E-commerce

Department store taps AI to help online shoppers find that perfect gift

Photo provided.

May 24, 2021

Jarrold, a 251-year-old department store in Norfolk, England, is deploying AI technology from Boon, to give customers a unique and personalized smart gifting assistant.

Jarrold is looking for ways to help shoppers browse its website and uncover their next purchase. But with more options, shoppers find it harder to choose products to buy and can become overwhelmed and the challenge only gets harder when a customer is searching for a gift rather than making a purchase for themselves, according to a press release.

The Boon gifting assistant uses psychology research to establish each recipient's unique situation, interests and desires through image-based questions. Users explore different question branches as they respond, creating an immersive and personalized experience, akin to what the customer might experience when talking to an in-store shop assistant. Once the questions are completed, BOON's artificial intelligence algorithms analyze the responses and pick out the most relevant ideas to maximize inspiration.

"We're so pleased to offer these experiences to our customers. Whilst the conventional browsing experience is still available and works well for many of our shoppers, having this alternative, interactive experience is great. We know that picking a gift can be a real headache and we're focusing on using exceptional experiences like these to help our customers," Neil Park, head of e-commerce at Jarrold, said in the release.

"The team at BOON have designed the questions and configured their technology around our requirements, customers and catalogue. And we couldn't be happier with the results: customers who use the technology are then over three times more likely to buy a product and have a much higher order value, and we've gained a better understanding of shopper demographics and desires," he said.

BOON's approach champions online privacy by giving users complete control of their data and total anonymity. Rather than tracking users behind the scenes, their AI learns from feedback that shoppers provide, giving better recommendations for each subsequent user.

"The experiences we've built for Jarrold continue to be a real success; it's lovely to see retailers putting more emphasis on customer-centric experiences. Our technology is a great match for what Jarrold had in mind. We've shown that by creating engaging experiences like this, we can help our clients grow customer loyalty, increase sales and get insights into their customers that they never had before. We're thrilled with the feedback from Jarrold's customers and the results the technology is delivering," Dylan Grey, BOON CEO, said in the release.