In January, Salesfloor announced the acquisition of Automat, a Montreal-based conversational artificial intelligence platform.
Automat’s AI powers guided shopping experiences, product recommendations, and helps brands to provide authentic, value-driven personalized shopping experiences. “Automat joining Salesfloor has the potential to redefine the entire clienteling and virtual shopping experience”, says Andy Mauro, Automat co-founder.
Who is Automat?
Automat provides businesses with technology that listens to and learns from customers in order to make better product and bundle recommendations and– ultimately– deliver uniquely personal shopping experiences that customers love. Brands like Amika, Kiehls, Colgate Palmolive, and L’Oreal are leveraging Automat ai on their eCommerce sites and delivering customer experiences recognized in retail as exceptional.
Automat has been acknowledged for their innovative approach to conversational commerce by publications like Forbes, Ad Week, Vice, and Ad Age. Automat’s AI technology doesn’t just “personalize” websites in subtle ways, it has the ability to design pages that display products and bundles tailored to each site visitor based on their browsing habits and purchase history. This makes every visit to the website different and has obvious benefits for the customer and retailer alike.
What does Automat do?
Automat simplified and perfected scalable eCommerce personalization and product recommendations. Every excellent in-store shopping experience follows a certain intuitive pattern. You walk in, the sales person greets you, asks you if you are looking for anything in particular, and then asks follow up questions to help you find the things you needed when walking into the store. They won’t show you just that item, but also items related to it. As a customer, you walk away from the store with a heavy shopping bag, happy that you found what you needed plus additional items besides! You also walk away knowing that you’ll be back based on that successful trip.
The next time you go in, if that same sales associate is there, they will undoubtedly ask you how your last purchase is working out, recommend things perhaps based on previous purchases, and continue the conversation. Rinse and repeat. This is what Automat’s AI engine reproduces in the digital retail space.
Here’s how it works:
- Listen: Conversational AI helps you to learn about what your customers want and need from their visit to your eCommerce site. Automat’s conversational AI chat bot asks customers the right questions, learns about their needs, and then adapts each experience which not only increases conversion rates and purchase confidence, but creates an emotional connection with the brand that turns loyal customers into vocal brand ambassadors.
- Learn: The powerful AI algorithm maps product feeds and automatically updates personalized experiences based on changes to your inventory. The AI reads your product descriptions and automatically adds tags features and attributes your customers care about. For retailers, inventory and pricing management and rule setting is a thankless, time intensive task. With automatic tagging, your team saves literally thousands of hours of exporting, labelling, and merchandising manually with Automat’s AI.
- Recommend: Automat’s recommendation engine is the most powerful in the business, and will be key to taking Salesfloor’s platform to the next level. It ensures that retailers are recommending the right products to customers every time. It has a proven track record of increasing average order values (AOV) by boosting purchase confidence and automated bundling.
- Personalize: “Personalization” is a buzzword that is so overused it’s lost any meaning. Automat’s AI delivers real personalization at every digital touch point in a similar way that your sales associate does with repeat customers shopping in-store. Every product description, badge, ad, landing page, match score, review, and recommendation is personalized to them.
The Bottom Line
The partnership between Salesfloor and Automat is going to revolutionize the way customers and brands engage with each other. Now, retailers have the opportunity to partner with trailblazers in the immersive customer engagement arena and deliver better brand experiences that will set them apart from the competition.
If you want to learn more about Automat, Salesfloor, or immersive virtual shopping, get in touch with a sales automation strategist today.