How Artificial Intelligence is Driving Commerce
Artificial Intelligence has been boosting bottom lines and easing employee endeavors for years now and, while almost every organization at this point has begun implementing some AI tools of their own (or at least have it on their IT roadmap), it’s always exciting to hear new use-cases and the real-world results they’ve engendered. One of the most exciting areas for the application of AI in business is commerce, “e” and otherwise — and today we’ll be taking a look at how organizations have leveraged Salesforce’s Einstein Artificial Intelligence platform to drive revenue and results.
Let’s dive in!
Revenue
First and foremost, the measure that’s always question number one from the c-suite, “How will this help our bottom line?”. While artificial intelligence first made it’s business case as a tool for analysis and pattern recognition in huge swaths of corporate data, it should be no surprise that it has tremendous upside when paired with data about shoppers and the shopping experience!
Ask anyone in e-commerce about their most-watched shop metric and you’ll likely hear “cart-size”, “basket-size”, or “AOV” — essentially three ways to say the same thing, “on average, what’s the average amount of each sale?” (AOV = average order value). And, while there are lots of levers to pull to try drive those numbers up, Artificial Intelligence may not be front of mind, but it probably should be!
In fact, Salesforce AI for Commerce customers see an average 26% increase in AOV! That’s like a reverse sale, where you get 1 free customer for every 4 you sell to!
But what exactly is AI being used for to push that number up? It really comes down to two areas of influence, Customer Experience and Business Intelligence.
Customer Experience
On the CX side of things, AI can help shoppers find the right products, overcome the paralysis of choice, and help prevent cart abandonment — three areas of the e-commerce experience that are under the improvement microscope.
Using AI to deliver personalized shopping experiences with tailored product recommendations reduces browsing fatigue, improves your hit-rate with the products presented, and illustrates that your store values your customers’ business and their time. With the ability to recognize common follow-up purchases from other customers, your storefront can better promote those purchases in order-one, helping boost not only AOV, but customer satisfaction as well.
Also, the integration of your most popular customer touchpoints with AI for commerce allows you to follow-up on abandoned carts automatically and on the medium with the best chance for conversion, based on the customer.
And predictive sorting further helps address the eternal e-commerce contradiction of product quantity vs product relevance — allowing your customers to see items in the order that’s most relevant to them, beyond just “price — low to high”.
Business Intelligence
The other area where AI really shines in the commerce space is business intelligence. Commerce Insights looks for patterns in shopping behavior and gives you the data you need to make manual improvements to the shopping experience. Instead of spending their time poring over data and looking for relevant correlations, your team gets instant access to the metrics they care about and the behaviors leading to those results, so they can spend their time improving, not analyzing.
The Einstein Search Dictionaries functionality also significantly boosts retail effectiveness, with little to no input post-setup. ESD evaluates all of your site searches against eventual click-ins, orders, click-outs, etc… and updates the results and recommendations accordingly, so your search functionality gets better and better, even when you’re constantly adding new products. It’s like your own personal Google algorithm, getting stronger and stronger everyday, just because it’s being used (and can see the ultimate customer/behavior result of any search, not just what gets clicked next).
Throw in AI-driven live chat, customer support routing, and internal AI tools and you stand to free up staff up and down the workflow to focus on delivering excellence in the roles you hired them for, not managing data and day-to-day reporting upkeep.
If you’d like a more in-depth, but still high-level look at AI for Commerce, you can head over to Salesforce to read up and watch a short video demo.
And, if you’d like a more personalized analysis of what AI could bring to you and your org, drop us a line! We’re always happy to help.
Until next time, keep working hard, smart, and happy. We’ll see you in the cloud.
