In this extract from Ragtrader's 2024 Technology Report, The Iconic director of data and analytics Glynn Willis unpacks the fashion platform's various ventures with artificial intelligence technology.
At The Iconic, AI has played a crucial role across various operational processes that help enhance efficiency and productivity. Ultimately, these technologies allow us to deliver inspiring and seamless shopping experiences for our customers whilst offering the best assortment of fashion and lifestyle brands. AI has significantly impacted customer service, inventory management and logistics, for example:
Inventory Management and Logistics: Machine learning models optimise product selection processes in our picking robotics, ensuring optimal functionality throughout our fulfilment centre. This has resulted in increased usage of robotics and significant cost savings in the picking process, in turn increasing our daily fulfilment potential by over 10 per cent.
Customer Service: By integrating Zendesk Advanced AI and OpenAI into our customer service ecosystem, we have empowered our team to deliver faster, more personalised support while driving efficiency and innovation in our operations. The advanced technologies have significantly reduced median response and resolution times across all channels of support, ensuring prompt and effective support for our customers.
Zendesk Advanced AI: Zendesk Advanced AI is instrumental to our customer service operations, enabling us to automate tasks such as ticket routing and basic enquiries, by using advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. This frees up our support agents to focus on more complex issues and provide personalised assistance to customers. Additionally, Zendesk's AI-powered analytics help us gain valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and satisfaction levels, allowing us to continuously optimise our service delivery.
OpenAI: OpenAI's language processing capabilities augment our customer service efforts by providing advanced chatbot functionality. These chatbots engage with customers in natural language conversations, assisting with common inquiries, product recommendations, and order tracking. By leveraging OpenAI's technology, we can offer customers immediate and around the clock assistance, enhancing their overall experience and reducing response times. Moreover, OpenAI's machine learning algorithms enable our chatbots to continuously learn and improve, ensuring that they remain accurate and effective over time.
Postage Estimates: Our AI models predict postage times for marketplace sellers, ensuring accurate delivery estimates and improving customer satisfaction. As a result, our net promoter score (NPS) is consistently improving and is among the highest in the industry, reflecting the exceptional level of satisfaction amongst our customers. With an NPS of 83 per cent, we have solidified our position as a customer-centric brand trusted by millions of shoppers.
Customer service
As Australia and New Zealand’s leading fashion and lifestyle platform, The Iconic constantly strives to create a better way for people to shop. We use AI to give our customers the best possible experience and make it more inspiring, convenient, and engaging. Some of the ways we use AI include:
Multi-Modal Search (MMS): Whilst this technology is new, its capacity to unlock superior search experiences is very exciting. MMS uses vision and large language models to understand the context of more complex searches, empowering customers to articulate exactly what they want. For example, customers could search terms like “beach themed party” and MMS provides context and meaning, enabling connections that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the product data. This significantly increases the chance of connecting shoppers with their desired products and products that inspire them. We have rolled out MMS in its early stages and are continuing to explore how it will evolve.
AI Ranking of Catalogue: AI algorithms are used to rank products in the catalogue based on customer preferences, behaviour, and trending items. By analysing past purchases, browsing history, and real-time interactions, the AI can personalise product recommendations resulting in a more engaging shopping experience. It also means that during peak seasons, such as holiday shopping, the most relevant and popular items are prominently displayed.
Recommendation engines: We are constantly looking at new recommendation engines to help spotlight relevant content for our customers. For example, recently we’ve rolled out a new AI powered “Wear it With” algorithm, which helps to inspire customers with suggestions on complementary products.
Inventory management
The Iconic implemented autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in June 2022 in order to support the increasing customer demand in the fulfilment centre and optimise inventory management. Ultimately, these solutions work to optimise delivery time for our customers, and ensure we are meeting our fast and seamless delivery proposition. The AMR solution supports our picking team by helping them to streamline their operations and create better efficiency to enable greater output. More specifically, the AMRs are used to receive, store and present products to our pick team based on order sequencing and cut off times.
Regarding inventory management, our AMRs scan and identify inventory on the shelves, updating inventory data in real-time by triggering regular inventory checks and ensuring the inventory is accurate and up-to-date. They also assist in transporting products from receiving to storage, and from storage to the picking areas. Goods-to-person picking is supported by AMRs transporting products to the designating stations for team members to select the required items without needing to walk and collect them. AMRs also assist in optimising storage by identifying and filling empty spaces, reducing the need for manual labour. Overall, AI models are there to offer advice at scale in the supply chain.
Ragtrader's FREE 2024 Technology Report can be downloaded HERE.