How Smart Virtual Assistants are Changing the Retail Dynamics

Human intelligence is spending precious time wisely, creating smart machines to buy more time for mankind to do better things. The foundation for the intelligent virtual assistants (IVA), as we call them today, was laid in 1994 with the launch of IBM Simon, the first personal digital assistant with telephony features. Later, Artificial Intelligence has evolved to enable humanized interactions with machines via text and voice commands. Several industries inducted IVAs for one or another reason and Retail also has recently jumped on the bandwagon.

Voice Commerce Unfolding

If you are a Walmart customer who uses an Android smartphone, you can now shop for groceries just by saying ‘Hey Google, talk to Walmart’. Walmart Voice Order, as the company calls it, is the retail giant’s answer to it’s rival Amazon’s Alexa. Using the customer information available with them, Walmart would learn about customer shopping habits and preferences.

How is this going to enhance your shopping experiences?

Customers can get the tedious job of grocery shopping off their plates to focus on other important things. “We continue to innovate for the future and look to technology to make great services even better in the future,” says Tom Ward, senior vice president, Digital Operations at Walmart. Earlier, in 2017, Target too saw an opportunity in virtual assistants and partnered with Google to enable its customers to shop via their Google Assistant.

What do these developments mean for retailers in 2019?

Voice assistants are unleashing their potential to revolutionize the retail industry as customers are increasingly leaning towards virtual assistants. Voice commerce is now accounting for more than two billion dollars in consumer spending and is expected to touch the $40 billion mark by 2022. More than 98% of smartphones are running on Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS, which come with in-built voice assistants Google Assistant and Siri. It means, almost every one of prospect customers has a virtual assistant and retailers should add a new dimension to their customer engagement.

The game plan for small retailers

The voice search volume is increasing. According to a study by ComScore, 50% of online searches will be done through voice by 2020. Though the technology is still in its nascent stages, the evident potential of virtual assistants should be compelling retailers of all sizes to draft their voice strategies.

The importance of digital presence for a business has been talked about a lot. While optimizing web applications is currently a sine qua non, retailers should also be optimizing their digital channels for voice searches too. For this, retailers have to shift their focus on creating content that is more appealing for the virtual assistants. Users are more often using their virtual assistants to find answers to their questions, using long-tail keywords and conversational phrases. According to a Backlinko study, more than 40 percent of answers on virtual assistants are coming from featured snippets. This emphasizes the need for creating FAQs that answer the questions of prospects and optimizing the page for featured snippets.

Speaking about consumer behavior in the modern times, Russell Winer — the William Joyce Professor of Marketing at the Stern School of Business, New York University, says, “Choice is a double-edged sword. More choices can be good for the consumer, because she can choose exactly the right product for her. This increase in choice, as well as more price competition in many product categories and more channel alternatives like the internet has led to less loyalty overall.”

So, retailers should consider curating their offerings; for example, offer products that your business is popular for or the ones that are most frequently purchased. Over time, they can leverage analytics to expand their catalog. This will increase the chances of the business to get more visibility while their customers searching for that particular section of products.

Millions of users own at least one virtual assistant and they are no longer confined to flipping switches in their homes. The future when these smart assistants reach their full potential is just around the corner. So, are you ready for the game?

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