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How do you use AI in retail, particularly in the jewelry industry?
Artificial intelligence or AI is not new, yet it was only recently that we saw industries adopt it willingly and at an unprecedented pace. Since the pandemic started, we’ve seen businesses speed up their digital transformation and new technologies adoption as a response to many crippling restrictions. Some companies accelerated their digitization by 3-5 years and the jewelry sector is among these adopters.
In this article, we’ll explore the different ways AI can help jewelry businesses like yours as you strive to be more equipped for the future.
First, let’s get the basics down.
What’s Artificial Intelligence?
Often tackled together with data analytics and machine learning, AI is a network of different technologies that work together to allow machines to act and make intelligent decisions like a human.
Contrary to technology pessimists’ fear of AI conquering humans, these systems will always require human input to operate at their maximum potential. Together with its sub-domains (Machine learning, Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks, Cognitive Computing, Automation, etc.) AI can empower retail businesses by leveraging data and information that could improve your operations.
AI has many useful applications in the jewelry industry, especially with the current situation. Let’s take a look at them!
AI in Retail: How to Use AI to Boost Your Jewelry Store?
1. Automation
AI can automate many traditional repetitive processes in your jewelry shop. From cashier-less payments to contactless returns, the scope of the tasks it can do for you is vast and encompasses sales, marketing, and accounting departments, just to name a few.
Think of the most repetitive and time-intensive activity in your day-to-day operation and you can automate that. For example, writing product descriptions. It’s a recurring task but necessary because you cannot just list your products on the platform without providing buyers with enough product information. I mean, you can but if I were a customer I wouldn’t bother buying high-priced products from retailers who can’t be bothered with product descriptions.
Writing product descriptions requires a lot of time, especially if you’re listing bulk pieces of jewelry. It would take time and by the time you reached your 20th product description, your brain’s probably fried and you ran out of ideas. However, with the right resource, you can actually automate it like this using the jewelry description generator tool in the Jewelry Hub.
Automating repetitive and tedious tasks like this helps make your team productive because it allows you and your people to devote your time and energy to more impactful business activities.
2. Gemstone analysis and identification
Aside from delegating basic repetitive tasks to machines, AI can also perform gem analysis and gem identification like the Gemtelligence where through Machine Learning, the system can determine the origin and authenticity of your gemstone. This software could also be very useful for detecting counterfeit products.
Automating gem identification benefits the gemology industry by reducing human error, increasing and maintaining consistency in lab results, enhancing the scalability of gem laboratory services, as well as, establishing consumers’ trust in their gemstones.
3. Product search and discovery
Isn’t it frustrating to search for products on a product page only to be served with irrelevant results?
And then, there’s option paralysis which leads to decision paralysis. Sometimes, options could get too overwhelming that instead of driving consumers to a positive buying decision, you create this no-decision gap where they just bounce off of your website and delay the purchase decision because they don’t know what to get.
Product search and discovery is one aspect of retail that AI addresses invaluably. With the right system and features, you can simplify your customers’ product discovery process as AI-enabled digital shopping tools can deliver accurate product search results; thereby, making the whole online jewelry shopping experience frictionless.
When the product discovery stage is effortless, you direct jewelry shoppers to their online carts as fast as possible.
4. Real-time digital shopping assistants
According to Kindly, a conversational commerce technology, 90% of purchases will happen on e-commerce platforms by 2040. And since customers have a lot of shopping options now, you must take the step forward to stand out.
Real-time 24/7 virtual assistants can boost your sales by guiding customers from product discovery to checkout. They can help you create a shopping experience that easily differentiates you from other jewelry retailers. Digital assistants can do a lot of things for you such as the following:
- Answer the most basic and common questions
- Provide shoppers with accurate product recommendations
- Confirm order details to your customers
- Serve special promos and discounts
- Remind buyers of abandoned cart
Taking on the role of a sales associate, having an AI-powered virtual assistant will make your customers feel valued and looked after as they shop. In return, it makes the customers stay longer on your website while giving you more data to work with for an even personalized jewelry shopping experience.
5. Customer satisfaction tracker
How often do you respond to customer satisfaction surveys? I don’t. Unless the experience I had with the brand was memorable. It’s just time-consuming, especially when they got me at my busiest.
Most brands think that traditional Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) tell the true sentiment of their customers, but they don’t. It could sometimes mask serious problems overlooked at times if the customer service team is not attentive.
These days, AI can help you track customer satisfaction through sentiment analysis. For instance, using Natural Language Processing, An AI-enabled customer satisfaction tool can analyze your interactions with customers and extract and map keywords in a way that would tell you the positive and negative sentiments.
For example, I could say, “The Breathe Gold Mantra Necklace is amazing. I really love it, the design is amazing but I’m disappointed with the shipping delay.” When extracting and mapping the vocabulary used, the AI tool can associate words like “disappointed” with a negative or sad emotion and “shipping delay” with complaints. This way, the model can thoroughly predict the sentiments, and then, you can use these insights to improve the service or products for an effective customer retention strategy.
Final Thoughts
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the jewelry industry. Sure, its adoption has skyrocketed since the pandemic started but don’t expect it to go away as the world goes back to the new normal. It’s here now and given its usefulness and benefits, it would be a big mistake to ignore digital transformation efforts. Future-proof your business by investing in new technologies that could help you thrive with our without the pandemic.
Have you incorporated artificial intelligence in your jewelry shop? We want to know your thoughts, comment below!
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