remote-selling Archives - Intelistyle https://intelistyle.com/tag/remote-selling/ Personalization for Fashion Thu, 29 Apr 2021 16:20:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 How To Increase Your Sales With Remote Selling https://www.intelistyle.com/increase-sales-remote-selling/ Tue, 22 Sep 2020 14:56:40 +0000 http://18.134.58.41/?p=6104 Find out how remote selling allows your brand to sell more without the cost of increasing your existing sales capacity Increasing Post-Pandemic Competition Luxury and fashion consumers expect to spend less in physical stores and more on e-commerce moving forward, according to McKinsey & Company. They are not alone in establishing that online fashion sales […]

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Find out how remote selling allows your brand to sell more without the cost of increasing your existing sales capacity

Increasing Post-Pandemic Competition

Luxury and fashion consumers expect to spend less in physical stores and more on e-commerce moving forward, according to McKinsey & Company. They are not alone in establishing that online fashion sales will keep growing exponentially even when concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic ease. A study by Alvarez & Marsal in partnership with Retail Economics found that a quarter of the entire population who have adopted online shopping during the pandemic do not intend to change their new habits. While store traffic has nearly halved from a year ago, consumers are more inclined to buy and the average fashion spending has actually increased. However, as the demand for online fashion grows, so does the competition. online retail growth

Service Is The New Competitive Advantage

In-store services conducted remotely have become a major competitive advantage across the retail spectrum in recent months. With global retail bodies warning that brick and mortar footfall will remain low, remote selling capabilities become crucial to the success of fashion and luxury retailers. personal services increase retention Personalised shopping assistance is proven to increase consumer spending. While in the long run, strengthening the relationship between brand and consumer significantly increases customer lifetime value. Luxury and fashion brands are experts at relationship building and catering to the individual’s needs. The new challenge is doing this remotely and at scale. online shopping growth Director of Brand Engagement at retail intelligence agency Stylus, Katie Baron-Cox, explains to Forbes that “Generosity of service will become a key new metric for brands’. With the correct tool, personalised services will no longer be limited to in-person encounters: Retailers can easily channel their existing physical sales force to remote selling and enjoy a greater share of the growing online fashion spending ready to be claimed.

What Is Remote Selling

Remote selling – or virtual selling – is a buying cycle where sales and post-sales communications take place between a customer and a sales associate in different physical locations. Put simply, it means that a sales associate can sell to a customer who is located anywhere in the world.

Why Choose Remote Selling

In-store sales associates are a fashion retailer’s biggest asset in relationship building and customer loyalty. They communicate brand identity, convert new customers, truly know their loyal customers and serve them with the personal touch that is expected. All of this translates into higher single transaction values and long-term customer retention. online spending engagement Instead of restricting your sales capabilities to a branch or even a physical space, remote selling means that their expertise can be utilised when and where it is most needed. Yet, there’s a gap in resources that enable retailers to build in-person relationships remotely and recalibrate existing modes of selling for the online space. Enter Intelistyle’s Remote Selling Solution that delivers all benefits of face to face, in-person selling with the additional power of A.I. and data intelligence in one, easy to use App that is specifically designed to meet the unique needs of fashion and luxury retailers.

The Benefits Of Using A Remote Selling Tool

Sell On A Global Scale At No Extra Cost

Regardless of where they are based, sales associates can service any customer from around the globe as if they have just stepped into their local branch. The beauty of remote selling is that you can expand your in-store services to any location without the associated cost of opening a store and building a new team.

Zero Training Required

Once a retailer starts using Intelistyle’s Remote Selling Solution, store managers can easily onboard as many sales associates from their team as they want with a simple invite. The App is designed with user-friendly functions and quick user tips so that zero training is required to start remote selling immediately.

Increased Sales Capacity

Real-time customer requests for shopping assistance collect in a joint pool where all sales associates can see and pick them up. This means that your sales teams can swiftly alternate between serving customers in the store and serving an online customer remotely when store volume is low. Or even keep serving customers from their home. Removing physical barriers of service increases the capacity of your existing sales teams without investing in additional human resources. remote selling customer requests

Increased Sales Effectiveness

Assigning your sales force to real-time demand instead of location ensures that no sales opportunity goes missed. Additionally, assisting the customer at the optimum point when they are already invested in making a purchase allows sales associates to successfully upsell and cross-sell at the fraction of a full sales cycle. This means they can serve more customers and make more sales in the same time frame.

