By Indraneel Ghosh
With the rise in automation around the world, our retail stores are on their way to being revolutionised. With several companies taking steps to bring in new technology to cut down on labour, we may be moving towards an age where we would have more automatic shopping stores instead of their brick and mortar counterparts.
Virtual shop assistants
To help give a personalised feel to their customers, retail giants around the world have started using virtual assistants. The breakthrough virtual assistants by Amazon and Google, combined with the all famous Apples Siri, have further accelerated the process. What makes AI assistants so efficient is that they can gauge customer preferences much better than a stranger. Having studied the behavioural patterns of various kinds of customer, they can provide better suggestions. For instance, right before you go for your Goa vacation, they might show you a range of swimwear after having studied your decision to go to a place filled with sea beaches.
These technologies can help win over the tech-savvy part of the crowd. Keeping this in mind, Amazon recently added Alexa, which is a virtual assistant, to its shopping apps for users of iPhone or iPad. It further extended this service to its Prime Now two-hour delivery service. Alexa uses the customer’s previous activity on the website to gauge their preferences and suggests them a product that they may like. There are specific other app-independent bots which perform the same function. They study the users behaviour on different online retail sites and based on the data collected from all sites, makes an ideal suggestion. They have access to more data for studying the user’s choices. Thus, they give better results. The huge volume of data that the machine analyses for every user helps them provide personal attention to each user. Thus, they have better efficiency than a human assistant. Also, the offline stores may use such tools to ensure that all the users get a more personalized experience and can shop more efficiently.
But one of the downsides is that as of today, these instruments still lack the human touch. One of the biggest issues with Alexa and most of the other assistants in existence is that they can only answer one question at a time. They cannot engage the consumer in a conversation. This issue needs to be sorted out to improve the user’s experience with virtual assistants.
Making things secure
To ensure that theft and fraud are kept under control, companies can use RFID tags on their stocks, which notifies the owner in case some fraudulent activity occurs with their product. Radio-Frequency ID (RFID) is a small chip that is implanted on a tag. The chip can store data related to the product, like its serial number, price or sale record.
The use of RFIDs would also improve the efficiency of the supply chain. For instance, in a factory, RFID can be used to track if all the goods are present. These methods would be much more accurate as compared to manually counting the stocks. At the same time, it can help the customer service check if there is a stock of a given product or not, much faster. In fact, the concept of tagging can also be extended to other industries as well. As of now, various financial institutions use the concept to keep track of the assets that they store. This can help them keep a record of possible breaches in security.
Although RFIDs have been touted to revolutionise the shopping experience for a long time, scientists havent yet managed to design RFIDs which would be useful for all kind of products. It is not viable to use the technology for very cheap goods. It is primarily used for luxury goods. Other innovations like the use of self-driven cars could help in providing the customers with a more relaxed shopping experience. It would allow them to entirely focus their attention on shopping as they travel to the required destinations.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality has been in use in the gaming industry for quite some time now. An early example, back in 2016, was the game Pokémon Go. Seeing its mass appeal, companies around the world tried to incorporate the idea into their products. Recently, Apple introduced its augmented reality product ARKit for iOS users.
Augmented Reality is a technology which superimposes a computer-generated image on a users view of the real world. Tech giants all around the world have been working on making this technology better and more viable for quite a few years now. It has been used by various online shopping portals to give the users an opportunity to try out their products virtually. This solved one of the biggest complaints customers have expressed against online shopping over the years. One can now try out the product sitting in their home and decide.
Cosmetics retailer Sephora was one of the earliest companies in its sector to use this technique to improve their users experience. Their application uses Modiface technology to scan parts of the users face like lips and eyes. It then overlays the effects of different products that they offer. It was done to boost the e-commerce sales as customers typically complained of not being able to gauge the real-life impact of the products by checking out the description given on the website.
In fact, various Indian companies have also been using the technology to improve customer experience. Lenskart was one of the first companies to adopt Augmented Reality and still uses it. Their application takes photographs of the users face from different angles. Then, they allow the user to try out various products virtually by placing the frames on their faces. This allows the user to make a better decision on what they would like to buy.
The interactive experience offered by augmented technology can also help transform the brick-and-mortar stores and bring back some of the customers that they have lost to the automatic online markets. They can make use of the technology to make shopping a more fun experience for their customers. The applications of Augmented Reality across various industries ensures that the technology would grow exponentially in the next few years and is a promising source of revenue for tech companies around the world.
Goodbye retail stores?
Automatic shops would be accessible to users so long as there is a proper internet connection. This may be of benefit for the people living in more developed parts of the world. But, these wouldnt be of much use in the parts of the world which do not have proper internet connectivity. Thus, companies around the world are focusing on expanding their range by bringing the World Wide Web to the remotest of places around the world. This would be beneficial in the long run as they would be able to increase their profits by entirely shifting to Automatic Shops.
Although it would still take quite a few years to shift the retail industry entirely to a digital platform, the potential rewards are humungous. At the same time, it may also be possible to shift to robots for the process entirely. But, doing this would take several years. As of today, we dont have sufficient technological development in place to make the complete shift to machines. At the same time, the process must be made a commercially profitable one so that the change helps these companies.
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