IBM, the International Business Machines Corporation, an American multinational technology company, has announced that Aditya Birla Online Fashion (abof), leading online fashion retailer from the Aditya Birla Group, has selected IBM Watson and Cloud suite for a new shopping experience to deliver a personalised and convenient shopping experience.
Abof sells apparel, footwear, and accessories for men and women targeting the millennial consumers. Abof’s goal is to provide a highly convenient and distinctive customer experience, driven by a strong technology backbone and 100 per cent curated merchandise.IBM, the International Business Machines Corporation, an American multinational technology company, has announced that Aditya Birla Online Fashion (abof), leading online fashion retailer from the Aditya Birla Group, has selected IBM Watson and Cloud suite for a new shopping experience to deliver a personalised and convenient shopping experience.#
In a first for India’s retail market, abof customers can use natural language questions within abof’s enhanced ecommerce platform to receive greater personalisation and product recommendations.
With this new discovery tool, shoppers can now interact and ask natural language questions about abof's unique product assortment, and then receive custom responses to their inquiries. For example, a customer could type, “where can I find a red floral dress?” or type a combination of price and product inquiry such as, “show me black shoes below 2000 rupees.” These inquiries are recognised and understood by the system on abof’s website to recommend top matches to the shopper.
The customer engagement is conducted through a simple question and answer interface leveraging Watson’s Natural Language Classifier, as well as Retrieve and Rank delivered on the IBM Cloud. IBM Global Business Services and IBM Research worked with abof to introduce the service and help create a more engaging and intuitive shopping experience for customers.
Prashant Gupta, president and chief executive officer, abof.com said, “The business of fashion has experienced extreme change in recent years. Our aim is to create seamless and convenient shopping experiences for our customers in the digital world. This is a start of our cognitive journey and we plan to implement more Watson-enabled solutions in the future to continue our momentum.”
Steve Laughlin, general manager, IBM Global Consumer Industries said, “India is the fastest growing ecommerce market and expected to reach $64 billion by 2021. With this exponential growth, India’s retailers need to drive deeper understanding, better engagement, and leverage data more efficiently to enhance the customers’ shopping experience. With IBM Watson, abof can make the customer shopping experience more personalised, informed and enjoyable, similar to the engaging service shoppers could get in a physical store.” (GK)
Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India