Happy Friday! ‘This week in CX’ brings you the latest roundup of industry news.

This week, we’re looking at new AI implementations by Google and Freshworks, and what they mean for the customer moving forward. There’s also new research into the consumer view on product quality during the financial crisis, and how unified commerce is being utilised in retail.

Key news

  • Accenture is laying off 19,000 employees worldwide — about 2.5% of its workforce — and consolidating office space as it seeks to shrink costs amid rising economic uncertainty.
  • Kia Motors UK has teamed up with Reputation to revamp its customer experience programme, manage multiple customer touchpoints and drive vehicle sales. The news comes a few months after Kia shared their partnership with Incubeta to drive future marketing strategies through insightful data usage. The company are clearly dedicated to their new transformation!
  • The cost of some everyday groceries has increased by more than 100% – consumer brand Which? found, when it looked at 25,000 food and drink products from eight major supermarkets. Own-brand products have been particularly hard hit. Which? looked at the average price of the products in the three months to the end of February 2023 compared to the same time period last year.
  • The Bank of England (BoE) has announced an interest rate hike of 0.25 percentage points to 4.25%, marking its 11th consecutive increase in the tightening cycle that began in December 2021. The rate rise follows a surprise jump in inflation to 10.4% last month. It also comes in the wake of Credit Suisse’s buyout and Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, which had prompted many finance experts to speculate against further monetary tightening. 

Shopify and Google Cloud new AI integration

Shopify and Google Cloud have announced a new integration that enables retailers using Commerce Components—Shopify’s enterprise retail solution—to leverage Google-quality search capabilities and AI innovations. This integration will increase access to Google’s advanced search and browsing technologies. With this, retailers can create more fluid and fruitful shopping experiences for their customers. 

This integration will lead to AI-driven product discovery capabilities that address real-world business challenges, including: 

  • Google Cloud Retail Search. This provides advanced query understanding. This includes non-product and semantic searches, to effectively match product attributes with website content for relevant product discovery. 
  • An AI-powered browse feature that uses machine learning to select optimal ordering of products on a retailer’s ecommerce site. Over time, the AI learns the preferred product ordering for each page on an ecommerce site using historical data, optimising how and what products are shown for accuracy, relevance, and likelihood of making a sale. 
  • An AI-driven personalisation capability that customises the results customers get when they search and browse retailers’ websites. The AI underpinning the personalisation capability uses a customer’s behavior on an ecommerce site to determine shopper taste and preferences. 
  • A Google Cloud Recommendations AI solution helps retailers deliver personalised recommendations at scale. 
  • Advanced security and privacy practices that help ensure retailer data is isolated with strong access controls and is only used to deliver relevant search results on their own properties.

To mark the partnership, Google Cloud has also unveiled new research into search abandonment, which found that UK retailers are losing out on around £124bn in sales each year because of insufficient search functions. Key UK findings include:

  • Nearly 9 in 10 UK consumers (89%) say they are more likely to make repeat visits to retail websites that are easy to navigate and browse.
  • After an unsuccessful search experience using the search function or search box on a retail website, more than half of consumers in the UK (54%) say they typically abandon their entire cart and go elsewhere if there’s at least one item they can’t find on a website.
  • On average, the cost of the item they were searching for during their most recent unsuccessful search was £98.
  • Nearly 4 in 5 consumers in the UK (79%) say they are less loyal to a brand when it’s hard to find what they want on their website.
  • More than 4 in 5 UK consumers (83%) say they view brands differently after having an unsuccessful search experience on their website.
  • Around 1 in 4 also view the brand as disconnected from what customers want (27%) and behind the times of technology (25%).

While this is an interesting new integration and advancement in the AI field, we invite you to think about – what do you make of the influx of extreme AI solutions? Do you, as a customer, feel you have the freedom and participation in business as you previously did? While AI solutions are increasing in both quality and quantity, it only further raises the question of virtual interference on human experiences. 

Let us know! What do you think about this?

Freshworks are working on their AI strategy assistant – Freddy

Freshworks have shared they’re working on new GPT-based conversational enhancements to their AI powered assistant, Freddy. Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and underlying large language models, the latest AI capabilities of Freddy help a wide range of customer-facing professionals work more effectively. 

Customer service agents respond quickly to customers and employees in the right tone, marketers compose more compelling copy in a fraction of the time, and salespeople craft powerful emails that hook in a prospect.

Conversational AI will be embedded via Freddy across Freshworks’ entire customer and employee suite of products. Customer support agents will deliver faster issue resolution and have higher quality conversations with customers. Marketers will receive smart customer segmentation and optimised email content to maximise campaign efficacy. Sellers will close more deals through recommendations on opportunities with highest potential.

