. Not long ago, Wacoal implemented hands-free AI body scan technology called mybraFit that allowed customers to choose the perfect bra size. Wacoal’s technology allows the customer to use the scanning capability, answer questions, and input information. The AI then uses an algorithm to create a custom recommendation of products. 

Enhancing the Buyer Journey and Reducing Returns 

With body scan technology and AI solutions, shoppers everywhere can customize their profiles or online avatars to be as realistic as possible and predict how clothes will look on them without any need to purchase and return or visit a store. This is an exciting new capability for the research stage of their shopping experience, especially when discerning whether to buy up-and-coming products. This technology substantially alters the buyer journey and ecommerce – now online retailers at the cutting edge of AI can gain a competitive advantage and decrease instances of returns and unhappy customers.  

What About Generative AI? 

The AI technology hitting the headlines right now is generative AI, which retailers can use to personalize the customer experience even more without needing to invest countless resources. With generative AI, retailers can offer chatbots and portals that create custom product recommendations for shoppers. It can build personalized customer journeys based on each customer’s data, such as offering deals and discounts tailored to their preferences. Further, the customer can be shown content curated for them, increasing the chances that they’ll find the perfect products faster and be more likely to check out and even return for future purchases. 

By taking advantage of the latest advancements in AI and virtual reality – and by combining them with immersive online experiences and customer portals – retailers can capture what makes both brick-and-mortar shopping and ecommerce so great while excluding the inconveniences. These retailers will more effectively support and engage consumers from beginning to end of the buyer journey and secure their loyalty. Many of the shoppers who lost faith in finding the right products for them will suddenly feel heard and cared for.  

To optimize your customer experience with AI technology, tap into Perficient’s expertise surrounding digital solutions for retail. And if you’re specifically interested in learning how generative AI can be used for your particular business, we’ll be happy to share use cases. 

Survey says… 

Recent surveys of cable users have shown that the demographic is quickly aging. Half of cable users surveyed in one report were at least 60 years old, while over a quarter of respondents aged 18 to 29 preferred streaming services over cable TV. More troubling was that 60% of those surveyed who used a combination of cable or satellite and streaming services responded that they planned to drop their cable or satellite TV within the year. 

How do we reverse this exodus of cable and satellite users?

Personalize 

What’s causing younger cable and satellite users to seek another means of entertainment? There’s quite a bit to learn from streaming services, which have stolen the spotlight in recent years. Notably, they generally have exceptional digital platforms designed to help users browse for entertainment according to genre, topic, cast, and more. In addition, algorithms track, analyze, and utilize data about user preferences to keep them on the platform longer, watching more, and viewing advertisements. While cable and satellite TV offer preset channels and air shows at set times, streaming allows users to watch according to their preferences and desires immediately from any device. 

Redesign billing 

In addition to user experience while streaming, streaming services also offer carefree billing – a long-lived point of contention for many cable users. For years, cable users have dealt with complicated bills, including device leases, prorations, overage charges, and more. For streamers, an automatically paid bill every month includes one predictable (and often perceived as more affordable) subscription charge, relieving customers from overcomplicated and confusing bills. Even if billing must remain complicated in the sense of line items, a digital user-friendly interface for customers to review and understand their bills, as well as see value and other service offerings, is a huge improvement. 

Time is of the essence 

While streaming services were able to initially disrupt the cable and satellite landscape with low prices, that draw is slowly fading with inflating prices. The rise in pricing has much to do with the need to produce original content as networks begin pulling licenses to exclusively use content on their own platforms, like Peacock taking back ownership of The Office, and streaming services like Netflix needing new ways to reaccelerate growth. Overall, many of the challenges that cable TV faced years ago are finally hitting streaming services as well, and these streaming platforms are realizing they ironically must become more like cable to survive. 

By learning from the strengths and weaknesses of the streaming service space, cable, and satellite TV companies can add value to their services and raise customer retention rates. Improved interface design for both viewing entertainment and managing accounts will create a user-friendly experience that keeps customers coming back. Intelligent utilization of customer data can help assess the potential of new products and base network capacity and offerings on value. Not to mention, high-quality customer service and simplified account and billing support can help companies regain the trust and loyalty of life-long and new cable users.  

To begin turning the tables for your organization, tune into Perficient’s communications sector expertise. 

Omnichannel is critical, but it can only help so much 

Presenting the customer with a sleek and functional experience for online shopping is a top priority for leading retailers, making omnichannel retailing a key strategy in the industry. Omnichannel retail ensures a brand presents consistently across all customer-facing channels. However, omnichannel retailing alone has not sufficed to create a complete customer experience. It falls short on the backend for companies that are expanding and wish to effectively make use of customer data. 

In the beginning, many retail companies used unconnected channels and systems to provide ecommerce to their customers. Without the foresight to predict the path of retail digital transformation and innovation, companies began building their in-store and online experiences separately. This practice led to a divide that grew wider and wider, making it more difficult for companies to gather and share data between the channels effectively. 

