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The global beauty market has been on an upward trajectory since 2019, across all categories, growing by a projected 6% year on year. Unsurprisingly, everyone wants in on the market - from A-list celebrities, to serial entrepreneurs, there’s been a steady influx of emerging beauty brands in the e-commerce space, all of whom are vying for their individual success.
The trick to success is personalisation - the key differentiator and e-commerce feature on the tip of everyone's tongue. Today’s beauty e-commerce brands are increasingly finding ways to incorporate personalisation and AI into their marketing mix, and what better way than through a customisable, virtually assisted experience.
Enter Neo. State-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chatbot, combining face and skin analytics, with virtual try-on and personalised product recommendations.
Chatbots have long been used within e-commerce and with the rising influence of AI global retail spending via chatbots is predicted to reach $142 billion by 2024. Moreover, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands which offer personalised recommendations, mirroring the ever-growing need for tailored & custom experiences.
Common chatbot use cases range from customer service, website assistance, and e-commerce interactions, to scheduling/appointments, generating marketing leads, and as personal assistants.
Whilst chatbots have been in use for a while, they felt frustratingly robotic, rigid & scripted prior to AI influence. We have all felt this type of frustration interacting with chatbots through chat windows –typically located in the bottom left-hand corner of an e-comm website– oftentimes promising answers to your burning questions, underdelivering, and 8/10 times urging you to speak with a human instead.
The majority of chatbots that you come across can be classified into 3 categories:
First came the menu/button-based approach which intended to save users decision-making time by providing preset options. Unfortunately, the preset options were too rigid, forcing the user to select between limited options rather than intuitively expressing requests in their own words.
They often took users to the wrong self-help content and if a user wanted to try for a different outcome, they would have to restart the journey from scratch.
The succeeding chatbot was rule-based. This type of chatbot allowed users to freely type their queries into a chat window, and in the same instance proved useless as soon as users' words didn’t match exactly to those that were programmed into the chatbot.
These chatbots assume user needs based on keywords found in users' input, frequently resulting in brittle conversational flow due to a lack of consideration for nuance & semantics.
The third type is context-based chatbots aka conversational AI agents. AI-powered contextual chatbots, don’t rely on pre-set conditions & rules and can understand user input no matter how it’s phrased.
Having been trained to process natural language, contextual chatbots understand the nuance, & complexity of human conversation, and are thus quick in identifying user needs. Even if the chatbot is unsure of what a user is asking, it will follow up with questions to provide the best possible answer.
Here at Beauty by Holition, we went a step further and combined the contextual chatbot within our state-of-the-art AI virtual try-on solution: Neo Beauty Studio.
Meet Neo, AI-powered contextual chatbot that accompanies your virtual try-on experience. Neo provides a bespoke consultation within the Neo Beauty Studio platform by knowing when and how to search a product catalogue, dynamically tailor products and looks, and provide the best possible recommendations, all based on initial conversations with the user.
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Neo comprehends language, discerns context & intent, and responds sensibly to a plethora of scenarios. Our chatbot is also connected to our unique face analysis platform, which facilitates a holistic beauty consultation, whereby Neo can prompt users to do a skin and face analysis for truly hyper-personalised product recommendations & AR tutorials.
Moreover, Neo is customisable, and can be fine-tuned to take on any tone of voice to be more aligned with its hosting e-commerce platform helping achieve a luxury-grade beauty and skincare consultation.
By Edit Kruk
27.02.2024
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