Freshworks customers participating in the Freddy AI beta programs are able to:

  • Summarise Conversations.
  • Rephrase Responses.
  • Autocomplete Content.
  • Generate Articles.
  • Write Email Copy.

As well as another advancement in AI being brought to the table, this latest assistant is interesting to evaluate as we seem to be moving away from female names. With one of the biggest names in virtual assistants being female (Alexa), it’s refreshing to see us hopefully shifting away from assistants being perceived in this way.

Why do consumers care more about quality now than they did a year ago?

A new study from Ideagen has shed light on the importance of quality for consumers, despite the continuing rise of the cost of living. Nearly a third (31%) say that quality of products and services is more important now than it was a year ago. 

Ideagen appointed Walnut Unlimited to interview a representative sample of 2,000 adults in Britain. They discovered that the cost of living has put a greater emphasis on price, but consumers aren’t willing to compromise on quality of goods and services, even with rising household costs. 

Here are some of the key, significant takeaways from the research:

  • Younger demographic care even more about quality. Over half (54%) of 18-24 year olds and 43% of 25-34 year olds are putting more emphasis on it than a year ago.
  • When it comes to food, quality remains top over price and convenience. Subsequently food quality symbols are the most recognised, with 55% of consumers more likely to pay attention to a quality standard symbol if it’s food-related.
  • The majority (76%) of quality-conscious Brits pay attention to at least one quality or safety symbol when purchasing products and services.
  • Food scandal awareness remains high. 65% of respondents were aware of the ‘Mad Cow Disease’ despite peak of the outbreak being in the 90s. 62% were aware of 1980’s salmonella scandal, and half (54%) remember horse meat in food.
  • Impact lingers for decades: of those aware of each respective scandal, a quarter said this event changed their behaviour (i.e. purchasing decisions, healthcare decisions, opinions etc.)
  • Reviews rank low for determining quality as people look to ‘authority’ for reassurance. 44% of consumers cited them as the least important. However, nearly a third (31%) of 18-34 year olds cite them as the most important.
  • 1 in 10 consumers are seeing a reduction in quality of products and services during the cost of living crisis.

One reason we may put forth for this emphasis on quality is that consumers simply want good value for money. With the prices of almost everything increased during the cost of living crisis, it only makes sense that customers want to feel as though they’re still getting the most out of their money. If they’re paying more, surely the quality should feel like it matches the price hike? Let us know what you think and if you also expect a better quality product or service to match the price increases.

To learn more about consumer budget-consciousness during this time, check out our fantastic interview with retail expert, Elissa Quinby!

2023 Unified Commerce Benchmark for Specialty Retail   

Manhattan Associates Inc., in partnership with Google Cloud and Zebra Technologies, announced the findings of the industry’s first real-world analysis of Unified Commerce in specialty retail. The Unified Commerce Benchmark for Specialty Retail, conducted by Incisiv, assessed 124 retailers across 11 specialty retail segments on the implementation of 286 key attributes of Unified Commerce.

For brief clarity, unified commerce is the practice of connecting your backend systems with your customer-facing channels via a single platform. It’s the setup companies require in order to support omnichannel journeys and create a unified view of shopper interactions, products, and management systems.

The report is based on insight from real purchases, returns, and customer journeys across digital and physical channels. The benchmark reveals the common attributes of successful retailers and the opportunities for others to improve their customer value and modernise operations.

Unified Commerce can see revenue growth by up to 6X. However, consolidating systems and building a cohesive Unified Commerce solution can be quite challenging. The benchmark identified the following common challenges in retailers’ efforts to adopt this new model:

  • Personalisation – Retailers must be able to identify shopper intent and curate a personalised experience that meets their expectations. However, only 38% of the retailers studied give their store associates access to shopper purchase history and wish lists across all channels. Only 20% of the retailers studied provided personalised product recommendations and offers. 
  • Real-Time Inventory Visibility – Visibility into allocatable and saleable inventory and rich findability are critical for retailers wanting to provide a seamless omnichannel experience. Only 29% of the retailers studied provide real-time inventory statistics on their product detail pages.
  • Convenience and Flexibility – Today, convenience is about more than just speed of delivery. Convenience encompasses providing multiple payment and delivery options and the ability to make changes to an order after the sale. Only 15% of the retailers studied provided the option to change fulfillment method post order confirmation. On an average, only 27% of the retailers provided the ability to return store purchases online.

Thanks for tuning into CXM’s weekly roundup of industry news. Check back next Friday for the latest updates of the week!

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