By Chidi Achara, Global Chief Product Officer at Huge
With the holiday season quickly approaching, now is the perfect time for retailers to start developing their holiday marketing strategies. One key part of this planning should be to measure customer “intent” – you know, the age-old metric allowing retailers to determine signals and behaviors in consumers even before they make a purchase.
According to some calculations though, 80 to 90 percent of a buyer’s journey happens before they can even establish contact with a brand, limiting the retailer’s ability to anticipate intent accurately.
Adding to this challenge is the pressure to deliver digital experiences that both surprise and delight consumers while meeting their practical needs. McKinsey’s research shows that 71 percent of consumers expect personalized interactions, and 76 percent get frustrated when these expectations aren’t met.
So, what are retailers supposed to do?
The new era of intent: Intelligent Experiences.
In the last couple of years, the expansion of generative AI has made it possible for retailers to analyze a previously impossible multiplicity of data points and in turn, more accurately measure intent.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say a customer needs to book a trip to Hawaii. Historically, they would go and browse multiple sites, click multiple buttons, and boom! They’re done. What’s interesting is that the data from that interaction would be captured in a node. And from there, the system may have inferred that they wanted to go for these specific dates; that they may have wanted to take these people; that they may have wanted to do these things—but it doesn’t really know the intent of why they wanted to make that trip. Is it because they wanted to celebrate an anniversary? Is it because they felt burnt out at work and they just wanted some time alone? Is it because they wanted to go hiking up a volcanic mountain?
With GenAI, you can now have a conversation at the beginning of the consideration process that actually allows you to understand your customers’ intent. You can design experiences in a substantial way that can make the user feel understood and like their problems are being solved in a natural way. You are now able to cross-check enough data points from enough customers and past interactions to actually bring the promise of anticipatory design to life. You can start to design digital experiences that are increasingly personalized, conversational, contextualized and human-like. You can design what’s called “Intelligent Experiences.”
Think about it: Up until now, retailers have been very much relating to technology on technology’s terms: there are certain rules and certain codes that we have to obey in order to get the results that we want. In such a case, the best that we can do is to create digital experiences that are human-centric, but that essentially still navigate the frameworks of existing technologies. Now, with GenAI integrated into the design, we can actually put humans in control of the experiences they have in a way that has never existed before. We can enter a territory that I like to call “human-directed,” rebalancing the relationship between humans and technology.
OLI, the conversational experience designed for the Paris Olympics was a giant step in this direction—an AI-powered logic system that incorporated variables such as the time zone of the user to determine their intent and provide the best possible viewing options for their queries.
But it’s time to go further. A 2022 report found that businesses that managed to put “life-centric strategies” into action, meaningfully contributing to customers’ lives, would see annual growth rates of 9 percent higher than their peers. To achieve this, the report said, these companies would utilize data, human ingenuity and machine intelligence to better understand people’s multi-dimensional lives; in other words, using technology and creativity to design human-directed experiences that respond to intent in delightful ways.
This is the roadmap for Intelligent Experiences in retail —and the realization of the hidden value of intent.
