8 Min
Remember shopping back in 2014? Elbowing your way through a crowded mall to seize the best sales at your favourite store. The racks overflowed with discounted items, and the latest hits played in the background, while the busy staff rushed over to answer your questions.
Fast forward to 2024, where you browse curated recommendations on your phone, chat with a virtual assistant, and pay contactless, all while enjoying a latte in a tech-powered store.
Retail has changed over the last decade. Today, consumers expect personalised and streamlined experiences, both online and in-store.
Around 80% of US retailers have adopted tech like digital marketing and cashless payments to meet these demands. However, this is just the beginning. McKinsey forecasts that AI integration could lead to a 118% cash flow increase by 2030 for fashion retailers.
Conversely, those slow to adopt may see a 23% decline. This does not concern only fashion retailers. Integrating AI can give retailers across industries, a competitive edge by improving customer experiences, decision-making, and more.
But where do you start integrating AI in your retail business? By AI-optimising your retail knowledge base!
Your knowledge base is the brain of your business. It contains all the information regarding your product, sales, and more. By implementing an AI-powered retail knowledge management solution you can use this information to better serve your customers.
Table of contents
What is an AI-powered Retail Knowledge Management System?
An AI-powered retail knowledge management software (KMS) is like a virtual library for all your retail knowledge, managed by an intelligent AI. The AI simplifies and automates how you create, organize, share, use knowledge across your entire organization.
Some of its benefits are:
- Swift Answers for Store Staff: AI quickly turns product info into dynamic Q&A systems, so retail associates get accurate responses fast, enhancing customer service on the shop floor.
- Smooth Self-Service: AI understands customer intent and gives relevant info promptly, making online shopping and automated customer service easier.
- Effortless Content Creation: AI helps write product descriptions and marketing materials, saving time for copywriters while maintaining accuracy.
- Real-Time Insights: AI analytics track market trends, predict customer needs, guide content updates and strategic decision-making, enhancing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction in retail.
- Engaging Staff Training: AI transforms dull product knowledge into fun FAQs and quizzes, supercharging employee education to provide a sharper, faster, and superior shopping experience.
5 Ways AI-Driven Retail Knowledge Management Enhances Customer Experience
1. Predict Customer Satisfaction
As a starting point you need to know how satisfied your customers are and how well your agents are performing. AI helps you track these metrics by reading customer interactions, analysing tone of voice, and more.
Based on its analysis it assigns a customer satisfaction percentage and a net promoter score. This will help you fast-track call monitoring, identify training needs, and update the knowledge base to improve customer experiences.
2. Gamify Retail Staff Training
The employee turnover in the retail industry is high due to various socio-economic reasons. In the USA alone it’s about 60%. This inevitably means rehiring and training.
AI can help identify the training needs of new hires and can also personalize their onboarding experience by gamifying training resources into interactive quizzes.
This will reduce training time and facilitating faster productivity among new hires. Based on their performance, the AI can also facilitate continuous on-the-job training, ensuring improvement.
3. Superfast AI Search
You might find your retail staff wasting a lot of time, digging through static and dull knowledge bases, searching for information. AI can speed up this process by turning your dull knowledge base into an interactive questions and answer system.
The AI-powered knowledge base uses semantic search and state-of-the-art foundation models to understand user intent and wade through your entire knowledge collection to deliver precise answers to retail associates.
This ensures that your shop floors are not flooded with long queues and frustrated customers.
4. Automate Content Creation
Your retail copywriters are often busy creating eye-catching advertising copies to promote your latest sale, informative product descriptions, or engaging social media posts to build an online community.
This is often a time-consuming process of collecting data, writing, editing, approval, etc. However, the fast-paced nature of retail does not allow much time for brands to leverage every passing trend. So, with AI you can automate content creation.
Your copywriters can either use prompt engineering to create near-accurate content drafts that they can refine before publishing, or by uploading data and curating content by turning SOPs into dynamic guided workflows.
This will ensure that brand content can leverage every market trend, stay relevant and ahead of the competition.
5. Seamless Retail Self-Service
Today, consumers prefer solving their own problems on product websites rather than contacting help centers; it’s faster and easier. Studies show that 91% would use a knowledge base for issue resolution.
Therefore, a smart AI knowledge base can enhance this experience for customers. Instead of lengthy manuals, FAQs, or pre-programmed chatbots, smart Gen AI chatbots can be offered.
These AI chatbots engage customers in natural language, providing contextual and guided assistance. If unable to resolve the problem, they escalate it to a live agent with all relevant customer context for a seamless support experience.
Ready to join the AI revolution? Global retail giants like Walmart, Currys, and Ooredoo are already thriving with Knowmax’s AI-powered knowledge base software.
Don’t get left behind – Download the free e-book now!