Enriched Customer Data

Sales associates can easily create customer profiles with detailed information on size, body type, colouring, price ranges as well as clothing attributes the customer favours and dislikes. They can even link a customer’s social media accounts and Pinterest wish boards to the profile. The A.I. merges all this information to filter a retailer’s entire stock. Sales associates can quickly see the products and complete outfits that match an individual customer’s requests, without any manual search. The profile is enriched with every interaction to include favourite looks and products, preferred occasions and past purchase activity. Sales associates can even take notes directly on the profile for future reference. Customer profiles can be shared, edited, marked as VIP, downgraded or deleted at any time.

Uninterrupted Customer Experience

In the event that a returning customer can’t be served by the same person, the sales associate taking over has access to their profile details, activity and notes. Additionally, they are supported by Intelistyle’s award-winning A.I. Stylist on the next best actions for that individual customer. This smooth hand over ensures that a customer can pick up their interaction with your brand where they left, independent of who is serving them. Continuity of exceptional service builds a trusting relationship with your customers and increases their lifetime value. remote selling video call

Choice of Multiple Platforms

Customers can choose how they get remote assistance: Intelistyle’s Remote Selling App supports multiple platforms including an online chat on the brand website and on the customer’s WhatsApp. Sales Associates can also get on a video call with the customer directly on the App. This feature closes the physical gap in selling from a distance so that sales associates can truly recreate a face to face store visit: display products from the store, demonstrate fit or show styling tips. 

Data-Driven Recommendations

While serving a customer, sales associates see product and complete outfit recommendations put together by the A.I. based on individual customer preferences. The outfit recommendations are presented in a tasteful mood board layout and can be titled for an occasion or trend. remote selling outfit recommendations A.I. recommended outfits can be edited quickly by changing, adding, removing products or by changing the outfit layout with an easy drag-and-drop function. Alternatively, sales associates can create an outfit from scratch by using detailed search filters to find the right products at the fraction of the time spent on manual search. One or multiple recommendations can be shared with the customer directly on the chat at the click of a button.

Increased Team Performance

Managers can track individual and team performance on a master dashboard. Moreover, sales associates can monitor their own performance compared to the team average on important metrics including total sales and conversion. They can see the distribution of their commissions from individual products and from complete outfits. This visual, easy-to-digest dashboard allows sales associates to see their strengths and weaknesses. The weekly Leaderboard ranks top performers, introducing an element of gamification and constructive competition. These metrics encourage sales associates to meet higher performance levels and helps them identify areas of improvement. remote selling dashboard

Sales Strategy Support

Every day, sales associates can see new-in products coming to the online store, the trending products and most popular items. This knowledge allows them to make strategic sales decisions such as prioritising the newest stock or pushing products to clear out older stock before they are discounted.

Empowered Sales Associates

The App empowers your sales teams with a wide range of functions designed to increase their speed without compromising their service quality. Each sales associate can create and add to their own list of pre-set questions and group them under topics such as price-related or size-related enquiries. Pre-set questions significantly increase conversation speed, while ensuring the tone-of-voice is always on point. A comprehensive in-built filtering system lets them quickly refine stock by price ranges, available sizes, body types, colours and detailed product attributes. They can even browse the entire stock for all items that are suitable for a requested occasion – such as a cocktail party or a trend -such as monochrome looks. Upon customer request, sales associates can search for stores by location and stock availability to find the best physical store to visit. Through all of this, sales associates are able to serve customers with the human touch at A.I. speed.

Final Thoughts

The future of retail will be increasingly more remote and not only due to the pandemic effect. Yes, Covid-19 accelerated this shift but consumers were already feeling more comfortable online and prioritising the convenience of service. The most successful retailers are the ones who have adopted a customer-centric approach that combines physical and digital, technology and human to focus on the most important metric: Meeting customer demand wherever that is. If you want to see Intelistyle’s Remote Selling tool in action and explore how you can start selling remotely, get in touch!

