Almost every business will tell you they play a good CX game, with enhanced this, AI-powered that and elevated experiences flying into the ceiling. But the results inevitably tell a different story, especially around much-vaunted AI efforts. To dig into some of the details around the reality, CXM talked to Matt Hildon at Valtech, a company on the cutting edge of digital experiences for global brands and businesses.
Valtech (a UK Digital Experience Awards finalist) is a French-founded business that reaches global markets with 30 years of digital experience. Growing organically and through acquisitions to master retail, marketing and the digital landscape, it offers advisory and practical services to customers, down to the smallest cogs in retail. The most recent addition is an AI Concierge to generate real business value and insights.
Talking to Matt Hildon, European retail director at Valtech, we want to find out more about what companies are doing now, how successful they are, and what the future offers across all-things experience.
What does the retail landscape look like from your perspective?
For many companies, good enough is the default operating mode. They can’t align data for a single truth, and struggle to cleanse data for high-value AI experiences among other problems. For the more progressive retailers, their business is moving into an era of intelligent experience, underpinned by data, to deliver intelligent, innovative and omnichannel experiences.
That all starts with a customer data platform, a single view of business truth and approaching a single view of the customer across all channels, including in-store and online. When a retailer hits this rich seam of information and accessibility, they can create hyperpersonalised experiences based around a model of each customer or consumer.
Phew, seems like an impressive goal, given the low state of most customer retail experiences. What types of data are we looking at here?
You have to remember that most retailers are dealing with a huge range of customers and can only develop services so far before alienating a statistically significant number of them. Take loyalty cards, which could provide many cool and useful features, but the evolution is snail-paced, while improving.
Brands that can soon create your shopping list based on your history and one or two inputs, rather than the item-by-item list creation approach. But they need to make sure every suggestion is valuable and relevant, otherwise consumers will lose faith in the experience and might drop out of the loyalty scheme.
In terms of data, everything is now vital from that physical receipt, asking for an email address at the checkout, as well as using QR codes for in-store marketing, online link behaviour, and many other aspects. As long as they link into a single view of the customer, they will help develop the next generation of services and insights.
Interesting, talking of what’s next for brand loyalty?
Stores will also analyse your shopping to see what you might buy two-of to get a cherished one-free, making it a personal offer, rather than a store or chain wide affair. Upselling through 15%-off on a happy hour deal might also encourage people to shift their shopping behaviour to times when they know you might spend more.
Of course, with higher-value brands, loyalty provides serious extra value. With Hilton Honors, for example, there’s almost a gamified level of customer desire to reach the next level or maintain their current one to keep the perks they rapidly become used to. Similarly, with non-profits and charities, the ability to rate and rank altruism is an enticing prospect for many. Consider people, like Apple Genius forum members, who help out for free to maintain their genius-ratings.
And what sort of service will this fully joined-up approach deliver?
The next goal is conversational commerce. With the rise of AI people aren’t just searching for a product. Like business buyers, they are more likely to search for the solution to their problems, such as “What wine will go with this meal?” Or, “what colour paint goes with this furniture?”
This approach creates a conversation that uses both customer and business data (and metadata), to deliver useful insights. They can act smartly, perhaps knowing if one of your dinner guests is lactose intolerant, or that your children dislike product X, so why not try product Y.
This style of conversation leads retailers to the key goal of the “Next Best Action.” A tool for driving sales, upselling, improving loyalty and creating a sense of value, even the romantic notion that the AI agent is working on your behalf.
How about value for employees?
AI agents are also employee-boosters, helping deliver key data like product descriptions, converting a provider’s product description into your company’s own style. Ensuring that colour, style and other descriptors match. That’s vital across potentially thousands or millions of records, and bots taking the workload off “search-merch” teams enable them to focus on where people add value.
They can add that personal touch to descriptions, highlight how a particular top was worn by a sports star or celebrity, anything that adds a touch of humanity to the experience. In an increasingly robotic experience, brands will need to find the human connection in new ways and use their people to create new avenues for loyalty and engagement that an AI agent simply cannot replace.
We’re building these tools for a wide range of retailers, in-store and omnichannel, harnessing their data and finding the new concepts that help them stand out from the crowds. And It is also an exciting time to hit the streets and see what firms are doing with technology. To visit a store and intuit what’s behind the scenes that makes some marketing magic work, and hoping to see some new wizardly idea that maybe one person in one store created that the rest of the world could take inspiration from.