How E-commerce is Leveraging Deep Tech to Unlock Seamless Growth Here are a few domains within e-commerce where Deep Tech is making a profound impact

For brands looking for scalability and seamless growth online, tech has emerged as a key factor because of its agility, efficiency and something brands can have control over and a sense of ownership in comparison to other growth drivers. When the pandemic hit us hard and mobility was limited, some businesses set up new brands, and went from zero to 10-figure revenue within a year.

In this article, we have covered how the e-commerce industry and leading D2C players are leveraging Deep Tech to grow their business seamlessly. So, what is Deep Tech? And what are its different tenets that businesses leverage for e-commerce? Some of the common ones are: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Big Data, Natural Language Processing, Vision and Speech Algorithms, Speech Synthesis, Robotics, Logistics Planning / Drones, IOT.

Today, there are few D2C brands that are leveraging these tenets of Deep Tech to their advantage and to significantly improve key business metrics that matter - Conversion, Consumer Engagement, Operations SLAs and NPS / Brand Loyalty. Now, let's see a few domains where Deep Tech is making a profound impact:

Personalized Consumer Experience

Personalization has become so much of a buzzword these days that it sounds cliche, however, there is a lot of action around it for a reason. If we see the conversion at brick-and-mortar stores, it is somewhere between 10-30%. However, the same for digital stores is a fraction of it, somewhere around 1-4%. This high conversion at brick-and-mortar stores is usually attributed to the salesperson who is able to give a personalized experience to each of the customers, and they help discover the products as per the customer's taste.

The same behavior can be simulated online with the help of AI, ML, and Big Data. Brands are leveraging these technologies to give a personalized experience to thousands of their customers, at once. There are many other solutions available in the market that are being leveraged to personalize customers' experiences but this space is still emerging and full of possibilities to explore.

Automating Customer Interaction

Around 15% of customers find a need to interact with the businesses post-purchase and this interaction has to be perfect. When done well, these post-purchase interactions transform your customers into brand ambassadors.

Often, we witness customers need help with their order status, or returns & refunds. With the help of technology, these interactions can be automated at the business end. However, since humans value human interaction, these automated interactions need to be more human-like. This is where the tenets of NLP, AI, ML, Big Data come to help in empowering the businesses to gather deep data points of each of the customers and keep the conversation across the multiple channels personalized.

Fraud Detection / Risky Orders Identification

India is a unique market. Many of the challenges are very specific to our demography. One such challenge is the COD orders and the associated risk of high RTOs that come with them. Many times, the delivery addresses are incomplete, and logistic partners find it difficult to locate those addresses. At other times, some users are repeat offenders of abusing COD shipments. These issues lead to high RTOs and cause huge business losses.

With technology at disposal, these RTOs can easily be reduced. Tech solutions leverage AI & ML-powered Heuristic Algorithms to detect risky orders. It is an interestingly developing space where Technology can help plug such revenue leakages.

Decision Making

With the surge of big data volume in e-commerce, it is getting increasingly difficult to stay updated on data points and analytics, while the decision-making at top management usually relies on only a few key metrics. When business owners intend to find answers to any deviation in those metrics, they are welcomed by a mountain of data spread across different departments, functions, and third parties.

AI can process a big volume of business data, make a coherent picture, arrive at conclusions, and present a realistic/accurate picture to business owners to empower them to make those critical business decisions. This synergy of AI-powered decisions, vetted by humans, is proving very powerful for e-commerce.

Max AI - Your Virtual e-commerce Manager

While we know about Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant … there is also an e-commerce virtual Manager called Max-AI which is developed by KartmaX. It is a virtual assistant trained and tailormade for Indian e-commerce.

Brand leaders can speak to Max-AI, the way they do with their e-commerce manager. It can understand context, pull relevant data points, explain any aberrant patterns, and take corrective actions, as well ... while being available 24x7.

So, the next time you find your ROAS taking a hit, just ask Max-AI to deep dive & initiate a call-to-action!

What Leverages Do Businesses Expect From Tech?

Whether it is Operational Efficiency with minimum human intervention, Better Customer Outreach, and Decision Making with AI-powered data processing capabilities - businesses are now demanding more from Technology. The government is also very proactive in acknowledging the emerging technologies at a much faster pace now than earlier, be it Blockchain or the recently announced Drone Rules 2021.

India e-commerce is growing at an exciting pace. It has seen phenomenal growth especially in the last couple of years, and with its growth there are various challenges emerging too! These modern problems will require modern solutions. The tech community is presented with this great opportunity to solve these problems and lead the e-commerce space to an exponential growth.

By: Prakash Kumar

Co-founder & Product Architect @ Kartmax

KartmaX is a Headless, Serverless, and Artificial Intelligence-powered e-commerce tech platform suited for scaling India D2C brands. It handles large-scale businesses while maintaining a superior Customer Experience leading to Higher Conversions.