How AI in Retail Can Support Brands During Peak Season

Artificial intelligence is currently a must-have business asset. AI-powered technologies now enjoy enormous popularity across multiple industries, from sports to financial services. But AI in retail is proving to be a particularly significant advancement, with this new tech bringing a broad range of benefits to the sector.

In this article, we’ll analyse how AI in retail can support brands during particularly busy times, such as peak shopping seasons. Peak seasons vary depending on the location of a business, as well as the products they sell, but more universal peak seasons include gift-buying events (like Christmas) or multinational sales periods (like Black Friday).

Read on to learn how AI can assist retail businesses in common tasks like future planning, inventory management, data analysis, and more. 

Forecasting and Future Planning

Leveraging digital innovation in key areas like forecasting is crucial to stay ahead of the competition. By using AI in tasks like sales forecasting and the prediction of market trends, your company can learn what your competitors’ next move might be. 

But how can artificial intelligence help in these areas? The key lies in predictive analytics. An AI tool can understand patterns much better than a human analyst, which means the AI is likely to be better at predicting events like a spike in customer demand or a drop in prices. 

The more information a predictive AI has access to, the better. If the tool you use can combine varied data streams, it can begin making more in-depth conclusions. For example, if the AI has access to data on customer buying behaviour, as well as info on the current market value for a particular product, it can help with complex tasks such as identifying the optimum price for that product.

Customer Service

Automation already plays a fairly significant role in the customer service departments of many companies in the form of chatbots. Businesses can save significant sums of money (and improve the customer experience) by using chatbots to resolve simple customer queries — reserving human agents for more significant problems.

However, through AI, retail businesses can supercharge the functionality of these chatbots. The right combination of tools can help your business build AI-powered chatbots that enable new features like voice communication, and can even suggest relevant solutions, products, or blog articles in response to customer queries. This kind of tool vastly improves the efficiency of your customer service department, which is essential during busy peak seasons. 

AI can also assist your human customer service agents. These agents will need a database they can refer to for the solutions to common customer problems, but often these data banks are dense and difficult to navigate. An AI assistant would be able to retrieve information much faster, helping speed up service interactions and improve the customer experience.

Personalisation

Personalising the customer experience is almost a necessity in the modern retail world. In fact, research shows that 76% of consumers will become frustrated with a business if they do not provide some level of personalisation during the customer journey. Unfortunately, personalisation can be tricky,  as it’s difficult to accurately predict exactly what your customer’s wants or needs are.

Luckily, AI can help, which can prove to be a lifesaver in your Christmas and Black Friday marketing campaigns. Often, these types of campaigns will include email marketing, where you’ll send promotions to customers via email. By using AI assistance to identify products a customer is most likely to buy and creating a unique discount code, you can make these email promotions far more appealing to customers, improving key metrics like engagement, click through rate, and ultimately revenue. 

Inventory Management

Inventory management is critical for retail businesses, and even more so during peak shopping seasons. If you find yourself without sufficient inventory for a particularly popular product, you could be missing out on significant revenue. 

AI can help retail businesses with inventory management much in the same way it helps with forecasting. The AI tool can analyse patterns in your sales figures to identify how often you need a product to be restocked, then bring it to your attention — some AI tools can even place the order without human intervention, streamlining the process even further.

Data Analysis

Incorporating AI and other forms of automation into your data analysis is very common in digital transformation strategies. We’ve actually mentioned variations of this function above: predictive analytics are a form of data analysis. However, it’s important to emphasise the breadth of possibilities AI in retail holds for data analysis.

One example is customer sentiment analysis. Social media analytics are a huge part of modern marketing, as metrics like engagement help you better understand customer loyalty and what you can do to improve retention. Using AI tools to analyse how your customers feel about your brand can help generate more actionable insights and therefore come up with more effective retention strategies. 

With more information available, retail businesses can plan better for key dates on their business calendar, such as peak shopping seasons. 

Integrate AI-Powered Tools Into Your Digital Products With Future Platforms

Looking to digitally transform your customer experiences? Future Platforms can help. We’re experts at creating impactful digital products for businesses, such as accessible, appealing websites to highly engaging brand apps.

We like to stay at the forefront of new technological developments, too. We can assist you in integrating AI functionality into your website or app, ensuring you stay one step ahead of the competition.

So, if you’re looking for effective, innovative digital products that set you apart from the competition, get in touch today.