Book a free consultation

Brands we work with

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]]> Fashion E-Commerce Chatbots: Recreate In-Store Experiences Online https://www.intelistyle.com/fashion-e-commerce-chatbot-ai-platform/ Fri, 14 Feb 2020 10:06:31 +0000 http://18.134.58.41/?p=5424 Find out how you can use a fashion e-commerce chatbot to create exceptional online experiences and services that outperform in-store Back to Basics: The In-Store Experience Remember how it felt walking into a new store to shop for clothes? You see racks and racks of clothing all around you. And no sign of that striped […]

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e-commerce chatbot Find out how you can use a fashion e-commerce chatbot to create exceptional online experiences and services that outperform in-store

Back to Basics: The In-Store Experience

Remember how it felt walking into a new store to shop for clothes? You see racks and racks of clothing all around you. And no sign of that striped blazer you are looking for…you feel tired and lost. Then you hear those four magical words: Can I help you? And the cramped, claustrophobic shop floor all of a sudden looks brighter. The store assistant shows you a couple of striped blazers and a mono-colour alternative she thinks will look gorgeous with your hair colour. She also brings down the dress trousers they have in your size and suggests a blouse and heels to complete the look for your important meeting next week.

Was that a good experience for you?

Sure, you found just what you were looking for quickly without lifting a finger. And you don’t even have to worry about styling your new clothes because the store assistant showed you how to wear them.

Was that a good experience for the retailer?

Definitely! You are leaving their store with a big shopping bag. This is exactly why the iconic Parisian department store Galeries Lafayette is arming their shop floors with a 300-people team of personal stylists who will be trained in a ‘retail academy’. All in the selfless interest of delivering a better shopping experience to their visitors? No. Because personal styling recommendations are proven to increase spending. So why don’t online retailers follow suit and apply this rewarding experience guaranteed to increase sales to their e-commerce store?

The Manual Cost of Personalised E-commerce

Because it is extremely costly to have an army of stylists sit in front of a screen all day and assist your every online customer from home page to basket page. Let’s say you decide to train your existing customer service team in styling…that is just as costly on top of being highly time-consuming. What if you had a super-stylist who doesn’t eat, rest or sleep that can serve an indefinite number of customers at the same time? While we’re at it, also give her a magic wand to turn your existing customer service agents into expert stylists overnight. No, this is not the plot of a sci-fi film hitting the box office this year. This is your one-way ticket to the future of retail, today: Experiential e-commerce that goes beyond practical and impersonal conversations. e-commerce chatbot charts

Conversational Commerce: What Went Wrong

Fashion retailers have dipped their toes in conversational commerce in the past. Because scaling your services with an e-commerce chatbot makes commercial sense. The head of customer experience at LVMH-owned Eluxury says AI-powered automation eases agents’ burden allowing them to provide a better service to an increased number of customers. So why did conversational commerce never quite stick with fashion retailers? Because 84% of customers make it crystal clear that they won’t buy from a retailer unless they are treated as an individual, not a number. 96% of retailers agree, saying they feel the demand and pressure from customers for a more personalised service. Both customers and retailers are on the same page. Yet, so far conversational commerce in customer service has been about ticking off another number on a long list of problems to solve: FAQs, delivery enquiries, order and return issues. Add the intrinsically personal nature of a fashion purchase to the equation and seeing why conversational commerce never kicked off in this industry is a no-brainer.

The New Age of Retail: Experiential E-commerce

Retailers who want to scale their services to increase revenue have to reframe their perception of customer service from just problem-solving to delivering a personal experience with additional value. Experiential commerce that exceeds the confines of product and price to put exceptional services as a retailer’s main value proposition achieves genuine connection with the customer. Harvard Business Review found that connected customers (highly satisfied + perceives clear brand differentiation) spend 52% more with an online retailer. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal concluded that customer experience is the key competitive differentiator in the digital age. According to the Adobe Experience Index – a benchmark that retailers can leverage to understand and quantify customer demand – the top three value points for digital customers are:

  1. Know Me and Respect Me

  2. Delight Me at Every Turn

  3. Speak In One Consistent Voice Across All Interactions

This is why an overpowering 90% of consumers still shop in-store despite being perfectly comfortable with online shopping: they prefer an in-person experience and expert advice before making a purchase. Now, let’s look at how an AI e-commerce chatbot specialised in fashion can tick all these value points for your retail business to outperform an in-store experience. The e-commerce chatbot assists your customers in finding their way around a store’s entire stock and carefully leads them to the right products for them that result in a purchase.

E-commerce Chatbot Value Point 1:

Know Me and Respect Me

e-commerce chatbot stylist

The AI Stylist Who Knows Your Every Customer

An e-commerce chatbot welcomes your customer to the online store. The AI chatbot stylist knows who that customer is and what they like down to detailed attributes, such as colours, prints, sleeves, dress shapes and cuts they have preferred in the past. It also knows which attributes they don’t like without the customer having to repeat themselves every time and respects those preferences when making product and outfit recommendations.

