When our family built one of Europe’s largest independent cycling retailers in the pre eCommerce era, it was the quality interaction customers would have with the Store Associates that perhaps made it stand out amongst competitors. With the rise of eCommerce over the past 20 years, competition has forced retailers to cut store costs so much such that this experience is now becoming increasingly rare. You tend only to see it in high-end retail today. But does innovation in conversational search change things?
There have over the past 10 years been many attempts by software vendors to build a chat based interactions that resemble the interaction you would have had in store in the pre eCommerce era but the lack of sophistication of underlying technology has meant it still has to be staffed by people sitting on top of manual processes. During the pandemic we even saw an increase in retailers introducing live video selling online by a Store Associate. Here in the UK, Currys trialled and then went on to roll out ShopLive to it’s stores.
Significant advancements in machine learning & AI over the past 5 years has finally given us the foundational elements to build a virtual Store Associate that could be the AI superpowered assistant we dreamed of a decade ago but never had the technology to realise. The forward thinking retailers have now started infusing their own tailored LLMs into their digital storefronts, allowing shoppers to search for items with direct prompts rather than tedious drop-down menus. Then are vendors who have built life-like digital avatars for the metaverse that they are claiming can be put to use in eCommerce too.
Digital avatars could indeed hold the key to unlocking a new era of AI-powered excellence in customer service. These digital avatars combine GenAI tools like voice cloning, LLMs, and facial recognition and reenactment technologies to produce photo realistic digital humans capable of holding real-time, face-to-face conversations with online end-users in multiple languages. These AI-powered Avatars can be trained on company data and embedded onto company websites and mobile apps, effectively scaling personalised, one-on-one customer service — a groundbreaking leap in global CX.
This is most certainly a space to watch…