In all the excitement surrounding digital advancements for ecommerce in retail, the focus on the physical store fell away. The in-store experience became stagnant while retailers invested all their resources in online shopping. Online shopping contributes a large percentage of sales for most retailers, and it is especially popular among wealthier demographics. On the other hand, it’s a mistake to discount the importance of an impressive in-store experience, especially when it comes to creating a seamless transferable experience among the channels. 

Revamping the in-store experience has become critical to retailer success, but the renovations are more than physical. In-store innovation recently has included order management with in-store pickup, curbside pickup, and delivery – a pivotal factor that kept many stores alive despite lockdowns and persisting fears and has now morphed into an expected convenience. To effectively provide these conveniences to customers, retailers cannot rely on outdated and disconnected systems. Instead, they must turn to unified commerce. 

Unified commerce is all the rage in retail 

Unified commerce allows the retailer’s channels to engage with customers and collect and share data with one backend platform. This unification of channels simplifies the way a retail company conducts data collection and analysis, and it helps avoid issues of the past such as duplicate customer information and incomplete information. In real time, a customer can begin their buyer journey in the physical store and finish it online, and vice versa. They can easily pass between channels, always identified as the same person with complete data, able to utilize their rewards and complete orders with ease. In this way, retailers can also have a more complete view of their customers, gaining critical insights into their behavior and how best to market and offer products for a seamless customer experience. 

The buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) model depends on unified commerce because it enables retailers to track inventory across channels and locations in real time. This advancement was a huge success for CVS, especially when personal care products and COVID-19 test kits were scarce. When pandemic fears and supply chain issues left shelves nearly empty, customers could immediately locate what they needed before they left their homes and purchase for pickup or delivery to avoid social contact. Another example is Carter’s, which needs the capability to track sales of their clothing and accessories in their store and on their website as well as through third-party sellers like Amazon and Target. 

To stay competitive, retail companies must create not only an omnichannel experience but a unified one in which customers can jump from device to device and from keyboard to register without skipping a beat. 

To simplify your commerce across channels, take advantage of Perficient’s retail and unified commerce expertise.

Join our workshop at RICE on June 13th: “What Should I Do Now vs. Next? How to Prioritize Your Unified Commerce Capabilities.”

Despite surviving both the Great Depression and the Great Recession, not even enduring luxury retail giant Nieman Marcus could escape COVID-19’s interruption of indoor shopping. When Neiman Marcus emerged from bankruptcy after a tumultuous 2020, the company smartly pivoted towards a new plan for targeting consumers.

The 115-year-old luxury retailer would laser-focus on their most profitable market: millionaires. No longer would the company sell products for the entire price spectrum, but instead, it would only be concerned with those who spent $27,000 or more annually at their stores.

For Nieman Marcus, targeting the top 2% of their customers who contribute around 40% of their sales was enough to turn the tables. After this bold decision, Nieman Marcus saw a 90% retention rate for those affluent customers in 2022, which the CEO attributes to more intimately understanding customers and focusing less on pricing.

But is that hyper-focus on millionaires really the full story behind Nieman Marcus’s success?

Nieman Marcus could capitalize on a customer segment less disturbed by economic downturns, but not all brands are luxury brands. Yet, those non-luxury brands – such as Walmart and Target – have rallied without excluding their less affluent customers. If you can afford to hyper-focus on your most profitable segment to improve your understanding of their needs and desires, then that’s an excellent plan for personalizing your marketing efforts and ramping up retention. The other side of that success story is that current market research shows affluent customers prefer online shopping even more than the average customer does: surveys showed 63% of affluent customers preferred online shopping compared to 56% of all other customers.

The downfall of brick-and-mortar department stores during the pandemic had much more to do with stores lacking an impressive user-friendly online shopping experience among other no-contact conveniences for their customers than it did with customer segmentation. A combination of lockdowns, persisting fear of crowds and public places, and an overall trend towards digital-first preferences all led to where retail now stands. At the same time, consumers desire more control throughout their buyer journey, so customer-centric experiences that allow most of the research, shopping, and buying to occur online almost always prevail.

Most department stores have now learned their lesson and implemented a digital platform for shopping. Neiman Marcus has online shopping, too. Even further, online ordering for conveniences like curbside pickup and delivery have thrust department stores like JOANN back into the spotlight.

The nature of ever-evolving consumer demands and digital innovation promises more to come for retail. We imagine the future looks like a hybrid retail landscape with seamless order management, virtual reality showrooms, AI scanning and virtual imaging, virtual styling, exciting customer loyalty programs, and so much more. It also means not just collecting data but analyzing it for business intelligence to strengthen relationships with your customers.

To launch your customer experience into the future, tap into Perficient’s expertise surrounding digital solutions for retail.