The holiday season is upon us, and with it brings the joyous feelings of spoiling your loved ones for the festive holidays. During this time it is important to address how retailers can prepare themselves for the mad dash customers take to purchasing their gifts for the season with the assistance of machine learning.
While it is a highly popular time of year for customers to make hefty purchases, it is also the time of the year where retailers need to reassess and take into account their customer’s experience and learn how they can improve their overall experience. This is where artificial intelligence in the retail market can play a crucial role. So, let’s welcome some Christmas and holiday spirit and spread good tips and recommendations all around.
1. Skip the long checkout lines
In a recent study from Synqera, 73% of the responders reported that their number one pain point of in-store shopping is the dreaded checkout process, so much so that it prevents them from shopping in stores and rather turn to online stores. Speeding up the process is an obvious solution. Many retailers are already turning to AI to alleviate this challenge. In fact, according to eMarketer, the global AI retail market size is expected to reach about $40 billion USD by 2030.
Retailers, such as Walmart, Target, and CVS have scaled their self-checkout machines widely in order to help customers finish their shop quicker and ease their employees tasks, or even cut back on human workers. Circle K also is installing 7,000 machines in the next three years, reported Forbes. One of Dataloop’s customers, Standard AI, scaled their fully autonomous checkout technology allowing shoppers to pick up items and leave the store without waiting in any lines. With the help of cameras, sensors, and AI, they can register each item a shopper takes and bill them later.
With Dataloop’s highly robust data management system, Standard was able to categorize and organize mass amounts of data.
2. Make sure Santa isn’t out of stock
The biggest crisis during the holidays for retailers and customers is the dreaded “out-of-stock status”. Making sure you have up-to-date insights of your products helps you get ahead of shortages and eliminates the need to offer customers with similar in-stock products. Real-time shelf digitalization gives you the ability to view your store in real-time in order to assess what your shelves look like and how your store is performing.
When we’re talking about SKU’s it is important to remember the potential it holds from the time of manufacturing until the end of the process as many broken processes occur and taint the SKU’s lifecycle. Today, 5% of all sales are lost due to out-of-stock scenarios, and the worst part of this equation is that this pain point doesn’t have to exist at all if the right technology is implemented. Digitizing all of your SKUs, automating the process is the best plan of action. You can start the process by implementing real-time shelf monitoring and finally put an end to out-of-stock dilemmas.
Other insights that can be gleaned from real-time shelf monitoring include:
- Visibility of shelving stock
- Monitoring the percentage of the time the shelves are full
- Monitoring distributors if they’re delivering on time
- Monitoring in-demand products and availability inefficiencies
- Taking note of average shelf capacity
Implementing advanced automation abilities, data management platform, and real-time human feedback like Dataloop will help you get a better handle on your inventory and inventory control.
3. Understand the shopping frenzy with gestural feedbacks
Gesture recognition refers to the human-machine interaction using only body actions. This is accomplished by means of detection, tracking, and recognition. The key to understanding and deciphering these body movements and in turn their intent is rooted in deep learning. Also, with the help of advanced AI-enabled gesture recognition, retailers can better understand the popularity of an item by learning from shoppers’ facial and hand gestures. This is accomplished by using a trained model that analyzes how shoppers react to different products in the store and determines the potential for a sale from a product. This allows retailers the ability to immediately determine if new items are working for the store or not, it can even predict where the best place is to situate the item for best results.
How can Dataloop help?
Retail is an ever-changing industry and an evolving one too, from cashierless stores to shelf management systems to personalized production recommendations the list is ever evolving. This is where Dataloop’s platform can provide and integrate automatic active learning with human-in-the-loop functions for data validation, performed at every step of the pipeline.
This data can enhance the customer experience and provide a more personalized shopping experience. And when it comes to the holidays what can you ask for more than to get to know your customers better? Being able to provide them with a better and more stress free experience, is the ultimate goal. So welcome the holiday chaos and give your customers an experience to remember. Happy holidays!
