Retailers are striving to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded and competitive market. And a key factor that successfully attracts and retains customers is customer experience.
According to Walker, as cited by KPMG, “Customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by the year 2020.”
To deliver the desired customer experience, retailers need to understand what drives consumers to shop the way they do.
Thanks to the fast-paced, social, and digital retail environment, shoppers expect engaging content, easy access, and fast fulfillment. A seamless experience where everything is tailored according to their needs.
Accenture, through its survey of 15,000 customers across 20 countries, excellently summarizes the four essential things that make up a smooth customer experience:
- Know Me. Create the ability to really know customers and communicate with them in a hyper-relevant manner across all touch points.
- Inform Me. Truly understand and provide the kind of information customers are seeking at every step of their journey. Communicate with them about merchandise, and where each and every unit is or will be, with total transparency.
- Make It Easy & Engaging For Me. Reduce transactional friction and create engaging experiences that will drive loyalty.
- Get It To Me. Fulfill each customer’s demands, whenever and however they want, with an economic model that supports profitability targets.
Big data and analytics help retailers deliver outstanding shopping experiences by better understanding customers. In fact, worldwide spending on big data and analytics is expected to hit $187 billion this year.
Table of Contents
An enhanced data analytics approach
One component of data analytics is the use of video/image data.
According to Gartner analysts, Nick Ingelbrecht and Tuong Nguyen, “Video/Image analytics for customer experience […] automate[s] the identification of significant information contained in images […] to generate insight and actions that contextually improve the customer experience.” (Hype Cycle for Customer Experience Analytics, 2019)
Data science can help retailers understand consumer behavior and preferences through video/image analytics. Insights from data analysis (such as demographics, emotions, and preferences) support:
- Heat maps in stores for merchandizing
- Shelf optimization
- Footfall and reverse image search
The hype around image/video analytics is true. Gartner gives it a ‘High Benefit Rating’ and considers it a competitive advantage for early adopters.
“Image data will become an increasingly strategic and unique organizational asset and resource for unobtrusively generating the customer insight that is essential for improving customer experience,” shared Ingelbrecht and Nguyen.
Video/image analytics automatically identifies products, brands, and logos that appear in images and image streams. Especially where no text or tags are available, the technology helps retailers:
- Inform and validate ad campaigns
- Personalize/target messaging via social media
- Measure and classify visual “mentions” on social media
- Correct product defects and anomalies during manufacturing
- Improve service quality
Together with Amazon Web Services, Alibaba Cloud, and other video/image analytics providers, Syte was included in the ‘Sample Vendors’ that Gartner analysts mentioned in the report.
To know more about the Hype Cycle for Customer Experience Analytics, 2019, click here.
The Power Behind Syte’s Visual AI
Syte powers visual searches for more than 2B shoppers around the world. Its image analytics technology detects multiple objects and products in a photo with a single image upload. This eliminates the need to manually crop images for consumers and fastens product tagging for retailers.
With an accuracy of 95% and an average response time of 500ms, the technology detects brands and logos across many verticals, from fashion and home décor to groceries and packaged goods.
Combined with a near real-time high scale indexing that allows for an hourly inventory refresh, Syte helps retailers:
- Smoothen product discovery
- Create attractive merchandising campaigns
- Make data-driven business decisions
- Predict future stock demand
By leveraging customers’ interaction with videos/images and a robust technology that automatically analyzes visual information, retailers receive actionable insights that powers shopping experiences that match customer expectations.
With Syte, retailers can deliver seamless customer experiences and cement customer loyalty in today’s ever-changing, competitive retail space.
* Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Note: I wrote this content as a contractor at Syte, a visual search technology company.
