Give Your eCommerce Store a Boost With AI

We live in an experience economy where consumers are looking to get a customized experience. They would like to visit an eCommerce store and have their needs catered to individually, instead of the one-size-fits-all approach used in the past. Businesses everywhere are harnessing the power of AI to provide users with specific products they will most likely be interested in. However, in order to create state-of-the-art AI technology, quality data annotation will be critical.

In this article we will examine how eCommerce businesses are incorporating AI into their service offering and the type of data annotation needed to create them.

Sophisticated Chatbots

If you are wondering how big of a role chatbots will play in the business world, consider the following: according to a recent report, 85% of customer interaction will be performed without human involvement starting this year. This data shows that not only is a chatbot necessary for your eCommerce business today, but it will play an even bigger role in the future. When a customer visits your site, the chatbot can offer personalized assistance to help them navigate to the correct page. Similarly, if a customer has an issue or a question, they can call in and speak to a chatbot that will try to resolve the issues or provide them with additional information.

All of this brings up an interesting question: how can a robot maintain a conversation with a human being? How do they understand the depth of the question and know how to respond? The answer is that thanks to text annotation, the machine learning algorithms that power the AI chatbot can comprehend pretty much any dialogue. The way it works is that data annotators take the raw, unstructured data and label it with text and NLP annotation that highlight the keywords with metadata which allows the machines to understand what is written.

There will be times when a customer will try to look for an item themselves and search for it on your site. Such searches also need to be customer-oriented as well, so let’s take a look at those next.

Customer-Centric Search

According to research by the Search Engine Journal, 40% of those surveyed believe that the search is the most important feature a website can offer. If you can provide users with more precise search results, your eCommerce store will have an advantage over the competition. How do businesses provide a more customer-centric search function? Companies like Twiggle have created search engines powered by natural language processing to narrow down and contextualize the search results.

Another approach is to use a more visual approach, like the one pioneered by Clarifi, a New York-based startup. They use video and image recognition to create apps that allow them to see products from a human perspective. The AI itself will tag, categories and visually search content by labeling features of the video or image.

As you can imagine, technology like the one being developed by Clarifi requires thousands and thousands of images and videos to be annotated. They most likely do not perform such data annotation in-house because they are still at the early stage venture and most likely do not have the necessary personnel to perform such a job. This means that they will need to find a data annotation provider, like Mindy Support, who has experience actualizing projects of all sizes and can scale up quickly, without sacrificing quality.

Keep an Eye Out for Your Reputation

You work hard to provide the best possible service for each customer, but there are bound to be some dissatisfied people out there. They will write bad reviews about your business on social media and other platforms and you will not be able to track such activity manually. Moreover, some of the reviews may not even be real. Interestingly enough, 90% of people who recalled reading a positive review, said that it influenced their buying decision according to a recent study.

There are tools available, such as BotSlayer, that detect fake news, reviews and social media accounts. It is also powered by NLP and text annotation so that it can distinguish between the content written by a machine or an actual person. Thousands of pages of text would be fed into the system written by a bot and humans would have to tag and input metadata to help the machine learn.

Start Getting Ahead With AI

With so many customers visiting your website, you can possibly communicate with them yourself and find out their needs, tastes, and preferences. This is why you need AI technology to provide the personalization that customers are looking for thus increasing conversion rates and customer satisfaction. The chatbots, smart search engines, and other AI-powered technology are all made possible by the human data annotations that trained the machine learning algorithms to think like people. This is why you can be confident knowing that you will be providing your customers with the best service using AI.

Posted by Il’ya Dudkin