A Guided Styling Interview and Customer Profile

The chatbot stylist asks your customer the same questions that a human stylist would, in the same language that a human stylist uses at a guided styling interview. The AI then builds a personal style profile for the customer that is enriched with every interaction.

Personalised Recommendations: Physical Features, Personal Taste, Occasions

In addition to making personal recommendations to complement the customer’s unique features – their body type, skin tone, hair and eye colour – the AI stylist also shows your customer how to style the same product for different occasions they are interested in. These occasions can range from a date night to a formal business meeting to a casual brunch with friends.

An E-Commerce Chatbot for Every Style Persona

What’s more, you can have a selection of AI stylists with different style personalities – just like specialised human stylists. Your fashion-forward customers can speak to a fashion-forward stylist who will put together looks reflecting the latest trends in real-time, while your conservative customers are served by a stylist with traditional taste. Essentially, each of your customers is shown products and outfits that are hand-picked for them every time to match their physique, taste, personality and intended occasions. They will even get personal styling tips on how to wear particular garments to flatter their characteristics.

E-commerce Chatbot Value Point 2:

Delight Me at Every Turn

e-commerce chatbot stylist

Personalised Home Page and Online Store

The e-commerce chatbot will not stop at personalising the one-to-one interaction with your customer. It will go on to curate the entire website to each customer’s individual needs. Instead of showing all your customers the same generic home page, every customer will land on a home page entirely personal to them. This will be carried over at every turn they take on your online store from search results to product pages and basket page.

e-commerce chatbot personal crm

Increased Purchase Frequency and Customer Retention

Even after the customer leaves your website, the AI stylist will keep curating every brand interaction. For instance, instead of generic CRM and retargeting emails pushing irrelevant products, your customers will open their inbox to only see the products matching their personal taste. Additionally, each of these products will be selected by their AI stylist to complement their past purchases, increasing purchase frequency and customer retention.

E-commerce Chatbot Value Point 3:

One Consistent Voice Across All Interactions

e-commerce chatbot personal profile

Always On Brand Tone-of-Voice

Unlike human stylists, who might have good and bad days influencing their performance and customer interactions, the e-commerce chatbot stylist will always speak in your brand’s tone-of-voice, delivering the same level of exceptional service quality every time. Through the omnichannel customer profile created by AI, your brand interactions will be consistent across all customer touchpoints, regardless of which ones the customer has used in the past. At this point, you might be thinking: This all sounds too good, isn’t there a catch? Well, there is.

AI Technology and Human Intuition

While an e-commerce chatbot can do wonders for your business at scaling exceptional personal shopping services in a cost-effective way, it lacks the empathy and communication skills of a real-life person. While an AI stylist outperforms a human stylist at the speed and accuracy of personalised recommendations, it can’t match a human in picking up emotional cues to understand a customer’s mood. This is why the best-practices of experiential e-commerce will emerge from the marriage of AI technology with human intuition. A seamless online experience will integrate a smooth hand-over to a real-life person to handle more complex and sensitive cases. However, this person will be a customer service agent with little or no styling skills, bringing us back to the cost and time of required training. Right? Not if you support your customer service team with a tool that handles the styling part so all they need to do is bring in the human touch.

E-commerce Chatbot Value Point 4:

AI Styling Platform Empowering Your Team

e-commerce chatbot ai styling platform

An AI styling platform lets your customer service agents access a detailed style profile that has been created by your e-commerce chatbot for every customer they are serving. Agents can filter a retailer’s entire stock through attributes a particular customer favours and block the ones they don’t to only see the products that are relevant for each individual they serve. The AI platform will also show products and outfits they can directly suggest to the customer, accompanied by styling tips so that the agent can explain the reasoning behind their recommendations and add real value to the experience. These outfits can be added straight to the customer’s shopping basket, shared with them via email or even put in a box and delivered to their home for a VIP fashion concierge service depending on the retailer’s preference. The entire customer service team can provide customers with an expert personal styling experience, meaning they can upsell and cross-sell effectively even if they have limited fashion knowledge.

Key Takeaways

e-commerce chatbot customer benefits e-commerce chatbot business benefits

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Brands we work with

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