TDF Asia shares how the pandemic has influenced what we can expect with the online and offline luxury customer journey.
Predicting Shopping Behaviour
In-store customer behaviour is shifting. Technology advancements play a more significant role than ever in e-commerce and physical stores, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Technology can create a more personalized customer journey by optimizing online and offline shopping experiences. Plus, it decreases operation costs and maximizes omnichannel profits.
E-commerce brands are using AI-enhanced taxonomy to optimize product recommendations and customer searching speed. ‘The Yes,’ a personalized shopping app, creates an AI-enhanced taxonomy for identifying the characteristics of the products. The app helps filter out products so consumers can quickly find what they’re looking for.
Farfetch, another shopping app, has a similar function that provides better search results on a mobile app and aids physical stores’ operations. The app collects and combines online customer behaviour data so that luxury brands can use the data to enhance their online and offline channels. By predicting customer’s shopping behaviours, luxury brands can now offer a more personalized customer journey when it comes to pre-selecting products.
In addition to using AI on e-commerce platforms, the luxury industry applies it to customer service areas. For example, the chatbot. Louis Vuitton’s chatbot on Facebook Messenger can provide personalized product suggestions along with product care instructions.
This type of individualized customer service gives consumers more motivation to shop.
While others are implementing AI online shopping, Kering uses AI to anticipate future sales. Its Luce APP, created with Apple, helps collect and access real-time stock information, in-store product purchase records, product recommendations, and customer appointments. The data behind helps to analyze and predict the in-store customer behaviour. According to the Kering report, the app helped boost related sales of Luce APP from 15% to 20%.
Personalizing Customer Engagement
To engage customers digitally, the Luxury brands have had to get creative when it comes to engaging customers. With social distancing guidelines still in place worldwide, naturally, the digital approach was the way to go. Videos and in-store interactions via social media are more popular and necessary following the pandemic. They’re becoming an intricate tool for luxury brands to interact with customers, primarily, young shoppers.
According to a Vogue survey, young shoppers, (Gen Z), tend to follow fashion inspiration and lifestyle trends on social media platforms like Youtube and Instagram. Social media influencers are affecting online and in-store customer behaviour. Collaborating with different bloggers and influencers helps luxury brands connect with more shoppers.
You may be familiar with live stream shopping. Luxury retailers turn to digital solutions to keep the buzz and hype around their brand when customers can’t visit the physical store. Powerfront, a tool for luxury brands to conduct video shopping and live chat, helps brands like Valentino, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, and others provide live streaming shopping. This marketing strategy helps boost the pre-sale of a collection and converts engagement to sales immediately. Digitally personalized shopping experiences maintain and represent the private service associated with luxury shopping.
Taking live stream shopping one step further, Burberry, debuted its first social retail store in Shenzhen, China, with the collaboration of Tencent Technology. During the personalized customer journey in the stores, shoppers can enjoy interactive store windows, gaming, social media product drops, and app-driven customer service. We’re likely going to see more experiential approaches to digitizing in-store customer behaviour during the pandemic recovery. In the future, the luxury industry will have more technological advancement in physical stores. Store windows can already connect with consumers’ mobile phones displaying personalized content, and 5G will bring another level of customer engagement.
TDF Asia offer flexible visual merchandising solutions in just 5 easy steps. Learn more about how we create window displays, product displays, and fixtures for the luxury retail industry. Please don’t hesitate to contact our project management team at enquiry@tdf-asia.com or give us a call at +852 2116 9583.
